Columbia, South Carolina

• 1. Introduction

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  Columbia, South Carolina sits almost exactly at the geographic center of its state, at the place where the Saluda River and the Broad River meet to form the Congaree. That confluence is not incidental. The city grew precisely because this spot was the last point where boats could sail upriver before the falls made navigation impossible. In May 1540, Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto passed through this same ground moving northward through the interior Southeast, producing the first written records of the region. Nearly two and a half centuries later, legislators chose this juncture to build an entirely new capital city from scratch. What followed was a story of deliberate planning, catastrophic destruction, painful racial reckoning, and a persistent habit of rebuilding. How a city born from a political compromise became the educational, military, and cultural center of the Palmetto State is a story the source material is rich enough to tell in full.

• 2. A City Drawn on Paper

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  State Senator John Lewis Gervais of the town of Ninety Six stood before his colleagues and made the case for a name. He hoped, he said, that "in this town we should find refuge under the wings of COLUMBIA." One legislator pushed for "Washington" instead, but Columbia won by a vote of 11-7 in the state senate. The year was 1786, and South Carolina had just decided to create an entirely new capital in the center of the state rather than keep governing from the coastal city of Charleston.

  The commissioners who designed the city were not improvising. They laid out 400 blocks in a 2-mile square along the river. Each block was divided into lots of half an acre. Buyers who purchased a lot were required to build a house at least 30 feet long and 18 feet wide within three years, or pay an annual 5 percent penalty. The perimeter streets were 150 feet wide. The inner thoroughfares ran 100 feet across. As one of the first planned cities in the United States, Columbia began filling in quickly. Its population was nearing 1,000 shortly after the start of the 19th century.

  The State Legislature first met in the new capital in 1790. For the first two decades of its existence, the city remained under the direct government of the legislature itself before being incorporated as a village in 1805. The first elected official, a man named John Taylor, went on to serve in both houses of the General Assembly, both houses of Congress, and eventually won election as governor. In 1801, the state founded South Carolina College on the new capital's grounds. Its leaders deliberately placed the college in Columbia to help unite the Upcountry and Lowcountry factions that had clashed since the Revolutionary War, and for many years after its founding, commencement exercises were held in December so the state legislature could attend while in session.

• 3. Cotton, Slavery, and Secession

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  By 1850, virtually all of Columbia's commercial and economic activity was tied to a single commodity: cotton. Rail lines that reached the city in the 1840s primarily carried cotton bales outward to the port of Charleston and to textile mills in New England and England. The city had become the largest inland city in the Carolinas throughout the 1850s and 1860s, and its prosperity rested heavily on enslaved labor. In 1830, around 1,500 enslaved people lived and worked in Columbia; that number had grown to 3,300 by 1860. Some worked in their enslavers' households; others were hired out to Columbia residents and institutions, including South Carolina College.

  In December 1860, the South Carolina Secession Convention assembled in the First Baptist Church on the 17th of the month. A smallpox outbreak in Columbia interrupted the proceedings and forced delegates to relocate to Charleston, where South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union three days later, on December 20. The city's contribution to the Confederate war effort was substantial. Columbia housed the state arsenal and the state military academy. The entire student body of South Carolina College volunteered for the Confederate Army, and the university grounds were converted into a military hospital. By 1865, Columbia had also become what the source describes as the Confederacy's last breadbasket. All of those factors made it the logical next target for General William T. Sherman after his March to the Sea captured Savannah, Georgia.

  The Union Army under Sherman captured the city on the 17th of February, 1865. Much of Columbia burned between the 17th and 18th. The idea that Sherman ordered the burning became part of what historians now call the Lost Cause narrative of the Confederacy, but modern historians have concluded that no single cause produced the fire. A newspaper columnist writing in 1874 offered the most concise verdict: "the war burned Columbia."

• 4. Reconstruction and Rebuilding

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  During Reconstruction, Columbia drew journalists, tourists, and political observers from across the country to witness something unusual: a Southern state legislature that included freedmen and men of color who had been free before the war. The city began to repair itself. A mild construction boom took place within the first years of Reconstruction, and repair of railroad tracks in outlying areas created employment for residents.

  By 1897, the city's cultural ambitions had grown large enough that Mayor William McB. Sloan and the city aldermen founded the Columbia Music Festival Association, headquartered in the Opera House on Main Street, which also served as City Hall. The association booked and managed concerts and events for the city.

  In the early 20th century, Columbia developed as a regional textile manufacturing center. By 1907, the city had six mills in operation: Richland, Granby, Olympia, Capital City, Columbia, and Palmetto. Together they employed over 3,400 workers with an annual payroll of $819,000, giving the Midlands an economic boost estimated at over $4.8 million. The streets of the city had not yet been paved; Main Street received its first 17 blocks of surfacing only in 1908. One experimental stretch of Washington Street was paved with wooden blocks, which buckled and floated away during heavy rains before being replaced with asphalt in 1925.

