Dead men do tell tales, as does everyone else, in Columbia. For every tombstone, building, garden and bar, friendly-folk throughout South Carolina’s capital will volunteer a backstory sparkling with detail.
Guides, and ghouls, reveal during a moonlit tour of Elmwood Cemetery why a woman was buried in her wedding dress. Historic Columbia Foundation docents open doors not only to mansions but the Mann-Simons cottage – bought in 1850 by a freed slave who walked here from Charleston with her four young daughters, earned acclaim as a midwife and started a church in her basement.
That mountain tunnel on the side of a downtown bank? A native says that Blue Sky, creator of this astonishing trompe l’oeil mural, still lives here – and also sculpted “Busted Plug,” the tilted monolithic fire hydrant nearby. Humor enlivens storefronts: Immaculate Consumption eatery, Pupcakes, Village Idiot and Goatfeathers, reputedly the state’s first venue to serve cappuccino, Guinness and haute raw cuisine.
As I gaze at the ornate State House, a passerby points out palmetto tree insignias and bronze stars marking Union cannonball blasts, part of General Sherman’s fiery 1865 siege of the cradle of the Confederacy.
The Art Deco jewel now housing Gotham Bagel’s jitterbug, live jazz and tag-team DJ nights previously harbored a lunch counter that remained segregated until 1962. Outside the grand buildings still ringing the University of South Carolina’s “Horseshoe,” young scholars of yore let off steam by firing weapons, necessitating that tall stately wall.
Columbia’s museums braid history, culture and lust for knowing. Witness “World War I in 3-D” and crawl into trenches at the Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum. Be awed by early inventions and startled by eerily animated dinosaurs at South Carolina State Museum. Climb the spine and slide through the belly of 40-foot-tall, 17-ton “Eddie” at EdVenture Children’s Museum.
Recent revitalizations have transformed a west-side factory corridor into the bistro-studded Vista district and rejuvenated funky east-of-USC Five Points, whose myriad festivals include such amusements as “Feats of Strength” and “Airing of Grievances” pub-crawls.
Free self-guided tour brochures for this super-walkable city brim with lore about architecture (Second Empire! New Brutalism!), the Civil War, and real-people feats and foibles.
Linking downtown to nature, Three Rivers Greenway meanders along the Congaree, Saluda and Broad rivers. The picture-and-picnic-perfect waterworks station originally sprung from an early-1800s architect’s smart gravity-pumped plan.
As for spinning tales, Columbia City Ballet is unsurpassed. Its red-hot annual “Dracula” spectacular draws equal numbers of guys and women, hipsters and patricians. Bram Stoker must be pirouetting in his grave – dying to tell more stories. Here, the allure of lore is irresistible.
Reach Robin Tierney at [email protected]
