[3] Orangeburg County comprises the Orangeburg, South Carolina Micropolitan Statistical Area, which is also included in the Columbia-Sumter-Orangeburg, South Carolina Combined Statistical Area.

The district was occupied for thousands of years by Indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands.

By the time of European arrival, Eastern Siouan-speaking tribes, such as the Cheraw, Catawba, and Pedee, inhabited the Piedmont area above the fall line.

The Orangeburg Judicial District was chartered by European Americans in 1769 from a mostly unorganized upland area between the Congaree and Savannah rivers.

A county, initially of the same name but later called Orange, was organized within the district but deorganized in 1791, after the American Revolutionary War.

The county became a center of labor by enslaved Black people on the plantations, who were transported from coastal areas and the Upper South to cultivate and process cotton.

Reflecting the patterns of 19th-century settlement, the area is still chiefly agricultural and has a majority African American population.

In 1868, under the revised state constitution during the Reconstruction era, South Carolina districts were organized as counties.

Election of representatives by the state legislature had kept the districts dominated by the elite owners of major plantations in the Low Country and elsewhere.

Emancipation of slaves after the war under newly ratified federal constitutional amendments resulted in freedmen voting.

Using voter intimidation, white Democrats took control of the state legislature by the end of the century; they passed state electoral laws and a new constitution that essentially disfranchised most blacks, a situation that lasted until after the federal legislation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The western part of the county lies in the "CSRA" (Central Savannah River Area).

Orangeburg is a solidly Democratic county in presidential elections; it has not voted Republican since 1972.

Major crops are cotton, soybeans, corn, turf grass and watermelons.