  In 1917, the U.S. Army selected Columbia as the site for Camp Jackson, a military installation officially classified as a "Field Artillery Replacement Depot." The first recruits arrived on the 1st of September, 1917. Camp Jackson would eventually become Fort Jackson, now the largest United States Army installation for Basic Combat Training in the country.

• 5. Civil Rights and Recognition

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  In 1945, a federal judge ruled that the city's Black teachers were entitled to equal pay as their white counterparts. The state's response was to attempt to strip many Black educators of their teaching credentials in the years that followed. The struggle extended to voting rights and to the segregation of public schools, which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education.

  On the 21st of August, 1962, eight downtown chain stores served Black customers at their lunch counters for the first time. The University of South Carolina, a public institution, admitted its first Black students in 1963. Around the same period, Black residents gained membership on municipal boards and commissions, and the city adopted a non-discriminatory hiring policy. These changes earned Columbia the 1964 All-America City Award, the second time the city received that recognition, the first having come in 1951. A 1965 article in Newsweek described Columbia as a city that had "liberated itself from the plague of doctrinal apartheid."

  In March 2019, the murder of Samantha Josephson in the Five Points neighborhood drew national attention. Josephson mistakenly entered a car she believed was her Uber; the driver, Nathaniel Rowland, killed her. The case prompted South Carolina to pass the Samantha L. Josephson Ridesharing Act, which requires rideshare drivers to display identifying lights and bans non-rideshare drivers from misrepresenting themselves. Similar laws followed in New Jersey, North Carolina, and New York State. Rowland was convicted and sentenced to two life sentences without the possibility of parole. On the 28th of December, 2022, federal legislation authorizing a study of rideshare safety practices was sent to President Biden's desk.

• 6. Military, University, and Economy

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  Fort Jackson occupies roughly two-thirds of Columbia's total land area, about 81.2 square miles of the city's 140.68 total square miles. That figure is striking because it means the actual inhabited portion of the city is just over 50 square miles. Twenty miles to the east, McEntire Joint National Guard Base, operated by the U.S. Air Force, serves as a training base for the 169th Fighter Wing of the South Carolina Air National Guard.

  In the early 1940s, shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle and his pilots trained at what is now Columbia Metropolitan Airport for the 1942 Doolittle Raid over Tokyo. They flew North American B-25 Mitchell bombers, the same model as the aircraft installed at Columbia's Owens Field in the Curtiss-Wright hangar.

  The University of South Carolina, chartered in 1801 as South Carolina College, enrolls 31,964 students across 350 degree programs in fifteen degree-granting colleges and schools. Its Darla Moore School of Business has held the number one undergraduate international business degree ranking for 20 consecutive years. The university sits in downtown Columbia, and its transit system, maintained by the city's regional transit authority, serves an additional 1,000,000 passengers annually. AgFirst Farm Credit Bank, headquartered in Columbia, is the largest bank based in the state, with over $30 billion in assets, and is part of the Farm Credit System, the largest agricultural lending organization in the United States, established by Congress in 1916.

• 7. Heat, Rivers, and the Soda City

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  Columbia averages 72 days per year with temperatures at or above 90 degrees Fahrenheit and about 5 days per year at or above 100 degrees. The city's promotional slogan, "Famously Hot," is not an exaggeration. Several factors combine to produce those numbers. Columbia sits in the heart of the Sandhills region, where sandy soils contain less water and warm more quickly than soils elsewhere. The city lies well inland, away from the moderating influence of the Atlantic Ocean. Its elevation is relatively low compared to cities at similar latitudes. And the urban heat island effect adds further warmth relative to surrounding towns. The highest temperature ever recorded in South Carolina, 113 degrees Fahrenheit, was measured at a weather station on the University of South Carolina campus on the 29th of June, 2012.

  The three rivers that frame Columbia's geography have shaped its identity as much as any political decision. The city now markets itself as "The Columbia Riverbanks Region," sitting roughly halfway between the Atlantic Ocean and the Blue Ridge Mountains at an elevation of around 292 feet. The Santee Canal, first chartered in 1786 and completed in 1800, connected Columbia to Charleston via a 22-mile section linking the Santee and Cooper rivers. It was one of the earliest canals in the United States. River traffic eventually gave way to railroad competition, and the canal ceased operation around 1850.

  The city's nickname, Soda City, traces to a contraction of the name Columbia itself. "Cola" became shorthand for the city, and Cola became Soda City. Every Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., Main Street closes to traffic for the Soda City Market, which draws roughly 150 vendors and an estimated 5,000 shoppers, contributing approximately $5 million in sales each year. The name Columbia, as Senator Gervais argued in 1786, is itself a poetic term for the United States, derived from Christopher Columbus, who explored the Caribbean on behalf of the Spanish Empire.