A campus tour

Cheryl's sister Joyce has been making campus tours with her daughter Niki and this weekend, with the region enjoying 70+ degree weather, they came to the University of South Carolina at Columbia. Cheryl met them at their hotel near the airport a little before noon, and we headed to the campus for the official student-led tour.  Since we were early, we walked around and acquainted ourselves with the beautiful and historic Horseshoe where the oldest buildings on the campus are, and found the Student Union which is an impressive and modern building half a block away. Here are Joyce and Niki waiting for the official tour to begin.

The tour started in the McKissick building at the tip of the horseshoe. The building, constructed by the WPA in 1937, originally housed the university library, not that we learned that on the tour. Although the tour was recommended in a regional guidebook of ours because the school,established in 1801, has a lot of history, our guide concentrated only on the academic strengths of USC and the positive aspects of life on campus for prospective students.

This building is now a museum, and the impressively large, mostly underground library nearby, was part of the tour.

The Longstreet Theater is where Niki would perform, if she chooses to attend USC with her business major/dance minor.

It was the only stop on the tour that our guide was prompted to give any historical information about, informing us it is rumored to be haunted because it was a morgue during the Civil War.  What Cheryl had recently read in Civil War history was that the school ceased to function when the students all went off to join the army, and the entire campus was turned into a Confederate hospital. The official USC history says that the theater housed both Confederate and Union hospitals, and an arsenal. It is named for the University's President of 1857-1861 - not the famed General who served in Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia.

On Monday, Niki will meet with school officials in both the business and dance departments and will take a dance class. She has three other schools she is considering, but we would be happy if she chooses USC. The campus is only three hours away so we would enjoy seeing her performances and perhaps she would come and stay with us for short holidays.  Norris planned to make the trip, but he has been under the weather, so he stayed home and watched football.