97 Fun Facts About Columbia SC

Which two rivers meet at Columbia to form the Congaree?

The Broad and the Saluda meet at the fall line, where rapids block boats heading upriver, so the spot grew into a frontier crossing and trading post long before Columbia existed.

Why did South Carolina's lawmakers found Columbia as a new capital in 1786?

Moving the capital to be closer to inland farmers was a compromise meant to calm the feud between small Upcountry farmers and the Lowcountry's coastal planters.

What set Columbia's 1786 town plan apart from older American towns?

Very wide streets were the plan's hallmark: its two main avenues ran 150 feet across, and lots were sold to settlers while sites were held for public buildings.

Columbia's nickname "Soda City" comes from what?

'Soda City' plays on 'Cola', the local shortening of Columbia's name, a pun on the soft drink; the Saturday Soda City Market on Main Street takes its name from it.

Which historically Black college in Columbia was founded by the African Methodist Episcopal Church?

Allen University began in 1870 as Payne Institute in rural Cokesbury, then moved to Columbia in 1880 and took the name of Richard Allen, the AME Church's founder.

Columbia is the seat of which county?

Columbia became Richland's county seat when a 1799 law ordered the district court to meet there, so the capital houses state, county and city government.

Which Spanish explorer's expedition passed through the site of Columbia, SC in May 1540?

Hernando de Soto's army was hunting Cofitachequi, a chiefdom rumoured to be rich, whose female chief received the Spaniards with food and freshwater pearls.

The South's earliest secession convention met in Columbia on December 17, 1860, in which building?

First Baptist Church hosted the opening session, but a smallpox outbreak moved the convention to Charleston, where South Carolina voted to secede on December 20.

Which Union general's army captured Columbia on February 17, 1865, the night much of the city burned?

William T. Sherman's army marched in after Columbia's mayor rode out under a flag of surrender; Union shells also scarred the unfinished State House.

What goods lay piled in Columbia's streets when Union troops arrived in February 1865?

Cotton bales were already burning in places, and that night fire destroyed a third of the city, though who started the blaze is still disputed.

Which Savannah, Georgia, minor-league team moved to Columbia after the 2015 season and became the Fireflies?

The Sand Gnats left Savannah's old Grayson Stadium for a new ballpark on Columbia's Bull Street, bringing professional baseball back to South Carolina's capital.

Which Major League club became the Columbia Fireflies' affiliate in the 2021 shake-up?

The Kansas City Royals stepped in after baseball's 2021 minor-league overhaul led the New York Mets to drop Columbia as a farm club.

Which kind of training is Columbia's big Army post best known for?

Basic combat training is the post's main mission: it trains roughly half of all soldiers entering the Army each year, and in 1968 Columbia annexed it into the city.

Columbia's big Army post was first established under what name in 1917?

Camp Jackson, named for President Andrew Jackson, reopened in 1939 and became Fort Jackson in 1940; a postwar plan to close it was halted by the Korean War.

Under what name was the state's flagship university founded in Columbia in 1801?

South Carolina College opened in 1805; during Reconstruction it admitted Black students, until white leaders shut it in 1877 and reopened it as an all-white college.

What is the name of the University of South Carolina's costumed rooster mascot?

Cocky debuted at the 1980 Homecoming game as the 'son' of Big Spur, the earlier rooster mascot, and then replaced him as the school's official mascot.

In which athletic conference does the University of South Carolina compete?

The SEC split into two six-team divisions when South Carolina and Arkansas joined in the early 1990s, two decades after South Carolina quit the ACC in 1971.

Under what name did the University of South Carolina's football stadium, built with WPA money, open in 1934?

Columbia Municipal Stadium became Carolina Stadium after the city deeded it to the university in 1941, and took the Williams-Brice name in 1972 after Martha Williams-Brice's bequest paid for an expansion.

Which venue on the University of South Carolina's Columbia campus opened in 2002?

Colonial Life Arena replaced the Carolina Coliseum as the Gamecocks' basketball home, and the old Coliseum was later turned into practice courts for both basketball teams.

Which coach led South Carolina women's basketball to a perfect 2024 national title?

Dawn Staley left Temple in 2008 to rebuild a struggling South Carolina program, which beat Mississippi State in 2017 for its first national title.

Which rock band, formed by University of South Carolina students in 1986, grew into a national phenomenon in the 1990s?

