Buying a Home in Irmo, SC: The Okra Strut, the Lake Murray Dam and One Town in Two Counties

Gene McKay was on the air at WIS in the early 1970s, going on about a store in Irmo called the Ancient Irmese General Store. The Irmese, he figured, were "probably short people, a farming tribe who lived off okra." The Lake Murray-Irmo Woman's Club was trying to raise money for a town library at the time. In October 1973 the club took the joke, set up an arts-and-crafts fair at Seven Oaks Park, named it the Okra Strut, and fried okra to sell. By 1980 the fried okra had paid for Irmo's first library, and the Associated Press story carried by NBC News says it opened in a remodeled trailer. The Town's own Okra Strut history tells the same story, and the Strut still runs every September at Moore Park, behind town hall, for tens of thousands of people.

Irmo is a town of about 12,200 people near Lake Murray, 12 miles or so northwest of downtown Columbia, and it calls itself the Gateway to Lake Murray. An Irmo mailing address reaches well past the town limits, and the tax district printed on the county tax bill is what tells you whether a home is inside them. I'm Jeff Moran, NMLS #483943. I've been a mortgage broker since 1996, I'm licensed in South Carolina through C2 Financial Corporation, and I work from Bluffton. The Columbia area page covers Lake Murray, including what it takes to build a dock there. It also covers the county tax rates, the loan limits and how you apply for the lower 4% property tax rate on the home you live in.

Two railroad men, a Christmas Eve charter and half a mile from the depot

The name takes "Ir" from Iredell and "mo" from Moseley, two railroad men. C.J. Iredell was the secretary-treasurer of the Columbia, Newberry and Laurens Railroad, and H.C. Moseley was its first president. Irmo began as the first water stop on their line, which was chartered in 1885 and which people called the Crooked, Noisy and Late. The Lexington County Chronicle's history of the town has the whole story, and the South Carolina Encyclopedia has the charter date: Christmas Eve, December 24, 1890, the year the railroad opened. The town's first boundaries ran half a mile north, south, east and west from the depot. That half mile took in land on both sides of the Lexington-Richland county line, and the county line still runs through town today.

Irmo stayed small for a long time after that. The first boom came with the Saluda Dam, which went up between 1927 and 1930 and brought a wave of workers to the area. The subdivisions came a generation later. They started going in during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the Encyclopedia counts the population going from 408 to 3,957 over the 1970s. Dominion Energy operates the dam today, and SC Highway 6 runs across the top of it as a direct road between Lexington and Irmo, as Wikipedia's page on the Saluda Dam notes.

About a mile downriver from the dam, Saluda Shoals Park rents kayaks, canoes and tubes, and it has a dog park and trails. Admission is charged by the car, with a lower price if you live in the Irmo Chapin Recreation Commission district. Its north-bank ramp is one of the only public boat launches for a trailered boat on the lower Saluda, according to SCDNR's page on the Lower Saluda Scenic River.

Dutch Fork Road, the corridor that runs northwest out of Irmo through Ballentine, carries the old name for this land, and so does Dutch Fork High School. The Dutch Fork is the fork where the Broad and Saluda rivers meet, and "Dutch" is an anglicized "Deutsch," for the German-speaking settlers who arrived from about the 1730s to the 1760s. By 1760 there were 483 settler families, and their names survive on roads, in family names and on Lutheran churches, some from the 18th century, as the South Carolina Encyclopedia's entry on the Dutch Fork explains.

The Strut, Moore Park and the Mathias-Lown House on Woodrow Street

The 2026 Strut ran Friday, September 25, from 6 to 11 p.m., and Saturday, September 26, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., at Moore Park, 7473 Church Street. The Okra Strut schedule had the parade stepping off at 9 a.m. Saturday from CrossRoads and running down St. Andrews Road toward Lake Murray Boulevard, with St. Andrews closed to traffic from 8:45. A 5K opened the day at 7:30. The festival is free, and the Town says the proceeds go to scholarships, nonprofits and town beautification. Moore Park holds the Prisma Health Amphitheater, two shelters with grills, walking trails and a pond.

The Town runs a few smaller parks as well. If you have a dog or a skateboarder in the family, Rawls Creek Park on Friarsgate Boulevard has a fenced dog area and a skate park. The town tree lighting is held at Whitt Cline Community Park on Carlisle Street, next to the police department. Seven Oaks Park, where the first Strut was held, is an Irmo Chapin Recreation Commission park with a Columbia 29210 address and three gyms.

