Midlands Students Tour Columbia and Meet the President
Thursday afternoon after school, a group of 5th graders from Claude A. Taylor Elementary endured the rainy weather for a chance to travel back in time for a historical tour of Columbia. Teacher Don Simmons, a Midlands participant in the South Carolina Teaching American History Project, organized the event in which he took his students through the old town site of Granby and downtown Columbia. This tour was more than just a field trip for these 5th graders. They had been studying Columbia's history during Reconstruction, by analyzing old maps and aerial photographs of the town and comparing them with Columbia's current appearance. Thursday, they got to travel back in time to some of the places they had studied.
Dressed in period clothing, the students made their last stop at the Woodrow Wilson Boyhood Home, located at 1705 Hampton Street in Columbia. Outside the house, the students happened to meet a young man named Tommy Wilson. The students were familiar with Tommy, as they had seen his name on census records from the period and had seen a copy of his diary as a boy. The students knew that Tommy was the son of a Presbyterian minister and that his family had moved to Columbia during the 1870s. As Tommy told them about his experiences growing up during the Civil War, his love of baseball and drawing ships, and the many pranks he pulled as a youngster in school, the students immediately made connections with what they had studied earlier in class. One boy exclaimed,"Oh yeah, I saw some of your drawings of ships!" Tommy then thanked the students for their visit and let them continue into the house.
Once inside, the students got to see some of the furnishings of the house as it might have looked when Tommy was living there as a boy. As the students made their way to the second floor, they met Tommy as a grown man. Tommy was no longer an ordinary boy living in Columbia. He was now President Woodrow Wilson. The students were delighted and surprised to meet President Wilson, who told them that he was not known as Tommy anymore. President Wilson told the students about the events in his life since living in Columbia as a boy. He even pointed to an 1872 bird's-eye map of Columbia that revealed his boyhood home located on Hampton Street. He told them how he eventually went to Princeton and became president of the school there, before entering into politics as Governor of New Jersey in 1910. The students knew that Wilson would serve as president of the United States between 1913 and 1921.
President Wilson then showed the students a copy of his Fourteen Points, which he presented to Congress in 1918. Wilson's Fourteen Points were the precursor to organizations like The League of Nations and The United Nations. At the end of their visit, President Wilson shook the hands of each of the students and asked them to come back sometime soon. Excited from their experience, the students hopped back in their time machine and went home. More information about the Woodrow Wilson Boyhood Home can be found at http://www.historiccolumbia.org/history/wilson.html.