They spoiled a damn fine plantation to make a damn poor town.

— Thomas Taylor, on whose land Columbia was built

First planned capital in America and only the second planned city in the nation (after Savannah, Georgia), Columbia was born in compromise, bred in governance, and tempered by war. Shortly after the Revolution and statehood, South Carolina was in need of a state capital. However, generations of resentment by Upcountry farmers toward their much more wealthy agricultural counterparts in the Lowcountry meant that the capital would likely be nowhere near the slave-tended rice fiefdoms of Charleston and surrounding area.

Therefore, in the democratic spirit of the new nation, it was decided to locate the new capital as near as possible to the geographic center of the Palmetto State. In 1786, the compromise site was narrowed down to the area around the Congaree River. Because of its location on the Fall Line and its navigable waterways, there was already a thriving trading post there. But the site finally agreed upon would be on “The Plains,” the family plantation of Thomas Taylor (whose dissatisfaction with the final product is noted above).

The name of the new city would reflect the symbol of the new nation, a feminine figure who was the Uncle Sam of her day. “Columbia” won the vote in the state Senate, 11–7, beating out—you guessed it—“Washington.” The state legislature met in Columbia for the first time in 1790 in the still-unfinished first State House, now long gone. The following year George Washington came to town while on his national tour, describing Columbia as “an uncleared wood with very few houses in it.”

But by 1800 serious commerce had sprung up in politics’ wake, including riverboats from Charleston, slave labor, and the core of the city’s nascent textile industry. What would become the University of South Carolina was founded in 1801. In December 1860, Columbia’s First Baptist Church, still standing, hosted the state Secession Convention, which voted formally to remove South Carolina from the union.

During the Civil War, Columbia became something of a safe haven for refugees from all over the south. Its population swelled—women and children, mostly—and wealth was moved from more vulnerable areas in the Lowcountry, then under heavy Union pressure from sea and from land.

For reasons still unknown to history, though long debated, General William Sherman took a big left turn into South Carolina upon ending his March to the Sea at Savannah. Was Charleston, which fired the first shots of the war, spared the torch because of Sherman’s fond memories of when he was stationed there? Or, as is more likely, was it just too difficult to get his massive army through the marshes of the Lowcountry?

In any case, the wrath that could have been Charleston’s was visited on Columbia in February 1865. The circumstances are hazy to this day. We do know that Union shelling from across the Congaree came on February 16, and shortly thereafter Mayor Goodwyn surrendered the city to Sherman, meeting the general’s representatives at Fifth Street and River Drive.

What happened next is more murky. Sherman promptly set up his occupation headquarters at 1615 Gervais Street, promising that order would prevail. However, the very next night a third of the city went up in flames, with over 300 acres and nearly 1400 buildings destroyed. On Columbia’s key thoroughfare, Main Street, only the unfinished new State House and the French consul remained standing. Sherman would later essentially blame the townspeople themselves, saying the fire was caused by the combustion of carelessly-stacked cotton bales. But many eyewitness reports blame a series of fires set by vengeful (and drunk) Union troops.

War’s aftermath was particularly difficult in Columbia, with an ethically-challenged Reconstruction government wasting already-slim state funds and the Ku Klux Klan terrorizing local African Americans. A semblance of order was essentially forced on the city by the “Red Shirts” of Governor Wade Hampton III, former Confederate general elected to the governor’s office in 1876. His paramilitary organization moderated between extremist militia on both sides of the racial divide, and an uneasy truce came to Columbia.

Important though Columbia was, it wouldn’t have its first paved street until 1908. A construction boom soon followed, with banking in particular being a main economic engine. As with many areas of the South, the World War II era provided an enormous economic lift. The sprawling Fort Jackson opened on the city’s eastside in 1940. After the war’s beginning, General Jimmy Doolittle’s famous Tokyo raiders trained at what’s now Columbia International Airport, using an island in the middle of Lake Murray for bombing practice.

The Civil Rights era was relatively tame in Columbia, which saw its first lunch counter strike in August 1962. University of South Carolina admitted its first black students since Reconstruction in 1963, and around the same time most of the old Jim Crow laws began going by the wayside. Indeed, Columbia was so progressive compared to most of the South at the time that Newsweek magazine in 1965 wrote that the city had “liberated itself from the plague of doctrinal apartheid.”

Like Charleston and Savannah, a wave of grassroots activism in the 1960s conserved many older buildings from the wrecking ball and made possible the ensuing tourism and recreation boom of the 1970s and ’80s. In the 1990s the city renovated the once-seedy Congaree Vista warehouse area, now a thriving center of shopping, dining, and nightlife near the State House.