Irmo's council met in stores until the first town hall went up in 1953. Since 1988 the Town has worked out of the Mathias-Lown House, built around 1905 and moved to 753 Woodrow Street, as the Lexington County Chronicle described it in April 2024. Council has approved about $5.9 million for a new town hall of about 10,000 square feet in Moore Park at Church and Moseley streets, with one wing of offices and one wing of community space the Town will rent out. WIS reported in April 2025 that a USDA grant, the state budget and federal pandemic relief money pay for it. The mayor expected construction to start as soon as October 2025 and to take eight to ten months. I have not found a report on whether it broke ground, so if the new building matters to you, a call to town hall will tell you where it stands.

Irmo grew up as a railroad stop and never had a planned Main Street. The Town has tried to build a downtown on a wooded tract beside the park where the Strut is held. The owners of 12 parcels in the plan objected and raised eminent-domain fears, as the Post and Courier reported in December 2022. By 2023 the mayor told the Lexington County Chronicle that the downtown development was at a full stop.

Water Walk on the Lake Murray shore and the acres around the town limits

Water Walk is the biggest plan in town. Material Capital Partners proposed about 65 acres of mixed use at Dreher Shoals Road, Salem Church Road and Muskrat Run on the Lake Murray shoreline. The plan calls for up to 550 residential units, 150,000 square feet of commercial space and a boutique hotel, about $65 million in all. The Planning Commission denied it on August 12, 2024, approved it on September 9, and Town Council gave final approval with a development agreement on October 15, 2024, as WIS and the Lexington County Chronicle reported. A resident sued the Town over the process. The Town's planning office can tell you how that suit ended and whether any construction has started, which is worth asking before you count on a home there.

Inside the town limits there are fewer than 5,000 acres and not much vacant land, and the Town's draft future land-use map studied more than 6,000 acres around it. Assistant Town Administrator Doug Polen said that does not mean Irmo will annex any of it, and state law bars forced annexation, as a report on the land-use map syndicated on AOL put it. Town Council gave first reading to its Vision 2035 comprehensive plan on October 15, 2024, the same night it approved Water Walk.

Harbison College, Harbison State Forest and the Harbison name

Harbison, the name on the boulevard, the state forest and the Midlands Technical College campus, came to Irmo after a fire. The school began in Abbeville in 1885 as Ferguson Academy and was renamed for Samuel Harbison, a benefactor from Pennsylvania. After a 1910 arson fire killed three students, it moved to Irmo and reopened around 1911 as an agricultural and industrial college for Black students. The Presbyterian Board of Missions for Freedmen ran it, as the Town's page on Harbison Agricultural College recounts. It closed in 1958, and its land and building went to Midlands Technical College, now MTC's Harbison campus. Harbison State Forest was bought from the school's land in 1945, according to the South Carolina Encyclopedia. Judge Harold Boulware, a dean of the college, is buried in Upper Pine Grove Cemetery nearby, which was restored in 2021.

I-26 at Exit 101, the Koon Road overpass and the Harbison interchange

Exit 101 on I-26 is the Irmo end of SCDOT's $522 million Midlands Connection project, which widened 16 miles of the interstate from Exit 85 at Little Mountain. The stretch from Exit 97 to Exit 101 went from four lanes to eight, and seven overpasses were replaced along the way, Koon Road in Irmo among them. SCDOT announced all lanes open in December 2024, with crews still finishing Exit 97 at Broad River Road and Exit 91 at Columbia Avenue.

Closer to town, the next big one is Carolina Crossroads. The I-26 and Harbison Boulevard interchange, with widening west of St. Andrews Road, begins in 2027. The reconstruction of St. Andrews Road and Bush River Road at the I-20 and I-26 interchange begins in 2030, per SCDOT's phase schedule. If your commute runs down St. Andrews Road to the interchange, those two dates are the ones to plan around.

Irmo High, CrossRoads and the new hospital on Evergreen Drive

Irmo's schools are in Lexington-Richland School District Five, which reorganized its schools on July 1, 2026. For Irmo the main change was CrossRoads Intermediate becoming CrossRoads Middle School Academy for Innovative Learning, and the Post and Courier's education desk reported in July 2025 that the other Irmo-area schools were not affected. The November 2024 bond list included a Small Business Incubator and Student Center at Irmo High School. A 2021 plan put a roughly $50 million overhaul into the school, including replacing a wing, according to the Post and Courier. For any address you are considering, please check the district's current attendance map.

