The Planned Capital on the Congaree
Near Columbia, South Carolina
You're standing at the edge of one of the most deliberately designed state capitals in American history. Most cities grow organically from a trading post or a port. Columbia was argued into existence by committee, debated line by line on the floor of the South Carolina General Assembly, and dropped onto a map at a nearly precise geometric center of the state.
The year was seventeen eighty-six. South Carolina's colonial capital had always been Charleston, a port city of wealth, polished drawing rooms, and enormous political leverage. The backcountry upcountry farmers resented it deeply. They had different interests, different crops, different politics. They wanted a capital that belonged to no one region.
On March twenty-second, seventeen eighty-six, the General Assembly passed legislation introduced by Senator John Lewis Gervais to move the capital inland. The vote on the very name of this city, taken in the state senate, was eleven to seven in favor of Columbia. The senator making the argument said he hoped that "in this town we should find refuge under the wings of Columbia," invoking the feminine personification of the young American republic.
Five commissioners then purchased two thousand four hundred and seventy-one acres from ten private landowners. They divided it into a perfect two-mile-square grid of four hundred city blocks, with streets laid out ten to the mile. The streets were drawn unusually wide, up to one hundred and fifty feet across. The reason given at the time, which has not held up to scientific scrutiny, was that mosquitoes could not fly more than sixty feet without starving and would be unable to cross such broad avenues.
The General Assembly held its first session here in January of seventeen ninety. The new State House rose on a hill at the center of the grid, exactly as planned.
Columbia had been willed into existence by legislative vote. For better and for worse, that same spirit of deliberate, occasionally contentious planning has defined the city ever since.
