Guided driving tours offer an insight into the historically significant areas in Columbia and Richland County. You can experience our bus tours two ways:
Bus Tours
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Weekend Rolls
You can attend our Weekend Roll bus tours offered throughout the year. Each month we visit a different neighborhood by bus or by foot.
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Group Tour
You can take a private guided bus tour. Groups must provide their own transportation. Step-offs at various sites may be arranged.
Available Bus Tours
Historic Heart of Columbia
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.
Allow approximately 60 minutes for this tour.
African American Sites
From the Mann-Simons Site, home of Celia Mann, a free-black midwife 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 in the National Register of Historic Places, this tour features locations that illustrate important events and little-known facts about Columbia's African-American community.
Allow approximately 90 minutes for this tour.
Columbia's Civil War
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.