Encompass Health Rehabilitation Hospital of Irmo opened in March 2026 at 108 Evergreen Drive, with 49 private rooms in a freestanding building of more than 53,000 square feet, per its opening announcement. It is the company's 11th hospital in South Carolina, it is an inpatient rehabilitation hospital, and it has no emergency room. Lexington Health Irmo at 7035 St. Andrews Road, next to Irmo Medical Park, has urgent care, outpatient surgery, imaging, a lab and physical therapy, as Lexington Health lists it, and it has no emergency department either. The emergency rooms for the area are on the Columbia area page.

Out on Dutch Fork Road in Ballentine, Prisma Health opened an urgent care at 1085 Dutch Fork Road in December 2025, open 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily, as WIS reported. A Chipotle opened at 1069 Dutch Fork Road on April 14, 2026, according to the Post and Courier, and Whataburger opened its first Columbia-area restaurant on the same road in September 2024. All three are Dutch Fork Road addresses northwest of the old town center, and an Irmo name on the door does not mean the building is inside the town limits.

An Irmo mailing address, the town limits and the county line

The Town of Irmo counted 11,569 people at the 2020 Census on 6.86 square miles of land, and the Census Bureau's 2025 estimate is 12,204. ZIP code 29063 holds about 36,341 people on just over 40 square miles, by ZIP-Codes.com's figures, about three times the Town's population on about six times its land. Many Irmo-area addresses carry Columbia, SC 29212 instead. The Irmo Fire District's headquarters station is at 6017 St. Andrews Road, Columbia 29212, and the Lexington County library's Irmo Branch is at 6251 St. Andrews Road, Columbia 29212. An Irmo address, or a 29063 ZIP, does not tell you whether the home is inside the Town of Irmo. The tax district printed on the seller's county tax bill does, and the Town's sanitation charge, which I cover below, is a line on the bill for a home inside the town.

The county line runs through the middle of town. The state's historic properties record puts the current town hall at 753 Woodrow Street in Lexington County, while parcel records on Kinley Road and Jim Koon Road carry Richland County numbers. The two public libraries follow the line as well: the Irmo Branch belongs to the Lexington County Public Library, and Richland Library Ballentine, at 1200 Dutch Fork Road, belongs to Richland County's system. The county named on the parcel's tax record is the answer for any address. On the mortgage side, the county line does not change how much you can borrow. Lexington County and Richland County have the same 2026 loan limits, both for conforming loans and for FHA loans. A conforming loan is one that Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac will buy, and the loan limit is the largest loan they will buy.

The tax bill on an Irmo home

The home you live in as your legal residence is assessed at 4% of its value in South Carolina, and you apply for that rate with the county assessor, Lexington or Richland, depending on the parcel. The county levies differ between Richland County and Lexington County, and a Richland County bill also gets a sales tax credit taken off it. The SC Association of Counties' 2025 property tax rate table prints Lexington-Richland Five's school levy at the same figure for Lexington County and for Richland County. So the school part of the bill is the same on either side of the county line. For the Town itself, the same table lists no town levy for Irmo, and the Town charged no property tax rate of its own as far back as its 2012-13 budget. Please confirm with the county auditor what the Town charges on the parcel you are considering.

Two more lines on the bill are local to Irmo, and only one of them comes from the Town. The Town's sanitation charge for 2025-26 is $344.72 for solid waste, $8.00 for stormwater and $3.50 for a uniform service fee, $356.22 in all. It is collected on the property tax bill, according to the Town's sanitation payment form. Owners of duplexes and multi-unit lots that are not billed through the tax bill pay it directly. The other line is the Irmo Fire District, a special-purpose district created by Act 387 of 1963 and separate from the Town. The Town does not run its own fire department, and it contracts with the district instead, as a 1994 General Assembly bill records. The district's own levy for operations and bonds is on the bill. A purchase resets the taxable value, so the seller's bill is a starting point rather than your number.

Rawls Creek, Kinley Creek and the flooding of May 2026

In late May 2026, more than four inches of rain fell on parts of Irmo in a flash flood. Councilman Gabriel Penfield named Ashford, Friarsgate and Stonegate among the hardest-hit neighborhoods, and at least three people were displaced. One resident without flood insurance told WIS, "We're not in a flood zone, so I thought we would be all right." The same creeks have done this before. A USGS report on the September 7 to 9, 1987 flood near St. Andrews Road records about 5.5 inches in three hours, heaviest along Rawls Creek and upper Kinley Creek. That was the kind of flood expected about once in 75 years on Rawls Creek and about once in 60 years on Koon Branch.

