Not all history is stuff you fall asleep to in fourth-period world geography class. Some of it can keep you up at night.

For this Halloween-y history, we collaborated with Historic Columbia and are looking at Columbia’s hair-raising history. From funeral portraits to Victorian hair wreaths, there’s plenty to uncover.

Hope y’all brought your flashlights.

Carpenters wore many hats in the late 1800s. | Clipping via The Daily Phoenix and Newspapers.com

Undertaking in the 1800s

So, it’s 1861, and you’re dead. Killed by the common cold and your doctor’s leech treatment. What now? Your family rolls you down to 1440 Main St. (then Richardson Street) on the neighbor’s cart, where Milo Berry’s Furniture and Undertaking business was in full swing.

Image courtesy South Carolina State Museum

Milo was a cabinet maker. And like most cabinet makers in the 19th and early 20th centuries, he also knows his way around a coffin.

Milo had some competition – here’s an ad from the 1897-98 Columbia city directory.

Now your family has a choice of coffin: $5 gets them a pine box, $25 gets mahogany, and walnut with a rosewood finish is even pricier. But if they have the money to burn, they might go for the top-of-the-line coffins: the Fisk metallic burial case.

This metal monster comes with a glass plate or a metal door on the top, so folks can check in on you and make sure you’re still there.

What’s next?

If you want a pastoral eternal setting and still have money left over after buying a coffin, you’ll probably be taken to Elmwood Cemetery. Fun fact — There are 25,000+ people buried at Elmwood on fewer than 125 acres.

The earliest graves at Elmwood are in the original Potter's Field, where graves were either unmarked or marked with wooden markers.

Examples of real epitaphs and inscriptions on gravestones:

“A gifted woman with a heart of gold” — Malvina Sarah Black

“All our hopes lie buried here” — the Harris family’s last remaining son

“Here lies a bundle of mistakes” — Clarence Sanders

But it wasn’t just merchants, politicians + old haberdashers who were dying in Columbia back in the day. Prisoners + patients died, too.

Death at the Prison

Columbia was home to the State Penitentiary from 1867 to the early 1990s – later known as Central Correctional Institution. By 1871, it had a sprawling campus with cell block buildings, a machine shop, a shoe shop, a carpenter, a blacksmith, a weaving shop, a tailor’s shop, and a cemetery.

Today, the site is home to the 700-unit apartment Canalside community and Bierkeller near the river walk.
Between the intake of its first prisoner in 1867 and the end of 1882, there were 248 deaths reported at the prison.

So, where did they bury the bodies? A knob of land designated as a graveyard north of the pen. 279 burials had been ID’d in the Penitentiary Cemetery. However, archaeologists believe there are at least 79 additional graves in the cemetery whose locations have been permanently lost to history. Together, they account for 358 individuals.

The State Hospital

The State Hospital has a long, complex history and used six different burying grounds and cemeteries from 1832-1838 — including external plots like Trinity Episcopal Church at the corner of Sumter + Gervais Streets.

The hospital's location is now home to the Bull Street District, an urban playground with the Fireflies baseball stadium and a mix of residential, retail, and restaurants.

In the late 19th century, the hospital bought a plot of land at Elmwood Cemetery. But by 1909, all the plots had been filled. So, undertakers began digging new spaces between graves. And when those filled up, they just reopened old plots and placed new bodies on top of old ones.

–Lois from Historic Columbia + Beth

Originally published in 2017, this article was updated in October 2023 with additional details and formatting.