Columbia, SC news and local guide

After the Revolution, South Carolina leaders wanted a capital more central than Charleston. State Senator John Lewis Gervais of Ninety Six introduced the bill, and on March 22, 1786, the General Assembly approved a new capital at Taylor's Hill on the Congaree. The surveyor John Guignard laid out Columbia as one of the first planned cities in the United States, five years before L'Enfant's plan for Washington, as a two-mile-square grid of 400 blocks with unusually wide streets. Assembly and Senate streets were 150 feet wide and the others 100 feet, and the blocks were divided into half-acre lots for sale. After his March to the Sea, General William T. Sherman's army captured Columbia on February 17, 1865, and much of the city burned on February 17 and 18. The claim that Sherman deliberately ordered the burning became part of the Lost Cause narrative, but modern historians have concluded that the fire had no single cause. Sources Wikipedia: Columbia, South Carolina