The Chapin Commercial Historic District is comprised of twelve contributing buildings and one contributing structure located along Lexington Avenue, Beaufort Street, and Clark Street in downtown Chapin, South Carolina.

The Chapin Commercial Historic District is significant under Criterion A for its role in the commercial development of Chapin between 1901 and 1969. From 1890, when the Columbia, Newberry, and Laurens Railroad finally chugged through the tiny town of Chapin for the first time, until 1929, when water began to fill the area behind the brand new Lake Murray Dam, just a few miles to the south, Chapin was a bustling railroad town. Its downtown core flourished with a combination of brick and frame buildings that largely served the businesses that were heavily dependent on the passenger and freight traffic the train brought. However, the flooding of the lake, coupled with the devastating effects of the Great Depression, caused Chapin’s population to nosedive and led to the shuttering of many of its businesses. Recovery came more than a decade later, when increased tourist traffic to the lake renewed Chapin’s downtown business district. With that expansion came new pressures, primarily in the demand for new town services and more centralized local government. As a result, the period from 1940 through 1969 saw Chapin’s downtown revitalized through new, affordable, and mostly functional commercial architecture. This boom continued until the end of the 1960s, when the arrival of new development pressures—in the form of subdivisions and large manufacturing operations—drew residents away from Chapin’s cramped downtown core and out to the strip malls that began to develop along US 76 (Chapin Road), the main highway that passes through Chapin just south of the original downtown core.

The Chapin Commercial Historic District was officially listed in the National Register of Historic Places on October 7, 2019.