Oates was a thriving rural community from the 1880s to the 1930s that grew up around a general store built nearby by William J. Oates. His father, James Oates, had acquired a plantation here in 1824. William J. Oates moved to Florida, served in the Confederate army in a Florida unit, and returned to Darlington District after the war. This crossroads was named Oates in 1880, when a post office opened in the general store. Union Academy, founded about the same time, was later succeeded by the Oates School in the 1930s. A spur off the Lydia-Lamar line of the Seaboard Air Line Railroad ran to Oates from 1912 to 1937. The Bank of Oates, founded in 1916, closed during the agricultural depression of the mid- to late 1920s.