Hootie & the Blowfish signed with Atlantic Records, and their 1994 debut album, Cracked Rear View, became one of the best-selling albums in US history.

What was the South Carolina–Clemson football game called when it was played during Columbia's State Fair week?

Big Thursday ended after 1959 because Clemson wanted the game to alternate between the two campuses, partly so it could share in the money the game brought in.

What did Columbia's Riverbanks Zoo add to its grounds in 1995?

A botanical garden opened in 1995, and Riverbanks later built an aerial lift to carry guests across the river between the zoo and the garden.

What problem did Columbia's Riverbanks Zoo face soon after opening in 1974?

It couldn't pay its own way on visitor income alone, so a support society was created to help raise money for the zoo.

Congaree National Park, southeast of Columbia, protects the largest remaining US tract of what?

Old-growth bottomland hardwood forest here is often called a swamp, but it is mostly floodplain that the river covers only from time to time.

What threat spurred the grassroots campaign that led to Congaree's federal protection in 1976?

Logging: the Beidler family's lumber company had stopped cutting the tract by the 1910s, and renewed Beidler logging decades later sparked the campaign.

Why was Lake Murray, the big lake northwest of Columbia, created around 1930?

To generate electricity, a power company dammed the river and moved about 5,000 people, along with churches and schools, out of the valley it flooded.

The South Carolina State House is built mainly of which stone?

Granite construction began under architect John Niernsee in the 1850s, but the Civil War stalled the work, and the dome wasn't added until the early 1900s.

What changed at South Carolina's State House in 2015?

The Confederate battle flag flew atop the dome from 1962, moved to a Confederate monument on the grounds in 2000, and was permanently removed by a 2015 law.

Who became Columbia's first African American mayor in 2010?

Stephen K. Benjamin, a former state cabinet official, won a 2010 special election, and after the 2017 Las Vegas shooting he initiated a city ban on bump stocks.

What natural disaster struck Columbia in October 2015?

Historic flooding, from rain on the scale of a 1,000-year event, hit the Columbia area, so South Carolina moved its home football game against LSU to Baton Rouge.

After railroads took away its river traffic, what did the Columbia Canal become?

A power supply for industry: its water ran a Confederate gunpowder works during the Civil War, and an 1891 rebuild made it a major supplier of power to the city.

Which downtown Columbia concert hall opened in 1930?

Township Auditorium hosted everything from concerts to wrestling, but it kept Black and white audiences apart until the civil rights era.

Columbia's Trinity Episcopal Cathedral was modelled on which English church?

York Minster was the model for architect Edward Brickell White's Gothic Revival design, and the church escaped the fire that swept Columbia in 1865.

The Robert Mills House on Blanding Street was designed by the architect of which national landmark?

The Washington Monument's architect, Robert Mills, designed the 1823 mansion for merchant Ainsley Hall, who died before it was finished, so it became a theological seminary instead.

Which US president spent part of his boyhood in a Columbia house that is now a museum?

Woodrow Wilson's parents built the house around 1871, the only home they ever owned; it's now a museum of the Reconstruction Era rather than of Wilson himself.

Bomber crews training at Columbia's airfield in early 1942 volunteered for which famous mission?

The Doolittle Raid on Japan launched 16 B-25 bombers from an aircraft carrier in April 1942; it did little damage but gave Americans a huge morale boost.

Which Columbia-born civil rights leader directed the South Carolina Tuberculosis Association's work in Black communities from 1931?

Modjeska Monteith Simkins lost that job in 1942 as her NAACP activism grew, and she went on to aid Briggs v. Elliott, a school case that became part of Brown v. Board of Education.

Which TV host graduated from the University of South Carolina's journalism school in Columbia?

Leeza Gibbons, after her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, started a charity that supports people caring for family members with memory disorders.

Which Sex and the City star grew up in Columbia, where her father taught psychology at the University of South Carolina?

Kristin Davis first broke through as scheming Brooke on Melrose Place, a villain killed off after one season, before playing sweet Charlotte York.

Which 1930s dance craze began when University of South Carolina students copied steps from a Black Columbia nightclub?

The Big Apple swept the nation in 1937, but Columbia's dance-craze fame proved fleeting, and by the early 1940s the dance was a past fad.

