Lipman Theorodre Levin was the youngest of Lewis Levin’s five children, all sons. Lewis (his wife’s name has gone unrecorded) was born in London and had moved to the United States by the early 1790s. A merchant, he spent some time in Ohio, where his first son, Lewis, Jr., was born, and eventually settled in Columbia South Carolina, where Lipman was born in 1818.

Lipman, together with his brother Jacob, opened an auction house in Columbia, advertising as “auctioneer and commission merchant” for “real estate, stocks and bonds, negroes, cotton, flour, and corn,” in addition to offering “Dry Goods and Victuals.” In 1844 he married Charlotte Woolf, daughter of Isaac Woolf and Sarah Mendes at Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim in Charleston, where the Woolf family was based. The made their home in Columbia and there raised their five children.