Columbia (city, South Carolina) is a city in central South Carolina, capital of the state, and also seat of Richland County, on the Congaree River. Columbia is a distribution, finance, insurance, as well as medical center; during the 1990s the city's industrial base shifted to high-tech industries. State and local government are primary employers, as is nearby Fort Jackson, a large infantry training base for the United States Army. Commercial air transportation is through Columbia Metropolitan Airport.
An important educational center, Columbia is the seat of the main campus of the University of South Carolina (1801), Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary (1830), Columbia College (1854), Benedict College (1870), Allen University (1870), Columbia Bible College and Seminary (1923), and a technical college. Near the city are Francis Marion and Thomas Sumter national forests.
Columbia has numerous historical sites, including the State House, constructed amongst 1851 and 1907; the boyhood home of President Woodrow Wilson, developed in 1872; a number of antebellum houses, several designed by Robert Mills, who was also responsible for the U.S. Treasury Building and the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C. Additional points of interest are the South Carolina State Museum, situated in a former textile mill; the Chapelle Administration Building (1922), designed by John Anderson Lankford, a noted black architect; and the Columbia Museum of Art. The Mann-Simons Cottage in Columbia was established around 1850 by freed slave Celia Mann, who later established one of the earliest post-Civil War black churches in South Carolina. The cottage had also been the home of black musician and teacher Bill Simons and at this time houses a museum of African American culture.
The area that is now Columbia was populated by the Congaree people until the 1700s. Situated in the center of the state, the site of Columbia has been chosen around 1786 by the South Carolina legislature for a new state capital. The central site was chosen in an attempt to reduce tensions between South Carolinians living along the seaboard and those in the interior; the previous capital had been found on the coast, at Charleston. The legislature named the new capital after Christopher Columbus, and it incorporated in 1854. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the city thrived with the cotton milling industry.
Within the American Civil War, Columbia was a Confederate stronghold until February 1865, when it was shelled and set ablaze by Union troops under General William Tecumseh Sherman. The fires were in part caused by evacuating Confederate soldiers, who set fire to cotton bales to keep them from the Union soldiers. During the Reconstruction right after the Civil War, the city was rebuilt, and it also grew among the state's primary industrial and farm-trade centers.
Columbia covers a land area of 303.0 sq km (117.0 sq mi), with a mean elevation of 58 m (190 ft). In accordance with the 1990 census, whites are 53.8 percent of the population, blacks 43.6 percent, Asians and Pacific Islanders 1.4 percent, and Native Americans 0.3 percent. The remainders are of mixed heritage or failed to report ethnicity. Hispanics, who may be of any race, are 2.1 percent of the people.
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