Columbia, South Carolina

Learning lots of South Carolina History

We camped in Sesquicentennial State Park on the outskirts of Columbia, our 3rd State Park Camping in as many stops. We just hung out in camp and hiked around Sesquicentennial Lake on Halloween, resting up to go exploring the rest of our stay.

We got out touring the other 4 days, Monday being the day we “added to our counts”

Monday morning Tour of 1 new State Capitol:

• South Carolina State Capitol in Columbia (#45), whose founding was similar to North Carolina, in that Columbia was picked to be the capitol of South Carolina after the War for Independence, to get it away from the coast and make it more central, and it was designed to be the capitol. It is a beautiful and charming building, which took 56 years to complete. It was stalled, almost complete, with the advent of the Civil War in 1861. Partially destroyed by Sherman in 1865, it wasn’t fully completed until 1907. You can see 5 places where Sherman’s cannan balls hit the building.

Monday afternoon Visit to 1 new National Park Site:

• Congaree National Park (#310), first time we’ve visited a National Park Site during a government shutdown. (The Visitor Center was closed, so no stamp and no new brochure.) Congaree National Park has the largest intact expanse of old growth bottomland hardwood forest remaining in the southeastern United States. Waters from the Congaree and Wateree Rivers sweep through the floodplain. We hiked around the Visitor Center for a couple of hours and heard a LOT of birds!

Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday in Columbia!

• Saturday, we visited the Robert Mills Historic District and took 2 of 4 Historic Columbia House Tours. We started at the Robert Mills House, showcases the skill of the architect (Robert Mills) who designed some of our nation’s most prominent buildings, including the Washington Monument. It is also used to illustrate how enslavers and enslaved lived ante-bellum, and has an exhibit on Mary Boykin Chesnut, whose Civil War autobiography Gail has read. Then we toured The Museum of Reconstruction Era at the Woodrow Wilson Family Home, the only museum dedicated to interpreting the post-Civil War Reconstruction period and South Carolina’s only remaining presidential site. This distinctive circa-1871 Italian villa-style residence was home to a 14-year-old boy named “Tommy” Woodrow Wilson.
• Sunday we returned for the Journey to Freedom Tour to learn more about Black history in Columbia. It is a combined tour of both the Mann-Simons Site and the Modjeska Monteith Simkins House. The Mann-Simons Site was home to the same entrepreneurial African American family for nearly 130 years. Therefor, it traces the journey of Columbia’s African American community from enslavement through urban renewal. Modjeska Monteith Simkins practiced social activism from a young age. Her career involved working with local and national civil rights leaders and NAACP lawyers such as Thurgood Marshall, who stayed at her home. Simkins received the Order of the Palmetto-the State of South Carolina’s highest honor-before her death in 1992.

• Sunday we visited the South Carolina State Museum, along the banks of the Congaree River. WOW! It has four floors of exhibits, which we spent ~2.5 hours exploring before we had to go to our tour (above). We also saw the Icelandic show, Áróra, about the Northern Lights, in the planetarium. We returned on Tuesday for a couple more hours, to explore what we missed on Sunday. We even got to see “real time” sun flares in the observatory (funded by Boeing).
• Tuesday afternoon we also had a picnic at the nearby Columbia Canal and Riverfront Park. There we learned its history and took a (very short, due to construction) walk along the Canal Towpath, on the very skinny island between the Congaree River and the Canal.

Off for Charleston…

…for just a couple of days, to clean up and store Lizzy and The Brute, pack up, and…Fly Home for the Holidays!

For more pictures (later), see Adventure Album: South for the Winter

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