Foundation Collections

Historic Columbia Foundation maintains a permanent museum collection of 5000+ artifacts representing the Federal (1790-1820), neoclassical (1820-1840), antebellum (1840-1860), Civil War (1861-1865), late Victorian (1860-1900), and Depression (1930s) periods. Included in this collection are artifacts associated with the Hampton, Preston, Mann, Simons, and Wilson families.

Columbia's four nineteenth-century historic house museums boast a strong collection of decorative and fine arts, as well as personal accoutrements.

Artifacts vary in composition, size, and contributing value to the interpretation of the various sites operated under the auspices of Historic Columbia Foundation. Currently, the collection includes furniture, decorative arts, fine art, textiles, manuscripts, photographs, and ephemera. Materials include wood, ceramics, glass, paper, cloth, precious metals, and animal products (fur, leather, feathers, ivory, bone). Holistically, these artifacts are the physical embodiment of decorative, social, economic, military, political, and religious trends experienced by these families and other Columbia and Richland County citizens. Individually, each artifact tells a specific story and is a model of preservation in practice.

This circa-1850 silk brocade men's vest (artifact number 2004.14.1) is the most recent addition to Historic Columbia Foundation's extensive textile collection. Sewn by Columbia tailor William W. Walker, this article of clothing grants us insight into the fashion trends of mid-nineteenth century Columbians.

Collections-Based Initiatives
In fulfilling its mission to nurture, support, and protect the city's and county's historical and cultural heritage through its museum collections Historic Columbia Foundation engages in three major activities: acquiring new artifacts; conserving existing artifacts; and conducting research to advance the scholarship of local history and material culture.

Recent Artifact Acquisitions
Recently, Historic Columbia Foundation has made several additions to its growing collection of decorative arts that feature local provenance. Perhaps the greatest acquisition was a circa-1815 dining room table believed to have been manufactured in Richland County and known to have been used by the Adams family of lower Richland County. Also noteworthy are two artifacts accessioned in 2004. The first, which formerly belonged to John Smith Preston who once lived at the Hampton-Preston Mansion, is a circa-1845 coin silver ladle from the shop of Charleston silversmiths H. Sidney Hayden and William Gregg. The second, which was found in a Richmond, Virginia vintage clothing shop, is a men's vest believed to date to the early to mid 1850s from the tailor shop of William W. Walker.

Research Initiatives
Over the past three years Historic Columbia Foundation has become a driving force in advancing the scholarship of local topics. Nowhere is this more evident than in the research of nineteenth-century material culture studies, particularly in relation to artisans who operated in Columbia and Richland District (County) from 1800 to 1860. In September 2002, Historic Columbia Foundation co-founded with faculty from the University of South Carolina's Public History Program a consortium of historians from area museums, libraries, and archives whose purpose is to advance the scholarship of material culture studies related to South Carolina's geographic fall line region, of which Columbia is a part.

Since then Historic Columbia Foundation has uncovered heretofore-unknown information about important cabinetmakers, painters, silversmiths, and related artisans. Some of the results of this group's work were showcased in October 2004 at the Seventh Biennial Gordon Conference, sponsored by the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Future plans involve a collaborative exhibition involving these and other finds and artifacts from both the holdings of participating consortium institutions and from private collections.