South Carolina's capital — burned by Sherman, rebuilt in college-town style
Columbia is the capital of South Carolina and the state's largest city, a sprawling Midlands city where the University of South Carolina provides the cultural energy. Much of the original city was burned in February 1865 when General Sherman's Union army passed through — a disputed fire that destroyed much of the antebellum fabric — and what remains is largely a post-war rebuild. The South Carolina State Museum occupies a former textile mill and covers four floors of natural history, art, and space science. The Congaree National Park, 30km south, protects the largest intact old-growth bottoml…
Columbia was purpose-built as South Carolina's capital in 1786, chosen for its central location to balance the power of coastal Charleston. The city became a cotton-trading hub in the antebellum era, and South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union in December 1860, making Columbia a symbolic heart of the Confederacy. The 1865 burning, for which Union and Confederate commanders blamed each other for over a century, destroyed perhaps two-thirds of the city. During Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era, Columbia was the site of both fierce resistance and the establishment of histor…