
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
At the end of 2022 Muscogee Lodge 221 and Santee Lodge 116 merged as the councils had already tied the knot in August of that year. At a joint Winter Banquet held on January 7, 2023 in Sumter, SC the youth of the new lodge voted on bi-laws and elected officers for the coming year. …Read More
For going on a decade now the lodge has issued an activity patch set. In 2022 the designer, William Duffell, went with a “teardrop” design which throws back to patches that have been issued as far back as the 1974 Fall Fellowship. There are 5 patches in the set. This is one less than all …Read More
Just came back from Camp Coker and the Santee Lodge 116 Summer Fellowship. Numerous patches were issued and I thought I’d post here on CarolinaOA.com an update for the collecting community. I will use Blue Book issue #s only as a suggestion as these are what I would assign them in order of issue. S45 …Read More
Several lodges including recently Un A Li’yi, Muscogee 221 and Atta Kulla Kulla 185 have decided to use the design of their Dixie patch as a template for their event patches during that year. For collectors that has added some extra spice since not everyone collects lodge issues but there is something special about a …Read More
The first lodge emblem did not come out until 1955. This patch is in the shape of an arrowhead and is commonly called the “Arrowhead”. Prior to this time members only had their white sashes and dangle pin to distinguish them as brothers in the Order of the Arrow. The “Arrowhead” was ordered to have …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
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