Millwood: Columns Left by Sherman

What remains of Millwood are a handful of brick columns and some scattered foundation stones, standing in a grove near Columbia, South Carolina. The Greek Revival mansion they once supported was built and later remodeled in the Greek Revival style, probably in the eighteen thirties, by Wade Hampton the Second, one of the wealthiest planters in the antebellum South. His son, Wade Hampton the Third, grew up here, later became a Confederate general, and after the war served as governor of South Carolina and United States senator.

The mansion did not survive long enough to see any of that. On February seventeenth, eighteen sixty-five, as General Sherman's army burned Columbia, soldiers came to Millwood and put it to the torch as well. Only the columns survived.

They were added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-one, and today the ruins sit quietly as a registered archaeological site, a Civil War timestamp no one has rebuilt.