Columbia Closings   What's not in Columbia anymore

When I was growing up, going to get the Christmas tree was always a big event. We would all pile into the car and head for Trenholm Plaza and the Optimist Tree Lot.

The lot was set up yearly on the back side of the plaza (at the entrance which now has the traffic light) between the plaza proper and what I remember as then being woods, though I could be wrong about that. We would always get there after dark, and the place would be kind of a minature forest of Christmas trees standing in holes in the ground with white Christmas lights strung around the whole affair and there would always be a barrell with something burning inside around which the lot hands would warm themselves in between customers.

The trip would always play out as something of a contest between we kids, who wanted the biggest tree imaginable, and our parents who wanted a reasonably priced tree, and one, moreover, which would fit in or on the car for the trip back (we always had sedans or coupes growing up -- no station wagons). In the end, of course, our parents would get the tree they wanted while convincing us that it was the one we had picked out. The lot hands would always have plenty of twine on hand and would somehow get the tree secured for the 2 mile drive home. I believe we usually managed to get most of the tree in the trunk with the lid tied down rather than closed and several feet of tree hanging off the bumper -- I can't remember actually having the tree tied to the top of the car.

In the 80s, the lot beside Trenholm Plaza was developed, or further developed, and the space available to set up the tree lot was no longer sufficient. At that time, the Optimists moved the lot down Trenholm to its current location (pictured) by the Children's Home and the Methodist Church. In recent years, the garden center in the old First Citizen's Bank location in Forest Lake Shopping Center has added Christmas trees in season, so there is still a lot in the general area, but it's not the same.

Like Martin's Coffee House, Edisto Dairies first turned up in a comment thread, and seemed to have a number of people who fondly remember it, so I'm copying those comments here, and making a full-on Edisto post...

Grocery shopping has changed a lot in just my lifetime (I'm closing fast on 48..), but in the lifetime of someone like my father, it changed immensely. First of all, when he was growing up in the 1920s in Fernandina Beach Florida, how you went to the store was different. You probably walked most of the time. Sometimes you might take a horse cart. For one particular store, my grandfather would put a handcart on the local rails and you would see-saw there. You certainly didn't drive a car. When you got there, you would probably give your list to the grocer whose help would fetch your items to you. You certainly wouldn't go back into the stock yourself and pick things out. You might not even pay cash for anything, as the grocer would have an account for your family which you would periodically settle. And just to continue this digression in a seasonal mode -- if it were near Thanksgiving, you would go to the butcher, pick out a turkey, tie a string around its neck and walk it back to your house.

All that was if you actually went to the store. For a lot of things, you didn't have to. The ice-man would drive his cart to your house and replenish your ice-box, and the milk-man would come by in his wagon and leave full bottles on your doorstep and pick up your empties to clean and re-use.

Well, by and by the iceman cometh-ed not, but the milkman was a steady presence for over half of the 20th century, featuring in innumerable risque jokes and arriving at dawn or before day-in, day-out and year round. In Columbia, or at least my part of Richland County, the milkman was Edisto Dairies.

I've forgotten the milkman's name, though I knew it well at the time, but the Edisto truck would come off of Trenholm road and make its way onto my street and I knew that if I got up early enough, and ran down to the corner, the milkman would let me steer the truck from the corner to our house. The truck was something like a UPS truck, with the "doors" always open on both sides. The floor was corrugated metal with a very spartan seat for the driver. My mother would make sure I had on shoes before sending me off, as there were apt to be glass fragments on the floor of the truck. I would hop in from the "passenger's" side and take the wheel and the milkman would ease the truck into gear and off we would go.

Edisto's milk came in standard bottles. I think some dairies had long-neck ones, but Edisto's were short neck, and were sealed with flat, waxed paper caps. I'm unsure now what actually held the caps to the bottles -- perhaps they were put on while the milk was warm with pasturization and vacuum-sealed as it cooled. The caps were actually in some demand for school projects. I remember in particular at Satchel-Ford Elementary we had a "counting man" which was a flat wooden figure of a man who had no fingers. and we would somehow attach milk-bottle caps to his hands for various counting exercises.

I don't know much about Edisto the company. From the name, I assume it was a collection of farms along the Edisto river, but I could certainly be wrong. As a commenter notes, they advertised that their milk was "Golden Guernsey" milk, and aside from their milk-routes and, according to commenter Lew, a milk plant on Superior Drive, they also had several ice-cream stores in town. The one I recall was in Trenholm Plaza in the far corner, next to Trenholm road. The place has, I think, always been some kind of ice-cream store since then, and currently houses Hooligan's, a nice place to take kids for ice-cream and a sandwich. (Though that wing of the plaza is to be torn down soon). They also had several huge advertising displays in town. The one I remember most was on Beltline Boulevard, and was a huge animated stream of pouring milk flowing from a big carton into a big mug. (I suppose the milk stream was some sort of painted revolving spiral..