For a home near Rawls Creek, Kinley Creek or Stoop Creek, the first check is FEMA's flood map for that parcel. In the high-risk zone, which FEMA calls the Special Flood Hazard Area, the lender will require flood insurance, and the premium becomes part of your monthly payment. Outside that zone the lender does not require it, and you can still buy a policy. A flood insurance quote on the specific address before you make your offer tells you both the zone and the price. Please also ask your insurance agent whether that address gets a Community Rating System discount, which is the break on flood premiums that FEMA gives some communities for the flood-control work they do. The Columbia area page covers the flood insurance discount in unincorporated Richland County and the lake level at Lake Murray.

Columbia Water and Blue Granite, the water and sewer providers in Irmo

Water and sewer are not Town of Irmo utilities. Columbia Water, the City of Columbia's utility, serves water customers in the Irmo area, as a WACH report on misleading shut-off notices sent to Irmo residents makes clear. Sewer in parts of Irmo has been run by Blue Granite Water Company, formerly Carolina Water Service, and that company handled only the sewer side. In March 2021 the Town considered buying that system, as WIS reported. I have not found a current record of who owns that sewer system today, so please read the seller's water bill and sewer bill, which name both providers.

If you are looking in Friarsgate, the sewer there changed in 2019. Blue Granite's Friarsgate treatment plant used to discharge treated wastewater into the Saluda River near Saluda Shoals Park. On March 29, 2019, the plant was connected to Columbia Water's system and the discharge into the river ended, according to Columbia Water's release.

The Irmo costs in your monthly mortgage payment

A lender adds the taxes, the insurance and any dues to the principal and interest before measuring the payment against your income. The Irmo pieces are the county levy for the side of the county line the parcel is on, the District Five school levy and the Irmo Fire District levy. The Town's sanitation charge, flood insurance where FEMA's map requires it, and any association dues go into the same payment. Both counties carry the same 2026 conforming and FHA loan limits, so the ceiling on your loan is the same on every Irmo address.

Before you make an offer on an Irmo home, getting pre-approved in South Carolina is the step that turns these numbers into a letter a seller will read. If you run your own business, the self-employed page covers how your complete income tax returns, all pages and schedules, get read. If you already own in Irmo and want a lower payment or cash for a project, refinancing in South Carolina and a cash-out refinance each have their own page, and the South Carolina page covers the attorney closing. Once you have an address in mind, you can see rates and a payment for it on this site with no credit pull and no account. You choose the rate option that works best for you, and you can change that selection later if you want to. Or you can call me first and we can talk it through.

Nothing on this page is a loan approval, a denial or a commitment to lend, and none of it is tax advice. The value on a specific parcel and its 4% classification come from the Lexington County or Richland County assessor, and the Town of Irmo is the one to confirm whether a parcel is inside the town limits.

Common questions

Is Irmo, SC in Lexington County or Richland County?

Both. The Town of Irmo has been in both counties since its first boundaries were drawn half a mile in each direction from the railroad depot in 1890. The current town hall on Woodrow Street is recorded in Lexington County, and parcels on Kinley Road and Jim Koon Road carry Richland County numbers. The county on the parcel's tax record is the answer for any address, and both counties carry the same 2026 conforming and FHA loan limits, so the line does not change how much you can borrow.

Is an Irmo address inside the Town of Irmo?

Not always. ZIP 29063 covers about six times the Town's land area with about three times its population, and many Irmo-area homes carry a Columbia 29212 mailing address. The tax district on the county tax bill shows whether the home is inside the town limits.

When is the Okra Strut in Irmo?

Late September, at Moore Park on Church Street behind town hall. The 2026 festival ran Friday evening, September 25, and all day Saturday, September 26, with the parade down St. Andrews Road on Saturday morning. The organizer's schedule at okrastrut.com has each year's dates.

Is there a hospital in Irmo, SC?

Encompass Health Rehabilitation Hospital of Irmo opened in March 2026 at 108 Evergreen Drive, with 49 beds for inpatient rehabilitation, and it has no emergency room. Lexington Health Irmo on St. Andrews Road has urgent care, outpatient surgery, imaging and a lab, and it has no emergency department either.

Who provides water and sewer in Irmo?

Columbia Water serves water customers in the Irmo area, and sewer in parts of Irmo has been run by Blue Granite Water Company, formerly Carolina Water Service. The Town considered buying the sewer system in 2021, so please read the seller's bills, which name the current providers.

Did Irmo flood in 2026?

Yes. In late May 2026, more than four inches of rain fell on parts of Irmo in a flash flood, and Ashford, Friarsgate and Stonegate were among the hardest-hit neighborhoods. The same creeks, Rawls and Kinley, flooded in September 1987. FEMA's map for the parcel decides whether the lender requires flood insurance, and a quote on the specific address is worth getting before you make your offer.