The USC Horseshoe: America's Oldest Freestanding Academic Library

In December of eighteen oh one, South Carolina's General Assembly chartered a new college to be placed in the relatively new capital city of Columbia. The reasoning was deliberately political. The state's planters and coastal elites sent their sons to Yale and Princeton and the College of Charleston, while the backcountry upcountry families had no comparable institution. A state college in Columbia, South Carolina's leaders hoped, would bring both groups together, graduating men who shared a common intellectual formation regardless of where they came from.

South Carolina College opened in eighteen oh five with nine students and one faculty member.

The original campus is still here, and you can walk through it. It is called the Horseshoe, a U-shaped arrangement of buildings facing a garden courtyard. The buildings were designed largely by Robert Mills, often called one of the nation's first native born professional architects, the same man who later designed the Washington Monument. At the center of the Horseshoe stands the Maxcy Monument, an obelisk that Mills designed to honor the college's first president. This was Mills's first known use of the obelisk form, decades before he applied it to the Washington Monument.

The South Caroliniana Library, completed around eighteen forty, is the oldest freestanding academic library building still standing in the United States. It holds the original collection of the college library, including books, manuscripts, and documents going back to the founding.

A brick wall encircles the Horseshoe, built in eighteen thirty-five supposedly to keep students from slipping into Columbia's taverns at night. It was only marginally successful at that purpose. But on the night of February seventeenth, eighteen sixty-five, the wall did something unexpected: when Sherman's forces burned Columbia around it, the wall helped contain the flames, and the Horseshoe campus survived almost entirely intact.