
Santee Lodge 116 was chartered in 1938 to the Pee Dee Area Council headquartered in Florence, South Carolina. It serves eleven counties in the northeastern corner of the state stretching from rural farmland to the popular beaches along the grand strand. The heart of Santee Lodge is the council's summer camp property Camp Coker just outside of Society Hill, SC in Chesterfield County. The camp was founded in 1928 and during the life of the lodge much of its service has been centered around promoting, maintaining, and improving this jewel of the sandhills. The totem of the lodge is the Carolina Parakeet which is an extinct bird that was the only native species of parakeets in North America. Since 1955 the lodge has featured the bird on all of its memorabilia and lodge members proudly celebrate that heritage. Over its many years of service Santee Lodge has won many awards including the E. Urner Goodman Camping Award and numerous Dixie Fellowship recognitions. Although a small lodge compared to many of its neighbors Santee has stood out for the quality of its people and their passion for Scouting. In fact Rusty Riddle in his book on the history of the Dixie name Santee 116 as the #1 lodge in the section over the first fifty years of the conclave.
Since 2013 Santee Lodge has created activity patch sets with a common design. Back in 2013 it was to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the lodge. The tradition has continued every year. In 2019 the lodge leadership settled on a Totem Pole set for the 6 activity patches that make up the lodge calendar. The …Read More
Download the free PDF: A Patch Collectors Guide To Santee Lodge 116 (35 pages in color) In the post Blue Book era of OA collecting the trend I see in the hobby is for dedicated lodge historians to publish their own lodge memorabilia books. I first published this book in 2008 and followed it …Read More
Ever since the 75th Anniversary of the lodge way back in 2013 Santee has created an activity patch set for all lodge events. Each year in the fall a committee takes design proposals and settles on one to carry the entire lodge year program. These patches are usually ordered all at once from the patch …Read More
For nearly a decade (starting in 2013) Santee Lodge has issued themed event sets for all event patches. Because of the way patch companies produce patches this usually means the lodge orders the sets at the beginning of the year (typically 300 of each) and they are sold during the year. Ironically this has meant …Read More
For the 4th year in a row Santee Lodge 116 will have an activity patch set for the upcoming 2016 year. Paxton Roberts had his design approved at the recent fellowship with the first patch coming out in January for Winter Banquet. The set features some familiar parakeets and pulls on a lot of Santee …Read More
I really can’t tell you where I got hooked on lodge T-shirts. My brother will tell you that when he shipped out for the army after graduating high school that I raided his drawers looking for cool clothes. Among the shirts in there was the 1983 Dixie staff t-shirt from Santee 116. It is not …Read More
One of the goals of CarolinaOA.com is to share the stories that are so obscure that people in that lodge or council might not even know. I’ve got one of those for you today but first you have to go back about 15 years to the reign of terror. During the late 1990s the Pee …Read More
This was shared by Jason Shull and it was honestly a surprise to everyone he told about it. As some of you may know there were plans to hold the a National OA Meeting in 1942 and apparently one of the places that was strongly considered as the host site was Cheraw State Park just …Read More