The government at both state and federal levels has always intervened in the dairy market. I think it was primarily the state governments until the New Deal -- as a child, one of my father's family tasks was to take the coloring agent that came with each purchase of margarine, break the capsule, and spread it on all the sticks of margarine to make them yellow since so as to protect dairy interests it was illegal to sell yellow margarine in Florida. After that, there was a web of regional price support rules, and it was illegal to sell milk more cheaply than the agreed local price. I think that started to change in the 60s and 70s, and the milk market became more national. I don't know if that had an effect on Edisto, but I suspect it may have. At any rate sometime in that timeframe, they were bought out by Coburg dairies.

The rise of supermarkets had already been reshaping the grocery market for decades, and with their ample refrigeration cases and centralized locations, at some point it no longer made sense for dairies to deliver to indivudal homes, or for families to want them to. I may be wrong, but I don't think Edisto/Coburg home delivery lasted much if at all past the turn of the 70s (actually potato chip delivery lasted a lot longer!), and today milk is a complete commodity, like sugar. You buy "whole", "2 percent", "skim", or "nonfat" and never notice whose name is on the top of the carton and if the cows are anything beyond "cow" (ie: Jersey, Guernsey etc), they keep it to themselves. Not to mention that the whole insurance industry would descend like a horde of locusts on any company letting an 8 year old "steer" one of their trucks.

UPDATE 11 October 2011: Added a photo above of an old Edisto sign currently on display at the new Mast General Store on Main Street.

I'm happy to report that Bobby's Barber Shop has successfully moved from Trenholm Plaza (in the Hooligan's/UPS wing, which is to be torn down) to Richland Mall, near the second floor entrance to Belks (on the Barnes & Noble side of the mall). Haircuts are still the same price!

I believe that over the years, I was only in Corma's once, to get some barley malt syrup for a bagel recipie. They had it, and I was saved a trip over to the Rosewood Market. What with the ongoing renovations to Trenholm Plaza, if you want that syrup, or some Flower Essences, you need to head towards the Fort a block or so and check them out in their new location, the site of the old Wally & Crumb cookie store next to Ed Robinson Laundry and Cleaners.

Well, it appears the ongoing renovations on Trenholm Plaza have claimed another casualty. I noticed on the second of September that Heavenly Ham has gone ahead and closed shop in advance of the demolition of that wing of the shopping center. Apparently they are not relocating, but are just referring customers to the HoneyBaked Ham store on Two Notch. (HoneyBaked bought Heavenly in 2002).

If you look closely at the picture with all the network cables, there is a "Best Of" award from The State in the category Ham Store underneath it all. I don't doubt that it was deserved, but I confess I find the category "Ham Store" a bit contrived. How many entrants could there have been? There's not even a Yellow Pages category for "Ham". Again, that's not a criticism of the store, which as far as I know really did have good ham.

UPDATE 18 Feb 2010 -- The site (extensively remodeled) is now a Chipolte:

Another casualty of the Trenholm Plaza renovations. (Have you noticed all the new palm trees going in?)

I've always been an Electrolux guy myself, except that I figured out a few years ago that I just don't have the cleaning gene at all, got maid-service and never looked back..

UPDATE 30 Jan 2009: This is their new location a few blocks down Forest Drive in the Forest Park plaza with the Piggly Wiggly.

UPDATE 14 May 2012 -- The store has now changed its name to All Vacuums:

Does the phone number 252-6341 mean anything to you?

If you were here when the whole state's area code was 803, it probably does. Certainly there were many times I dialed it to set my wind-up watch to the dulcet tones of Standard Federal Savings & Loan's time of day service. That was a time when you couldn't turn to CNN and get the time off the bottom-scroll, or get it to within a second over the Internet. Around here, it was pretty much wait for the NBC news-tone at the top of the hour on WIS or call Standard.

I don't know much about the early history of Standard. Apparently it was founded in the aftermath of the Panic of 1907 and weathered WW-I, The Great Depression, WW-II and the 70s. Up through the 50s and probably into the early 60s, it was known as Standard Building & Loan. You can see from my first passbook here that in October of 1962, they had just put a paste-on label reading Standard Savings and Loan Association over whatever had been printed there before. My guess is that they had just switched from Building & Loan given that the inside of the passbook and the coin-banks their kid members got still bore the B&L verbiage:

The passbook cover notes the association's two locations, Washington Street & Trenholm Plaza. The Trenholm location had to be pretty new at the time, given that the area was a golf course into the mid 50s, at least.

In that era, the way savings & loans worked was that you would bring your passbook with you to the bank (OK, technically it wasn't a bank..) whenever you made a transaction, and your passbook would be run into a printing machine (similar to the way checks are still sometimes handled at supermarkets) which would print the day's transactions on seperate lines. (I'm not sure how long it had been since the teller's actually wrote in the passbook, but there still seemed to be a lot of hand-inking involved.) If you didn't have any actual transaction, the bank could still compute your interest (dividends) and enter that for you.

On 12 October 1962, I had $396.36 in my passbook -- very likely the first money I had ever had in my own name, though as I was probably more concerned with learning to walk, I doubt I really thought on it much. I did enjoy later visits as the Trenholm branch had a magical coin machine into which the teller would dump all your coins and it would sort them out and give you a total after much pinging and whirring.

