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Please note The Museum of the Reconstruction Era will be closed for house tours Wednesday, Feb. 1 - Friday, Feb. 3 due to garden renovations.

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Strom Thurmond Monument

Current location
Installed December 4, 1999
Designed by William Behrends 
Amended 2005
Funded with private donations

  • Strom Thurmond Monument, 2019. Historic Columbia collection

    Strom Thurmond Monument, 2019. Historic Columbia collection

  • Strom Thurmond Monument, 2019. Historic Columbia collection

    Strom Thurmond Monument, 2019. Historic Columbia collection

  • Strom Thurmond Monument, 2019. Historic Columbia collection

    Strom Thurmond Monument, 2019. Historic Columbia collection

  • Strom Thurmond Monument, 2019. Historic Columbia collection

    Strom Thurmond Monument, 2019. Historic Columbia collection

  • Strom Thurmond Monument, 2019. Historic Columbia collection

    Strom Thurmond Monument, 2019. Historic Columbia collection

The statue of the longest-serving U.S. senator in American history and former South Carolina Governor James “Strom” Thurmond was built and dedicated by the state while he was still alive, making it the second monument to a living person on the State House grounds (the first was for James F. Byrnes). The Strom Thurmond Monument Commission, chaired by S.C. Senator John Courson, privately raised $850,000, largely from corporate donors. The larger-than-life nine-foot bronze figure depicts one of South Carolina’s staunchest segregationists striding confidently from the State House atop an eight-foot base. The monument was amended in 2005 to add the name of Essie Mae Washington-Williams, a child Thurmond fathered with his family’s young black maid in 1925, and to change the number of Thurmond’s children from “four” to “five.” 


 

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Historic Columbia

© 2023 Historic Columbia

Administrative Offices
1601 Richland Street
Columbia, SC 29201

Tours
All historic house and garden tours start at the Gift Shop at Robert Mills.
1616 Blanding Street
Columbia, SC 29201

Questions? Call (803) 252-7742.

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