HOA Management in LADSON, SC

Ladson, South Carolina, is an unincorporated area within Berkeley, Charleston, and Dorchester counties. Ladson is an unincorporated area with no municipal limits or borders has been classified as a census-designated place or a CDP. Census-designated places are established by the United States Census Bureau. A census-designated place has no officially recognized geographic boundaries other than what the U.S. Census Bureau has defined. Boundaries defined by the U.S. Census Bureau for the census-designated place can align with what the citizens within the CDP believe the boundaries to be. However, this is not always the case, and local perception of a census-designated place can vary greatly in certain instances.

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There are multiple reasons for the formation and calculation of a census-designated place. In most cases, as in the case of Ladson, is the high population concentration. The census-designated place land area total for Ladson is 7.02 square miles per the 2010 U.S. Census. The CDP population per square mile is 1,963.5 as of the 2010 U.S. Census. The population of the Ladson CDP, per the 2010 U.S. Census, was 13,790, and per the 2020 U.S. Census was 15,550.

The Ladson CDP has a total land area of 7.02 square miles per the 2010 U.S. Census.

Location/Coordinates – Latitude: 32°59′08.62″N, Longitude: 80°06′35.32″ W per Google Earth

Per Google Earth elevation above sea level: 55 feet

Zipcodes for Ladson are 29456 and 29483

Telephone area codes for Ladson Creek are 843 and 854

The Ladson CDP is located within the Coastal Plain Region of South Carolina, also known as the “Low Country.” Ladson is around 17 miles drive from Charleston’s Historic District. Ladson is approximately 6 miles from Summerville and approximately 11 miles to North Charleston. Mt. Pleasant is around 22 miles from Ladson. Ladson is only a short drive to the beaches and other tourist destinations throughout the Charleston region. The Boeing assembly plant in North Charleston and Volvo’s American factory in Ridgeville are easily accessible from Ladson. The area that Ladson is within, the Charleston-North Charleston–Summerville Metropolitan Statistical Area, is deemed one of South Carolina’s primary industrial and business hubs.

The Charleston-North Charleston–Summerville Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) includes the Ladson area. Three counties comprise the Charleston-North Charleston–Summerville MSA, Charleston, Berkeley, and Dorchester counties. The 2010 U.S. Census population for the MSA was 664,607. The MSA population as of the 2020 U.S. Census increased to 799,636. As measured by population, the Charleston-North Charleston–Summerville MSA is the 74th largest in the United States. It is the third-largest in South Carolina behind Greenville Metropolitan Statistical Area, the largest, and the Columbia Metropolitan Statistical Area.

Ladson Community Name Origin

The community’s name “Ladson” originated from the Ladson family, who were some of the early settlers of Charleston in the 1670s. The Ladson’s were of English heritage and were members of the planter and mercantile class of Charleston.

The many Ladson family members were owners of large plantations and mercantile enterprises in Charleston and the Charleston area. One of the more prominent Ladson family members was James Henry Ladson (1753 – 1812), who was the 15^th Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina. He obtained the rank of major during the American Revolutionary War. He served under General Thomas Pinckney. Ladson was aide de camp to General Benjamin Lincoln, who was in command during the British siege and surrender of Charleston.

The house at 31 Meeting Street was built for Ladson around 1792 and is called the James Ladson House. In 1895, Ladson Street was cut through to connect King Street to Meeting Street. When not at one of his two plantations, Ladson lived at this home with twelve slaves. His two plantations had more than 200 slaves.

Probably the next most prominent Ladson was his son James Henry Ladson (1795–1868). He was a Charleston planter and businessman who owned James H. Ladson & Co. This was a Charleston enterprise involved in rice and cotton production with over 200 African slaves.

Along with his business interests, James H. Ladson held many church and civic offices. Interesting, he was the Danish Consul in South Carolina. James H. Ladson was a staunch advocate of slavery. Along with other members of the Charleston planter and merchant class, he was the southern faction clamoring the loudest for secession from the Union. This secession rhetoric is eventually what led to the bombardment of Fort Sumter and the American Civil War. His son, Confederate Army Major William Henry Ladson (1829–1861), was killed during the American Civil War.

A present-day Ladson descendant that is prominent is Ursula von der Leyen (born October 8, 1958). A physician by education, she is a German politician, and since December 1, 2019, she has been President of the European Commission. Her great-grandmother was Mary Ladson Robertson Albrecht (1883–1960). Under kidnapping threats from the Red Army Faction, she moved to London to study at the London School of Economics and lived under the name Rose Ladson to help avoid detection.

Snippets about Ladson

Before Ladson was Ladson, it was known as Ladsons, or at least the train stop was known as Ladsons. The Ladson’s stop was also known by a nearby settlement called Anneville in the 1890s.

During the era of early steam-powered trains (beginning in the late 1820s in the United States), water and coal stops were needed every 7 to 10 miles. As the technology of trains advanced and with the implementation of train tenders, this stop frequency became unnecessary. However, railroads tended to continue to place stops along with these same 7-to-10-mile intervals for commercial purposes. One theory for the commercial basis of these intervals being that farmers would not transport crops further than five miles to market. When railroads established these interval stops, these stops could be situated within or near established named communities. However, this was not always the case. Low rural populations and before established roads, settlements could be spread out much further than 7-to-10-mile intervals.

So, when a railroad would lay a rail line and establish a stop where there was no named community, the railroad would typically name the stop. There is historical documentation of a stop being added by the South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company at Ladsons in July of 1832. This would make a stop seventeen miles from Charleston. The name Anneville is found on railroad maps of the 1890s, so it appears that at one point, the “Ladsons” name was dropped in favor of the nearby Annevillle settlement name. But it appears the railroad stop was changed to Ladson in or around 1900 by the railroad.

Ladson was a stop on the Southern Railway Line #1 Charleston to Hamburgh (North Augusta, SC) route.

The Ladson train depot was constructed in a gingerbread architectural style. The depot structure was very common because the depot was available in construction kits akin to the homes the Sear and Roebuck marketed in the first part of the 20^th century. The South Carolina Railway, the predecessor to the Southern Railway, constructed the Ladson depot and freight shed in their Summerville, South Carolina, yard in 1880. Both structures were transported to Ladson on flatcars that same year and erected. The depot and freight shed were torn down in 1935.

In an undated picture of the Ladson train depot, the background is forested with no other signs of structures or civilization. The picture’s perspective leaves an impression the train depot was in a desolate area.

The Ladson area has been the site of marine fossil archeological discoveries. Ladson has been home to a huge deposit of marine fossils. The deposit of marine fossils around Chandler Bridge is considered the largest in the world. A deposit off Trolley Road is the only location on the east coast of the United States where complete Pleistocene turtle fossil remains have been found. This all began in 1969 when children playing close to the Chandler Bridge found a backbone and contacted Albert E. Sanders, the curator of natural sciences at the Charleston Museum. The backbone turned out to be the spinal column of an extinct whale.

A note from an article in The State, May 20, 1906, edition. Recent immigrants to Ladson had “found silk-raising profitable.”

General Electric opened a large manufacturing plant in a former soybean field in Ladson in 1969 to make large steam turbine generators for nuclear power plants. The steam turbine generator market dried up, and the plant closed in 1985. The plant closing made national news and had a major negative economic impact on the area. At the plant’s peak production in 1972, it employed around 1,200.

Ladson is home to Force Protection Industries Inc., a subsidiary of General Dynamics, that manufactured the Mine-Resistant Vehicle (MRV) called the Cougar for the Global War on Terror. During the height of the war on terror, Force Protection Industries employed around 400 people in the production of these vehicles.