How Columbia was built and evolved over time

Columbia was laid out on paper before it existed and rebuilt after it burned.

The 1786 grid

The commissioners platted a two-mile square with streets 100 feet wide — and the two main ones, Assembly and Senate, at 150 feet — on the theory, current at the time, that wide streets would disperse the miasma believed to cause malaria. The malaria theory was wrong and the streets are still there, which gives the centre an unusually open, almost oversized feel for a city of this size.

The State House

Begun in 1851 in Carolina blue granite to a Greek Revival design, interrupted by the war, damaged by shelling, left unfinished for decades and completed with a dome in 1907. The result is a building of obvious quality with a visible seam between its periods, and the bronze stars marking the artillery strikes are deliberately left.

The Horseshoe

Federal and Greek Revival brick buildings around a green, built between 1805 and 1855, several of them constructed with enslaved labour.

Mills

Textile mills on the river and the canal that fed them; the state museum occupies one, a large brick building of 1894 that was the first electrically powered textile mill in the world.

Robert Mills

The first federally appointed architect of the United States was born in Charleston and worked across this state; his Columbia house is a museum, and his severe, fireproof public buildings — he designed the Washington Monument — set a tone that the State House later followed.

After the fire

Late Victorian commercial blocks on Main Street, several now restored.