A Walking Tour of Columbia, South Carolina
In 1786 the South Carolina General Assembly convened in Charleston to pass legislation for a new capital city, one that would be more convenient for the growing number of residents leaving the coast and settling in the backcountry. The site selected for the new city, one of the first planned cities in the United States, had several advantages. First, it was located nearly in the center of the state and second, it was at the head of navigation on the Congaree River. The name for the new capital came from Christopher Columbus who was riding a crest in popularity for his travels to the West Indies in 1492.
The new capital was a success not just as a seat of government but as a center for education, commerce and transportation. A canal system was in places by the 1820s and rail service arrived in 1842. By the mid-1800s Columbia was the largest inland town in the Carolinas - twice as big as the next most populous town, Raleigh, North Carolina.
Columbia’s role in the Civil War was brief but lasting. America’s first convention to draw up an Ordinance of Secession met here in December 1860 but quickly departed for Charleston when word spread of a smallpox outbreak in town. Union leaders would not forget. After surviving four years of war unscathed, General William Tecumseh Sherman’s troops arrived in town on February 17, 1865 and with barely six weeks of conflict remaining, destroyed about one-third of the city, including the commercial and governmental district and every house on Main Street, save one. Ironically, one of the buildings to survive was the First Baptist Church where the Secession Convention was held - because Union troops had bad information as to where the actual location of the meeting took place.
Columbia would rebound slowly but steadily - the South Carolina State House would not be completely finished until the early 1900s. With the rise to prominence of the University of South Carolina, established in town in 1801, and the establishment of Fort Jackson, the nation’s largest U.S. Army training facility, in 1917, however, Columbia would emerge again into the nation’s consciousness.
Our walking tour of the capital city will cover much ground and take in the greatest diversity of architecture of any South Carolina town but will begin outside of its two most historic houses where, conveniently, the closest non-metered parking spaces to downtown are located...
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