Columbia Discovery Guide

Columbia is South Carolina’s capital and a university town, and it carries the state’s history more directly than anywhere else.

The State House is a granite Greek Revival building with bronze stars set into its western wall marking where Sherman’s artillery struck it in 1865, and the grounds hold a sequence of monuments that amount to an argument about how the state remembers itself.

The University of South Carolina founded in 1801 has a Horseshoe of antebellum buildings at its heart, and around 35,000 students give the city its energy.

Congaree National Park, half an hour south-east, protects the largest remaining old-growth bottomland hardwood forest in the United States, with some of the tallest trees in eastern North America.

And the Riverbanks Zoo is consistently rated among the best in the country.

The State House

Free to tour. Granite Greek Revival, begun in 1851 and not completed until 1907, with the bronze stars on the west wall marking Federal artillery hits. The grounds carry monuments including the African American History Monument, and the flagpole where the Confederate flag flew until 2015.

The university

The Horseshoe, a green enclosed by early nineteenth-century brick buildings, is the oldest part of campus and among the finest antebellum college grounds in the South. The South Caroliniana Library of 1840 was the first free-standing college library in the United States.

Congaree National Park

A boardwalk loop through old-growth cypress and tupelo, canoe trails on Cedar Creek, and in late spring a synchronous firefly display.

Riverbanks Zoo and Garden

Across the river, with a botanical garden on the far bank and the ruins of a nineteenth-century mill.

Museums and the Vista

The South Carolina State Museum in a former textile mill, the Columbia Museum of Art, and the Congaree Vista district for eating.

Columbia is a government town, a college town and a military town, and the three populations barely overlap.

Gamecocks

University of South Carolina football shapes the autumn completely. Home games bring around 80,000 people into a city of 140,000, the entrance ritual to the strains of a theme from a 1960s film is taken with total seriousness, and the whole city wears garnet.

Fort Jackson

The largest basic training installation in the United States Army is on the edge of the city and puts around 45,000 recruits through it a year. Graduation days bring families from across the country, and the base is a significant part of the local economy and character.

Reckoning

South Carolina seceded first, and Columbia has spent recent decades working through what to keep, what to add and what to remove on its public ground. The African American History Monument on the State House lawn, the university’s acknowledgement of enslaved labour in its buildings, and the 2015 removal of the Confederate flag are all part of that.

Southern city pace

Slower, more formal and friendlier than the north-eastern states; strangers speak to each other.

The history here is contested and present. Columbia was burned in 1865, the Confederate flag flew over the State House until 2000 and on its grounds until 2015, and the monuments on that lawn are actively argued about. Engage with it rather than walking past it, and visit the sites that tell the other half — the Mann-Simons site, the university’s slavery memorial, and the Modjeska Simkins house.

Congaree is a floodplain forest and its trails are boardwalk or soft ground; stay on them, take out what you carry, and note that the park is free and funded accordingly.

The rivers are recovering from industrial and municipal discharge; the Three Rivers Greenway and the river outfitters are the way to use them.

Spend in the Vista and Main Street, where independent businesses have driven the downtown recovery.

March to early May and late September to November are the best periods: warm, comfortable and with azaleas in spring and colour in the autumn.

June to September is hot and extremely humid — Columbia is among the hottest cities in the South, and the nickname Famously Hot is the city’s own. Plan indoor middles of the day.

Late May brings the synchronous firefly display at Congaree, which is ticketed by lottery and worth the effort.

Autumn Saturdays are dominated by home football games; book far ahead or avoid.

December to February is mild — often 15°C in the afternoon — with occasional hard frosts and very rare snow that shuts everything.

What a day costs, by how you travel

Relative cost across the city

Columbia is inexpensive by American standards outside football weekends and army graduation days, both of which fill the city. Sales tax is added at the till and tipping of 18 to 20 per cent is expected.