Which museum occupies the former Columbia Mills building on Gervais Street?

The South Carolina State Museum moved in after the mill closed in 1981 and its owner donated the building to the state; it had been an early all-electric textile mill.

Which daily newspaper has served Columbia since 1891?

The State was founded in 1891 by the Gonzales brothers; in 1903 politician James H. Tillman fatally shot editor N. G. Gonzales, yet was acquitted of murder.

What is the historic quadrangle at the heart of the University of South Carolina's campus called?

The Horseshoe emptied when students left to fight in the Civil War, so the college closed in 1862 and its buildings served as a military hospital.

Which woman was put off a Columbia bus in 1954, seventeen months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat?

Sarah Mae Flemming sued the bus company, and an appeals court ruling from her lawsuit was later cited in the Montgomery bus case.

In August 1962, what did downtown Columbia stores do for the first time?

Served Black customers at lunch counters, after student sit-ins began in 1960; the Supreme Court later overturned the convictions of two students jailed at an Eckerd's counter.

Which painter took a teaching job in Columbia in 1915 and began making abstract drawings there?

Georgia O'Keeffe mailed some of those drawings to a former classmate, who took them to Alfred Stieglitz, and he showed them at his New York gallery, 291, in 1916.

The University of South Carolina's Gamecocks are named for which Revolutionary War general's fighting style?

Thomas Sumter fought so fiercely that the British officer Banastre Tarleton likened him to a gamecock, and Cornwallis called him his greatest plague.

South Carolina's football team takes the field at Williams-Brice Stadium to the theme from which film?

2001: A Space Odyssey supplies the fanfare, a Richard Strauss piece written in the 1890s. Sporting News called the Gamecocks' arrival the most exciting pregame entry in college football.

Which Heisman-winning quarterback played outfield for the Columbia Fireflies in 2017 and homered in his first at-bat?

Tim Tebow opened the 2017 season in Columbia, a decade after winning college football's top award at Florida. He hit three home runs there before the Mets promoted him in June.

Busted Plug, a towering downtown sculpture by Columbia artist Blue Sky, was billed as the world's largest what?

A fire hydrant on that scale stood downtown beside the bank whose wall carries Blue Sky's best-known mural. The sculpture was later taken down.

James Hoban, credited with designing Columbia's first South Carolina capitol, later drew up which famous residence?

The White House design won Hoban a competition in 1792, two years after lawmakers first met in his Columbia building. Old pictures of the two show a family resemblance.

Barbecue in South Carolina's Midlands around Columbia is most closely tied to a sauce built on which ingredient?

Mustard sauce is the style most strongly linked with South Carolina, and it may trace back to French and German immigrants of the 1700s. Other parts of the state lean on vinegar or tomato.

Behind Williams-Brice Stadium in Columbia, Gamecock football fans have tailgated since 1990 in a row of converted what?

Retired cabooses, 22 of them, sit fixed on an unused track, each fitted out as a private party suite with cable television. Fans call the row the Cockaboose Railroad.

Which Allied leader came to Columbia's Army post during World War II to watch American divisions show their readiness?

Winston Churchill came to judge whether American soldiers were ready for a planned landing in Europe. That operation, code-named Roundup, was later abandoned.

Which Parks and Recreation cast member was born in Columbia and grew up in Bennettsville, South Carolina?

Aziz Ansari was born in Columbia to Tamil parents who had emigrated from India. He went on to co-create Master of None and play its lead.

Which dance track sends Gamecock fans into a frenzy at Williams-Brice Stadium in Columbia?

Sandstorm caught on after it blared before two late defensive plays that sealed a 2009 upset of Ole Miss. It is now played before kickoff and after Gamecock touchdowns.

Which city lost its role as South Carolina's capital when lawmakers created Columbia in 1786?

Charleston had hosted the legislature since before the Revolution. Lawmakers held their first session in Columbia's new, still unfinished capitol in January 1790.

Which disease outbreak drove South Carolina's 1860 secession convention out of Columbia after a single day?

Smallpox in the city sent the delegates to the coast after one day's sitting, so the ordinance to leave the Union was signed there, not in the capital, three days later.

In which sport did the University of South Carolina win back-to-back national championships in 2010 and 2011?

Baseball delivered both titles at the College World Series under coach Ray Tanner. Between 2010 and 2012 the Gamecocks won a record 22 straight NCAA tournament games.

