The Catawba Nation - Siouan-speaking, sedentary, agricultural - held this stretch of Piedmont for centuries before any European set foot in the backcountry. The Catawba were considered one of the most powerful Southeastern tribes. They cultivated corn and other crops along the Catawba River bottoms and the creeks that fed it. When the first Anglo-European settlers arrived in the early 1750s, the Catawba received them generously. Disease and displacement followed. The Catawba Nation survived, headquartered today on the reservation just west of the modern county line near Rock Hill, where they remain the only federally recognized tribe in South Carolina. Waxhaw Creek, which still flows through Lancaster County, is named for the Waxhaw - a related Siouan people who lived in the area but, unlike the Catawba, did not survive as a distinct nation.

The settlers who poured into Lancaster County through the 1750s and 1760s were overwhelmingly Scots-Irish - more than nine out of ten originating from County Antrim in what is now Northern Ireland. They had landed at Philadelphia, drifted south through the Great Wagon Road, and pushed into the Carolina backcountry looking for cheap land. They were Presbyterian almost to a person. Smaller settlements followed from Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex in England, bringing Baptists, Methodists, and Anglicans. A significant German minority also arrived. The county was created in 1785 from this mix - named, not for any of the migrating peoples, but for the English Lancaster from which a small group of settlers had come, and for the medieval House of Lancaster whose red rose they remembered.

Lancaster County is dense with Revolutionary War sites. On May 29, 1780, the Battle of Waxhaws - locals still call it Buford's Massacre - saw Colonel Banastre Tarleton's British Legion overtake Colonel Abraham Buford's retreating Patriots a few miles south of the modern North Carolina line. Tarleton's men killed Patriots who had surrendered. The phrase Tarleton's Quarter became a battle cry. On August 6, 1780, the Battle of Hanging Rock saw militia General Thomas Sumter attack a fortified British outpost - the battle where a thirteen-year-old Andrew Jackson fought alongside his older brother Robert. The Buford and Hanging Rock battlefields are both preserved today. So is Landsford Canal State Park on the Catawba River, site of a nineteenth-century canal project to bypass river rapids.

Andrew Jackson was born somewhere in the Waxhaws region in 1767. Whether his birthplace was on the North Carolina side or the South Carolina side of the modern state line has been disputed since both Carolinas began claiming him in the early nineteenth century. South Carolina makes the strongest case - Jackson's own statements late in life pointed there, and Andrew Jackson State Park, established 1952 on US Highway 521 nine miles north of Lancaster, treats the claim as settled. North Carolina disputes it. The county also produced astronaut Charles Duke, who walked on the Moon during Apollo 16; J. Marion Sims, the surgeon called the father of modern gynecology whose advancements relied on horrific experimentation on enslaved women; sprinter Shawn Crawford, who won Olympic gold in 2004; and former Governor Jim Hodges. Lancaster's notable people list runs honorable and complicated, sometimes both at once.

Geographically, Lancaster County sits in the South Carolina Piedmont - rolling hardwood and pine forest, worn-down ancient mountains, rocky clay soils, slow brown rivers. The Catawba River and Sugar Creek bound the county on the west. The Lynches River bounds it on the east, gathering Waxhaw, Twelve Mile, and Lynches creeks as it flows south. Forty Acre Rock Heritage Preserve protects an enormous granite outcrop near Pageland with rare endemic plants in its shallow soil pockets. The county totals 555 square miles, ninety-six thousand people, and one of the fastest-growing edges of the Charlotte metropolitan area in its northern Indian Land community. The southern half remains rural. The economy runs on Food Lion warehouses, Walmart, and Continental Tire - the textile mills that built the place are mostly memories now.