You might notice this Confederate emblem on Lexington’s seal. Town says you won’t for long
If you walk down Main Street in the heart of Lexington, you might notice the old town seal inset into the sidewalk, or displayed on downtown benches.
It’s a form of town pride that wouldn’t look out of place on any main drag, except for one specific feature: The inclusion of a Confederate flag.
The flag may not be noticeable at first. One side of the seal is the town highlighted on a map of South Carolina. The other shows the Confederate battle flag crossed with the South Carolina flag over a spear. Underneath it are the words “Saxe-Gotha,” the colonial-era name for the Lexington area. Around the crossed flags is written “From the Past, the Future.”
Besides its presence on the sidewalk and a few other spots around town, the seal is not that visible in the community, and that’s deliberate, the town says. In recent years, the town has switched to a more modern logo used in most of its public-facing communications, including on the town website and on road signs entering the town.
“We don’t use (the seal) officially, because we try to be more modern and consistent in our branding,” town spokeswoman Laurin Barnes said.
The new stylized town logo is just “Town of Lexington SC” with a crescent for the “o” in “of” and a palmetto tree replacing the “t” in “Lexington.”
The town seal, hearkening back to the area’s Civil War past, is actually quite recent. The design was adopted in the 1980s, Barnes said, and the redevelopment of East Main Street that included the seal happened from 2000 to 2002.
But attitudes toward the flag have changed significantly in recent years.
Lexington’s downtown redevelopment coincided with the time the Confederate flag was taken down from the S.C. State House dome after a fraught political struggle. The flag was later removed from the State House grounds entirely in 2015, after a white supremacist who posed with the flag in online photos went on to murder nine people in a shooting inside a historic African-American church in Charleston.
The town has spent around $100,000 on rebranding efforts since adopting its current logo design in 2005, Barnes said, including repainting water towers, changing displays at Town Hall, and getting new town police badges that feature the state, not town, seal.
“We’ve been actively working to remove seals throughout the town,” Barnes said, but the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent supply chain disruptions have slowed progress. The seal on Main Street, she said, should be gone in “the next couple months.”
The town also stamps official documents with yet another seal, which is just the town name circling the words “Official Seal.”
“It’s a divisive issue, and that’s not what we are about,” Mayor Steve MacDougall said of the flag on the town seal. “So, we haven’t used the seal in years, we’ve been systematically replacing it, and it’s a process that’s nearly complete.”
Reporter David Travis Bland contributed
This story was originally published March 18, 2022 at 12:11 PM.
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