Which South Carolina running back won the 1980 Heisman Trophy before going first in the NFL draft?

George Rogers led the nation with 1,781 rushing yards that season. The New Orleans Saints then took him one pick ahead of Lawrence Taylor.

Which former Florida coach became South Carolina football's winningest coach during a stint that began in 2005?

Steve Spurrier passed Rex Enright's old mark with his 65th Gamecock win. That made him the wins leader at two schools in the same conference.

Which Gamecock defensive end, famed for a helmet-popping hit against Michigan, was the first pick of the 2014 NFL draft?

Jadeveon Clowney went to the Houston Texans with that pick. His hit in the 2013 Outback Bowl knocked loose a fumble that he recovered himself.

Which two colors have University of South Carolina teams worn since a banner was given to the 1895 football team?

Garnet and black came from a banner the Flinn family presented to the team, and they happen to be the dominant colors of a gamecock too.

Columbia-born director Stanley Donen co-directed which 1952 musical with its leading man, Gene Kelly?

Singin' in the Rain was the second of three films the pair directed together and became one of the most praised films ever made. Donen was born in Columbia in 1924, the son of a dress-shop manager.

Which Columbia-born golfer won the 2016 US Open and then the 2020 Masters with a record low score?

Dustin Johnson finished that Masters at 20 under par, the lowest total in the tournament's history. He played his college golf in-state at Coastal Carolina.

When finished in 1930, the dam that created Lake Murray near Columbia was the world's largest built of what?

Packed earth, mostly the local red clay, made it the largest earthen dam in the world, and the lake behind it was then the biggest man-made reservoir anywhere.

An island in Lake Murray near Columbia is one of the nation's largest gathering sites for which bird?

Purple martins crowd onto a small island out in the middle of the water. The lake is named for William S. Murray, the chief engineer of the project that created it.

Columbia artist Blue Sky's 1975 mural on a downtown bank wall fools the eye into seeing what?

A tunnel, painted at full size on a wall 50 feet by 75, is the illusion, and the work is called Tunnelvision. Blue Sky has said the idea came to him in a dream.

Riverbanks Zoo's last resident from its 1974 opening day in Columbia, which died in 2014, was what kind of animal?

A flamingo, a female Caribbean bird, outlasted every other animal from opening day and lived at the zoo for forty years.

Which Cold War relic at the State Fairgrounds in Columbia is the traditional meeting spot for fairgoers?

A Jupiter missile, known to everyone simply as the Rocket, has stood at the north entrance since 1969. The Air Force gave it to the city, and it is itself named Columbia.

How far did South Carolina's men's basketball team go in the 2017 NCAA tournament, its deepest run ever?

The Final Four trip came after the Gamecocks won the East Regional, something no earlier South Carolina men's team had managed, even in the Frank McGuire years of the 1970s.

Which senator's statue at the State House in Columbia had its inscription altered to add another child's name?

Strom Thurmond's statue first listed only the children of his marriage. The name of the daughter he had fathered with a Black maid was carved in later.

A gun salvaged from which sunken American battleship stands on the State House grounds in Columbia?

USS Maine blew up in Havana Harbor in 1898, and the gun was retrieved from the wreck in 1910. Columbia first set it up in a park near the canal before moving it in 1931.

The cast-iron palmetto tree on Columbia's State House grounds honors South Carolinians who fought in which conflict?

The Mexican–American War memorial salutes the Palmetto Regiment of volunteers. Ironworker Christopher Werner made it from cast iron and copper.

Which cavalry general and later governor is shown on horseback in a bronze statue at Columbia's State House?

Wade Hampton III got South Carolina's first major equestrian statue in 1906. It was moved in 1969 from a spot lined up with his grave at the nearby cathedral.

Since 2007, Columbia's Army post has housed the service's only school for training which kind of soldier?

Drill sergeants from across the Army have learned the job in Columbia since the service merged its schools there. In 2009 Teresa King became the first woman to run the school.

Which 1994 Danny DeVito comedy about a teacher of Army recruits filmed scenes at Columbia's Army post?

Renaissance Man was set at the fictional Fort McClane, with the real Columbia post standing in during the 1993 shoot.

South Carolina's Governor's Mansion in Columbia began as staff housing for what kind of institution?

