24/7 Biohazard and Crime Scene Cleanup in Georgetown, SC

Georgetown is an incorporated city and the county seat of Georgetown County, South Carolina, and the third-oldest city in the state.

Planter Elisha Screven laid out Georgetown in 1729 in a four-by-eight-block grid, and the original grid, with its colonial street names and surviving early houses, is now a National Register historic district.

The town was incorporated in 1805 and reincorporated under a mayor and city council in 1892.

Georgetown stands on Winyah Bay where the Black, Great Pee Dee, Waccamaw, and Sampit rivers meet.

Its harbor is the second-largest seaport in South Carolina after Charleston, handling more than 960,000 tons of cargo a year.

In the colonial era Georgetown was the commercial center of an indigo-producing district, and in 1757 the planters' Winyah Indigo Society opened the first public school for white children between Charles Town and Wilmington.

Rice replaced indigo as the leading crop, and by 1840 the Georgetown District produced nearly half of the entire rice crop of the United States and was the world's largest rice-exporting port.

Georgetown planter Thomas Lynch Jr. signed the Declaration of Independence, and during the Revolution the port supplied General Nathanael Greene's army while Francis Marion waged guerrilla warfare in the surrounding swamps.

After the Civil War the economy shifted to timber, and around 1900 the Atlantic Coast Lumber Company's Georgetown mill was the largest lumber mill on the East Coast.

International Paper opened a pulp mill in Georgetown in 1936 that was the largest of its kind in the world by 1944, and a German-founded steel mill followed in 1973.