South Carolina Department of Transportation history

When the Historical Commission was reorganized in 1954 as the S.C. Department of Archives, the new agency was tasked with, “the approval of the inscriptions for all historical markers or other monuments erected on State Highways or other State property.”

The writer F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "There are no second acts in American lives." He may have been right about American lives, but as for I-85, Section 139 of the Surface Transportation Assistance Act of 1982 accidentally authorized a second act. It pre-dated the Interstate System and had been incorporated into it after 1956.

A 3-mile segment of the East-West Expressway opened to traffic on January 6, 1958, and within a week, was carrying over 17,000 vehicles a day.

The South Carolina Department of Transportation is still familiarly known as the Highway Department, which is what the agency was called until May 13, 1977 when an act of the South Carolina General Assembly reformed the agency as the Department of Highways and Public Transportation (SCDHPT).

The Federal Highway Administration approved its eligibility for Interstate Construction funding on December 7, 1983.

In April 1988, construction of the 8.75-mile Spartanburg bypass began with grading work in the New Cut Road area.

And it paid off in June, 1992, when BMW said it would bring 2,000 jobs and a $66.5 million annual payroll to South Carolina . . . .

The current name, the Department of Transportation, was established in the State Government Restructuring Act of 1993.

However, Section 139 called for a relocation of the Interstate, and the number, therefore, was reassigned when the bypass opened in mid-June 1995, marking the second time I-85 was completed in South Carolina.

For the first time in years, he traveled through the South, including I-85 in South Carolina, in 1997.

Archive-It Partner Since: Jan, 2007

Topping it all off, in 2015 Hilton Head Island joined the group with at the ‘Gold’ level—the first for South Carolina.