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.
At the 2017 Fall Fellowship old blue is back at Camp Coker. After the National OA rescinded their outright ban on lodges making Ordeal-Brotherhood-Vigil flaps (now they just strongly discourage it) several lodges in the area are going back and reissuing sets. Catawba Lodge 459 was probably the first in the area to do this …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
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
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
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
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
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
If you go back and take a look at lodge host items issued for either the Cardinal Conclave or Dixie Fellowship I think 1983 marks the beginning of a new era. Up until that point I’m not aware of any patches being issued by host lodges unless you want to count some of the early …Read More