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Chapter II COLUMBIA
- University of South Carolina Press
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CHAPTER II Columbia C OLUMBIA IN 1892 WAS AN AWKWARD OVERGROWN VILLAGE, LIKE A country boy come to town all dressed up on a Saturday night. The red clay roads from the countryside flowed into it and became by definition streets, kept straight by the bordering sidewalks and lot lines, and only a little less muddy or dusty in their new setting. The residences along these streets were, except the newest, farm and plantation houses squeezed into spaces too small for them, and the State House in the central square was only an enlarged courthouse such as might be seen in any county seat. There were trees everywhere, in rows and out of rows; paling fences continuing as wrought iron or not at all; clipped lawns next door to plain weeds; hitching posts with and without carriage blocks; brick pavements suddenly becoming footpaths as muddy as the middle of the street. The business section never knew where it began or where it ended, and the slatternly shops betrayed their origin, the crossroads ~tore. Since that time cement and electricity have brought change, mill and factory have moved in, and Columbia has become a citY-Dr so an inhabitant will tell a listener-but in its essential nature it is still a village, like most other cities in the South, where the center of life has always been farm and plantation and the town eccentric. Herein, as in most other ways, the South is different from New England, which started with the town and in which the cities spill over into the country round 41 42 I Came Out of the Eighteenth Century about. Excepting a few old seaports, such as Charleston and New Orleans, there are no authentic cities in the South. Everywhere else the farm, although it is losing the battle, hangs nagging on the outskirts of the city, hinting that she is no better than she should be. The main entrance to the town was the depot, and here was something new, something that marked the town as different from the country and the country depots at Lynchburg and Darlington and Varnville: two doors to two waiting rooms and on these two doors arresting signs, 'White" and "Colored." Here in cold impersonal language was a statement of belief in the caste system, the barrier of pigmentation. The architecture was something new too, the like of which I was not to see again until I came upon the Harvard Memorial. We had descended from the dusty Cindery train into a crowd of bawling barking frightening hack drivers, one of whom seized us and hustled us into an ancient vehicle that had once been a gentleman's carriage and come down in the world. Later I was to learn that clean and shiny carriages were never let for hire; these were reserved for the well-born and for funerals. Negroes paid fifteen cents or more a week for life that they might have one or more carriages follow them to the grave. Death and the aristocracy were entitled to the best, perhaps because they are so much alike. We drove through the business section, a block or so of fly-specked shops and stores that reflected dry heat from their false fronts of tin pressed to look like stone, and tin cornices painted to look like something other than they were, such as had aroused disgust in Louis Sullivan a few years before and started a revolution in American architecture . But no one who lived in South Carolina had ever heard of him; he lived in the twentieth century, and besides he was a Yankee. Carpenter and tinsmith had supplanted architect and artist in the state, where the only reminder of earlier days was the column-every South Carolinian still thinks no house is complete without its columns, the bigger the better-and there were no models or memories of business [54.210.85.205] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:43 GMT) Columbia 43 places except the country store. On one side of the street a racket store, ancestor of the five-and-ten, faced a dry-goods store on the other, where an indigent female cousin was one day to take a job and thereby cause a scandal in the family. Dent's butcher shop, with unscreened door, welcomed customers and admitted flies. A little farther on a livery stable, with an entrance high and wide enough to let a coach pass, served as breeding place for the...