Columbia historical timeline

Columbia was created to settle an argument, and its most famous day was its destruction.

A compromise capital

The legislature voted in 1786 to move the capital from Charleston to a central site, to balance the coastal low country against the upcountry farmers. The new town was laid out on a grid of unusually wide streets on a plateau above the Congaree, and the first state house was built there.

Secession

The convention that voted South Carolina out of the United States met in Columbia in December 1860 before moving to Charleston because of a smallpox outbreak. South Carolina was the first state to secede, and the war followed.

The burning

On 17 February 1865 Sherman’s army entered the city, and that night fire destroyed roughly a third of it, including most of the commercial district. Responsibility has been argued over ever since — retreating Confederate troops had fired cotton bales, wind was high, and Federal soldiers had been drinking and looting. The unfinished State House survived, struck by artillery; the bronze stars on its west wall mark where.

After

Reconstruction, textile mills, and the growth of the university and Fort Jackson. Segregation was dismantled slowly and contentiously; the university admitted Black students in 1963.

Mann-Simons and Black Columbia

A free Black family bought a lot near the centre in the 1840s and their descendants held and traded from it for 130 years; the site is now a museum interpreting what archaeology found there. Columbia also produced Modjeska Monteith Simkins, a central figure in the state’s civil rights movement, whose house on Marion Street is preserved.

Recent

The Confederate flag came off the State House dome in 2000 and off the grounds entirely in 2015, days after the Charleston church massacre.