The Building Where the Civil War Began

On December 17, 1860, South Carolina's Secession Convention convened at First Baptist Church on Hampton Street. Three days later, the delegates adjourned to Charleston and signed the Ordinance of Secession. The chain of events that followed killed 620,000 Americans and remade the country. The building still stands, still holds services, and still has its original slave gallery intact — the one the congregation's Black members were required to sit in during services where the congregation planned to leave the Union in order to preserve slavery.

Four blocks away on Blanding Street, the only surviving house designed by Robert Mills — the man who designed the Washington Monument — sits next to the Hampton-Preston Mansion, which was spared from Sherman's 1865 burning because Union General Slocum set up his headquarters there. Two blocks further, the boyhood home of Woodrow Wilson now carries the name "Museum of Reconstruction Era." Historic Columbia deliberately renamed it. Wilson's administration resegregated the federal government in 1913, firing or demoting nearly every Black federal employee. The building where he grew up now tells the story of the period his presidency helped end.

Columbia is a small city with a very dense history. Almost every block downtown has a name attached to a consequence.