I was down in Columbia last weekend. I managed to forget my Ben Irving postcards, but I did check my database against whatever images I could find, and most of the sites included were torn down. This wasn’t the first time I had run into that issue, but it was pretty dispiriting. Downtown Columbia has a lot of great things going on, as both the state capital and a major college town. My favorite building (and beneficiary of benign neglect) is probably Tapp’s Arts Center at 1644 Main Street. According to the official history, it was built in 1940. Irving went to Columbia at least four times (1936, 1938, 1940, and 1941), so he saw the growth of that block as the department store went up.

Here are a couple of online resources I found about two of them: the Jefferson Hotel and the Hotel Wade Hampton. The namesake of the latter is indelible to antebellum South Carolina history, and I’m just learning about the Hampton family now. Their plantation Southeast of downtown Columbia, Millwood, was also featured on one of Irving’s postcards and remained a tourist attraction for over a century after Sherman’s raiders torched it in 1865. The columns depicted on the postcard and various easily-searchable photos from the 1940’s were all that survived of the estate (one of which toppled in 1930, leaving five standing). On the way out of town, I drove down to the site, which sits behind a private fence across from a Target Plaza on the outskirts of Columbia. As the sun was setting, I drove down Woodlawn Avenue slowly, trying to catch a glimpse of anything through the trees. No luck, unsurprisingly; the Millwood site was too far West of anywhere visible. It seemed like everything was still named after Wade Hampton, including the private road leading to the old site and the public park off of Woodlawn where a bunch of young African-Americans played basketball. The site owners still give tours monthly, though all that’s there to see are decapitated pillars slowly being reclaimed my nature. Meanwhile, up the road, Columbia’s downtown grows fast; the Old South vanishing as the New South booms. Though he may not have realized it at the time, Ben Irving’s Southern journeys afforded him a glimpse at a South, albeit paralyzed by Jim Crow laws, limping into modern America. Today, like many Southern cities, it’s at the forefront.

Thanks for reading! Here’s a photo of one of their giant Gamecock statues on Gervais Avenue. Some colleagues goaded me into climbing onto this thing during the 2016 SEDAAG meeting. I don’t want to talk about it.