A military academy called the Arsenal stood there until the city burned in 1865, and this was its only building to survive. It became the governor's residence in 1868.

An 1864 brick building in Columbia, later turned into a grocery store and condominiums, was built to print what?

Government bonds for the Southern war effort came off the presses of the Evans and Cogswell Company. In the 1900s the building served as a state liquor warehouse.

Union officers held in an open field at Columbia in 1864 nicknamed their prison camp after which ration?

Sorghum syrup and cornmeal were the staples of the prisoners' diet, so the place became Camp Sorghum. With no walls or fences around the five-acre field, escapes were common.

Who burned the first bridge over the Congaree River at Columbia as Union forces closed in during February 1865?

The city's defenders destroyed the wooden bridge as they pulled back, hoping to delay the advance. Remains of it can be seen just north of the present crossing.

The University of South Carolina's South Caroliniana building was America's first freestanding college what?

A library with a building all to itself was something new for an American college. Its architect, Robert Mills, also designed the Columbia mansion that now carries his name.

Longstreet Theatre at the University of South Carolina failed as an 1855 chapel and lecture hall because of what flaw?

Terrible acoustics made the hall useless for speeches, so it went on to serve as an Army arsenal, a gymnasium and a swimming pool before becoming a theatre in the round in the 1970s.

The Columbia Museum of Art moved in 1998 to a downtown site previously occupied by what?

Department stores, a Belk and a Macy's side by side, had been standing deserted on the site. The museum had spent almost 50 years before that in a converted family mansion.

Columbia's BullStreet District, home of Segra Park, was redeveloped from the grounds of what kind of institution?

A state mental hospital, founded in 1821 as one of the first public ones in the country, filled the 181-acre site. The project includes restoring its landmark Babcock Building.

The Nickelodeon, a nonprofit Columbia institution since 1979 known as the Nick, is what kind of venue?

An art-house cinema on Main Street, the Nick bills itself as the only nonprofit one in South Carolina and draws about 25,000 filmgoers a year.

On which day of the week does Soda City Market fill Columbia's Main Street with vendors and visitors?

Saturday has belonged to the market since 2005, and it has grown into one of downtown's main draws, bringing in thousands of visitors each week.

Which holiday brings an annual street festival to Columbia's Five Points, the district beside the university?

St. Patrick's Day belongs to Five Points, which was Columbia's first neighborhood shopping district. A bar there claimed the state's first legal mixed drink in 1973.

The Columbia Inferno, who played at the Carolina Coliseum in the 2000s, competed in which sport?

Ice hockey came to Columbia after a group of physicians nicknamed the Hockey Docs set out to buy a team. The Inferno suspended play in 2008 and never returned.

The call letters of Columbia's WIS stand for a three-word boast about South Carolina's abundance of which element?

Iodine in the state's soil inspired the phrase Wonderful Iodine State. WIS radio received the last new three-letter call sign issued in the United States, in 1930.

Which astronaut and Marine general from Columbia was the first African American to lead NASA on a permanent basis?

Charles Bolden finished high school in Columbia in 1964 and commanded shuttle missions before President Obama picked him for the job in 2009.

Which Columbia-born Gamecock scored more points than any other NBA player during the 1980s?

Alex English did it with the Denver Nuggets and was voted into the Hall of Fame in 1997. He grew up in Columbia and stayed home to play for South Carolina.

Which rapper, born Jay Jenkins in Columbia in 1977, broke through with the album Let's Get It: Thug Motivation 101?

Jeezy left Columbia for Atlanta as a toddler. That 2005 major-label debut went double platinum and reached number two on the Billboard 200.

Kary Mullis, who grew up in Columbia and attended Dreher High School, shared a 1993 Nobel Prize for inventing what?

PCR, the polymerase chain reaction, copies a tiny trace of DNA millions of times over. One newspaper said it split biology into the eras before and after it.

Which future NBC morning anchor was born in Columbia and first went on air at WIS as a high school student?

Craig Melvin was a teenage reporter for the station in the mid-1990s, then came back after college as a news photographer and producer before moving up to the network.

Which 1993 college football film with James Caan used Williams-Brice Stadium in Columbia as its home field?

The Program turned the University of South Carolina into the fictional ESU, with the stadium as home of the Timberwolves. Halle Berry and Omar Epps were also in the cast.