Lost Legacies: Historic Columbia’s Exceptional House Museums

By Cathy H. Burroughs
Fashion & Culture Writer/Blogger

…If you do decide to venture out of Columbia’s uber welcoming Lantern Hotel, look no further than Historic Columbia’s exceptional series of walking, bus, house and garden tours to discover its significant past. Provoking fresh points of view, the tours present such topics as African American Heritage sites, Downtown Columbia bus tour, the districts of Main and Bull Streets, Journey to Freedom tour, various impressive house museums and others.

These beautifully constructed tours cover the early 19th through mid-20th centuries (we visited the Hampton-Preston Mansion & Gardens; the Robert Mills House & Gardens, the Woodrow Wilson Family Home and Museum of the Reconstruction and the African-American owned more modest Mann-Simons Site). These elaborately embellished and conceived
house museums breathe life and empathy into their whispered, undisclosed and lost legacies.

Here you’ll find Columbia’s previous residents in their bedecked and authentic habitats of the post Civil War Reconstruction Era. The houses are animated with videos and illuminating exhibits.

One groundbreaking sample is their Gold Award- winning “Heat & Hardship.” This dramatic storytelling display found in the Robert Mills House basement warming kitchen enlivens all of our senses. The Southeastern Museum Conference jury lauded this innovative exhibit for “stretching the limits of design and content,” creating a transformative interpretive experience while connecting us impactfully to complex histories and radically different world views.

The range of insightful tours awaken us to the often brutal realities of Jim Crowe Columbia, SC, and for the South of this period. The complex and conflicting vantage points are presented artfully from the very wealthy planters to the enslaved peoples to the average middle and lower class African American entrepreneurs in their actual abodes.

You’ll palpably experience what an average day might have been like from the stresses associated from an enslaved cook simply preparing a meal from memorized recipes to being forcefully, and sometimes permanently, separated from family members; to larger collective sociological and cultural values and views that may have overshadowed, eclipsed or marginalized others’ subjective histories.

Over two afternoons we visited the fastidiously furnished homes and verdantly manicured gardens of the Hampton-Preston Mansion & Gardens and the Robert Mills House to the plain and unadorned, keepsake-filled cottage and outdoor ghost structures of African American activists Mann and Simons. That last family resided there for nearly 130 years. The timeline depicted in this smaller home of family descendants follows the unfoldment of the Black Southern account from disenfranchisement to urban revitalization.

These authentically decorated house museums reveal the lives of the city’s various influential inhabitants from every cultural echelon. Our exquisite guided tour was led by the the eloquent, remarkably knowledgeable, intellectually lively Heather Bacon-Rogers Historic Columbia’s Visitor Experience Manager. She kept us mesmerized throughout. Kudos go to both Ms. Bacon-Rogers and all of Historic Columbia.

The Lantern Hotel
Ladder 13 Restaurant & Bar
1001 Senate Street
Columbia, SC 29201
839-262-6400
info@lanterncolumbia.com

Led by Purpose
Lit by Kindness

Huge thanks go to Charlene D. Slaughter, APR, Director of Communications at Experience Columbia SC and heartfelt appreciation to all at Historic Columbia. Kudos go the outstanding hospitality, historic and humanistic Lantern Hotel Columbia SC team to include Meg Syms, Marketing Director & Preservation Consultant; Raines (developer); Kim Moons Interior Designer (Garvins Architecture Group); Resort Interiors (guest rooms and private spaces); Roger Lewis (historic tax credits), Mashburn Construction (general contractor), Ciara Laney (social media), CJ Arlotta (public relations), and others.

Cathy H. Burroughs is a noted travel writer and blogger. Some of her specialties include historic hotels, Southern cities and small towns, vintage Florida, the US West Coast, all over Europe, www.homeexchange.com and more. She has published widely including The New York Times international supplement and others.