Downtown Columbia

Weekend in Columbia, Part 2 || Saturday, June 18, 2016 || Exploring the Downtown Area

Today started off with us waking up earlier than planned, but that’s never a bad thing when you want to have as much time as possible to explore a new-to-you area. Like I said before, we didn’t really have a plan for the day, just a small scrap of paper with some addresses scribbled on it. We stepped outside and were delighted to find that it was cloudy with very mild temperatures – maybe upper 60’s? I’m not sure, I just know it wasn’t long before I was cold. 😉 We drove to the heart of downtown Columbia and parked in a parking garage off of Taylor Street. This worked out great, and was about 75¢ an hour. It was mostly empty when we arrived just before 8. And naturally, we set off to explore the city by foot.

Our first stop on our walking tour was the State Capitol building. This was the main reason we wanted to come here – not just to see the grand old historic building, but also to walk around the well landscaped green space and view all the memorials surrounding it. I don’t think we’ve really taken the time to do this in any other state yet, and the only reason for that is that we’ve prioritized other outdoor attractions over visiting downtown areas. (I guess I did go see South Dakota’s capitol last year with my family, and we – Jess and her family – really enjoyed that!)

A few notes from Curtis on the monuments and a bit of history.  First, the Palm Tree Monument -by far one of the coolest and intricate looking small scale monuments I’ve seen- is a monument to those South Carolinian Soldiers who fought during the Mexican American War.  One always sees monuments to the 20th century wars. Down here there are several monuments for the Civil War (generally Confederate for obvious reasons). And occasionally a Revolutionary Monument.  But NEVER have I seen one for the Mexican American War, not even on the National Mall in DC.  They even had a Spanish American War Memorial here too.  (The reason behind this stems mostly from the general public’s – both then and now –  that both of these wars were Imperialistic and so garner less sympathy and support.)

The above picture is of the monument to General Wade Hampton, a Confederate General born in Charleston who later became Governor and then U.S. Senator for the State.  I bring him up, first because we see monuments to him many places, and second because he was the man who “defended” Columbia in 1865.  

As some may remember, General Sherman marched overland through South Carolina from Savannah Georgia in the beginning of 1865.  On February 3, he fought his only engagement in SC at River’s Bridge.  He then drove straight towards Columbia, much quicker than the Confederate command even supposed.  This left General Hampton in charge of the defenses at Columbia with only 500 some men against nearly 100,000.  Naturally, Hampton retreated burning the bridges into the city as he went.  Unfortunately, in the process of the retreat by the Confederates and the capture by the Union.  A large portion of the town burned down.  Fortunately the then incomplete State House was not burned, but did get hit by some cannon shot, today marked by stars on the exterior.  More than likely, the fire was started by the Confederates who were burning stores that they could not transport.  But many southerners like to lay blame on Union looters.  

After wandering around the entirety of the building, we started heading down Assembly Street to check out a visitor’s center. As we were walking, we spotted a Panera which reminded us of how we hadn’t had breakfast, so I ran in to grab some bagels for the 3 of us to share. It was seriously the biggest Panera I’ve ever seen, yet also the emptiest – my friends from Iowa would understand the culture shock I experienced here. To the readers from my hometown – it was over DOUBLE the size of the Collins Road location, and at 8:45 on a Saturday morning, it was completely VACANT besides like 2 other people ordering to go. Shocking! Anyway, we made our way to the visitor’s center where we ate and grabbed a map of the downtown area. We didn’t really find much we could do besides what we already knew, so we continued on, back the way we came.

Had we not had Charlotte with us, there are a number of indoor things we could have tried that others may find helpful when visiting downtown Columbia: a free tour of the capitol building, the zoo and botanical gardens, and any of the museums perhaps. I think the SC history one looked interesting. There were also a couple plantations and gardens further East. Oh well, I’m glad we had Charlotte with us today, and I know she enjoyed herself very much as well – if only for what we did next! 😉

We decided to take Main Street back up to Taylor St., apparently following the Palmetto Trail while doing so (the trail that goes from East to West across SC). Up till this point, we felt a little out of place wandering around the streets of Columbia. There were a couple runners, but aside from that, there was really no one walking around. We were also looking especially touristy as always, Curtis with a backpack and water bottle, me with the maps and constantly stopping to take pictures.

But once on Main Street, we started to see more people, and then we happened upon the Farmer’s Market. Ah, so that’s where everyone was! Unfortunately we had already grabbed breakfast so we weren’t hungry or anything, but Charlotte benefitted greatly from this walk: there was one booth selling healthy dog treats and they had several groups of people wandering around serving treats to the dogs, and so she received multiple treats and got lots of love from many friendly people.

Curtis and I, on the other hand, aren’t very good at farmer’s markets, apparently. This is the second weekend in a row that we’ve visited, and both times we’ve came out empty handed. We’re all for buying local and supporting small family businesses, we just don’t do well in these settings. Having one booth after another that’s selling delicious-smelling things is just overwhelming to me, and when I’m surrounded by crowds I don’t feel like I can stop and actually enjoy the different vendors. But that’s just me. We enjoyed our little stroll through, but then carried on with our plans once we made it to the end.

One takeaway from our walk? Columbia is weird. I mean, we think of the bigger cities of SC – Greenville, Charleston, and Columbia. Greenville has the beautiful mountains and state parks surrounding it, Charleston has the whole historic side and the ocean, and then there’s Columbia. Columbia has the state capitol, it has a college and a zoo, but when I searched for things to do online the things that came up were like “See the ‘Never Bust Chain’, ‘Tunnel Mural’, and ‘Busted Plug Plaza'” – all random works of art by Blue Sky, an artist from Columbia. They were all really cool and fun to see, but after all this we stopped and said, “now what?” (Fun fact: after the artist was commissioned to create the Busted Plug Plaza {fire hydrant thing in the picture above} and the tunnel mural {see last picture of the post} he installed the Never Bust Chain to 2 historic old buildings without permission from the city because he said “it looked like one was leaning toward the other”…now the 2 are eternally connected. haha.)

We wandered around to see the old County Courthouse, then made our way to Finlay Park hoping for a nice green space to wander around. It wasn’t really that well maintained, to be honest, and we didn’t spend a lot of time there. We talked about what our favorite trip has been while living in the SE – the one that kept coming to mind today was Savannah. Savannah is great for so many reasons – historic downtown, great food, an awesome fort, beautiful cemeteries, and a beach and lighthouse. We did enjoy our day in Columbia (more reasons why to follow in the next post – we had fun on our drive home too!) but if people were to ask us about where to have a great weekend trip from Charleston, we’ll point them to Savannah every time. And we wouldn’t mind going back ourselves. Haha.

At this point in our day, it wasn’t quite noon yet, but Curtis wasn’t feeling great and was a little discouraged thinking that we could have done this in a day, and going to Columbia didn’t necessitate an overnight. I was desperate to keep the fun going and find more things to see, so I asked for any or all attractions we could see on the way back – taking back roads, of course. He named off a few random places he had heard of either through letterboxing or from our new favorite site Sciway  (If you live in or are visiting SC you HAVE to check it out – so many ideas of things to do if you’re interested in exploring the state!) and being overly optimistic about traveling (as per usual) I jumped on every idea and said we should go do them all, or as many as he was up for. Haha. And the day got better from there 🙂

And because this post would be entirely too long if I included the rest, come back tomorrow to read about the rest of our trip!