Folk Victorian houses like the Cockfield House are found throughout the United States and were common from around 1870 to 1910. During that period, the advancement of the railroads allowed for increased access to the tools and materials necessary for woodworking, decreasing the cost of adding fine woodworked details to a residence and therefore accelerating the rise of Victorian architecture.

Lake City typified the sort of small railroad towns where Folk Victorian influence spread in those years. Known for most of the nineteenth century as “Graham’s Crossroads” and officially named “Lake City” in 1883, the town developed near the intersection of two key colonial-era routes connecting the South Carolina cities of Georgetown and Camden, and Charleston and Cheraw. In the 1850s, the Northeastern Railroad (later the Atlantic Coast Line) laid the first track through Graham’s Crossroads, passing just west of the future site of the Cockfield House on Valley Street. As business and residences grew up near the tracks before and after the Civil War, economics and kinship kept the town connected to the surrounding countryside, where agriculture defined daily life. In the antebellum era, area plantation owners relied on large enslaved workforces to cultivate primarily cotton, to the point that, in 1860, some 66 percent of the county’s roughly 15,000 residents were African American.