Guided Step-on Bus Or Trolley Tours Of Columbia

The guided step-on bus or trolley tours will offer your group insight into the central section of the city. Visitors must provide own transportation or arrange to secure bus/trolley rentals. Historic Columbia only provides tour guides. The tours are available for groups with prior arrangement with the coordinator of visitor and volunteer services at (803) 252-1770 ext. 24 or aposner@historiccolumbia.org. Prices vary according to the itinerary. Step-offs at the various sites may be arranged.

Bus/Trolley Tours

• The Historic Heart of Columbia Tour
  See the important downtown sites in the central core of Columbia. The tour offers informative and entertaining stories about the Palmetto State’s capital. A few of the landmarks on the tour are the Robert Mills Historic District, the State House, the Governor’s Mansion, the University of South Carolina’s Horseshoe (the original campus), historic churches, Historic Columbia house museums and the Vista, an area of restored train stations and warehouses. The tour length is approximately 60 minutes.
• Homeplaces, Workplaces, Resting Places: An African-American Heritage Sites Tour
  From the Mann-Simons Cottage, home of Celia Mann, a free black mid-wife in antebellum Columbia, to the North Carolina Mutual Building, offices of the largest African-American owned life insurance company in the United States, this tour explores houses, businesses, cemeteries, and other sites important to the African-American community. Largely comprised of sites listed on the National Register of Historic Places, this tour features locations that illustrate important events and little-known facts about Columbia’s African-American community. The tour length is approximately 90 minutes.
• Columbia’s Civil War-From Homefront to Battleground Tour
  Columbia’s antebellum and Reconstruction era structures, including churches, hospitals, armories, governmental buildings and private homes offer testimony to this tumultuous chapter in our nation’s history. Learn about Columbia during the early years of the war and about the fateful night of February 17, 1865 when thirty percent of the city’s structures were lost to fire. Step-off at the State House and count the iron stars marking where Union cannonballs hit the building. The tour length is approximately 75 minutes.