By the time 1973 rolled around and I got my second passbook, you could see that the intervening decade had been good to Standard:

With five locations in Columbia and new branches in Newberry, Orangeburg, Sumter, Mount Pleasant, Charleston and Myrtle Beach, they were obviously an institution on the move.

This was even reflected in the passbook itself, which had moved from being strictly utilitarian to a design with some panache, embossing and even gold-leaf for the text.

You could see the effects of inflation too in that the FSLIC guarantee had been raised from $10,000 per account to $20,000:

At some point in the 1980s, Standard started offering checking accounts as well as passbook accounts, and that's were I got my first checks. They were also fairly early into the ATM market, and though they never had many, the Trenholm location was convienient while I was living in town. (It was a walk-up, and I can distinctly remember thinking, I hope I'm never so lazy that I need to use the ATM without getting out of my car).

In 1985, I took my first real job and moved to Fayetteville NC. I kept my Standard accounts, but as there were no branches up there, mostly dealt with the (now defunct or subsumed) Southern National Bank. While I was living out of town, the S&L crisis of the 80s struck.

I know it's a complex issue, but I think it can be boiled down to the following: Gradually the state and federal governments took the position that George Bailey could go head to head with Mr. Potter -- and kindly, befuddled Uncle Billy was in charge of the new direction.

Standard was far from the only solid-seeming institution to dig its own grave at the time, but it was still a shock to me. I'm sure the taxpayers, en-masse, took it in the shorts as usual, but the government handled it pretty well from a member perspective. There was no panic, just an orderly takeover of the bank. It went so smoothly in fact, that my father decided he wasn't going to move his money and would just keep it in whatever institution ended up with the assets. At this remove, I can't remember what bank that was. It may have been NBSC. They certainly have the location at Trenholm Plaza which used to be occupied by the Standard Branch (which was a much smaller building, and was torn down when the current NBSC was built).

The downtown building is still there (it was obviously remodeled or replaced after 1908 if that was the original location), with its distinctive landmark clock beside it. My memory is that when Standard was at its peak, the building had one wall which was a waterfall -- that now seems to be gone. I have no idea what happened to the other branches either in or out of town.

The 2 August 1991 date for the closing comes from an online lawsuit which references the RTC takeover.

And that little coin-bank? It still has some change in it.

The Time At The Tone Will Be: Too Late

UPDATE 23 March 2010 -- Here are two pictures of the old Trenholm Plaza branch. They were taken inside another Trenholm Plaza store where Standard just happened to be in the background through the window, so the quality is not high:

UPDATE 21 June 2011 -- Here is an older picture of the Trenholm Plaza branch from a Chamber of Commerce promotional book:

The Holey Dough Cafe started out as Manhatten Bagel and had been a fixture in Trenholm Plaza for probably around 20 years. In our family, whenever we faced an early-morning out-of-town trip, the saying was This is a bagel situation, and we would fuel up with bagels and coffee (or soft drinks) on the way to the Interstate. I used to go in there frequently on early Saturday afternoons as well, and there were always the same two customers there, very elderly men whom the staff took care to see got in and out of the store OK.

In 2006, the store dropped it's Manhatten Bagel affiliation. I'm not sure why. Perhaps given how well established the place was, the national name cost too much without providing enough extra value. At any rate, they changed the name to "Holey Dough Cafe" and redid all the signage (including that on the bagel van) and menus. I couldn't tell any difference in the bagels; they still seemed quite good to me.

In recent months, I had become aware that the store was opening a new branch downtown somewhere. I'm still not sure of the exact location, but I would see sidewalk signs near Gervais & Main. I presume, and hope, the new store continues after the main store's closure.

I suspect the proximate cause of the Trenholm store's closing is the ongoing renovation of the Plaza, which will involve tearing down that whole wing of stores. (The Oreck store is primed to move to the Piggly Wiggly plaza). As to why not just move it a bit up or down Forest Drive, I think the recent opening of Bruegger's Bagels across from The Happy Bookseller has changed the local bagel market. An established store could tough it out, but a new location would have to fight for mindshare with Brueggers.

Roadtrips won't be the same.

UPDATE 2 November 2009: When Holey Dough moved from Trenholm Plaza, it set up shop at 1200 Main Street suite 102. I'm not sure how long it was there, but it was certainly less than a year. Jumpin' Jacks Giant Jersey Subs now occupies the spot.

UPDATE 11 Jan 2010: Added "Manhatten Bagel" and full Forest Drive Street address to post title.

There's a classic cartoon panel from the 70s. The setting is a doctors office. A female patient is sitting on the table and the (male, which rather dates the cartoon) doctor tells her:

I'm sorry Ms Johnson, but we're all out of birth control pills, please wear these Birkenstocks instead.

Whether the shoes got better looking, or men just don't look down that far, the brand is still around.

It's not around Trenholm Plaza anymore though. I don't know if the ongoing renovations cut traffic, or if they had decided to decamp before that, but I noticed when I went to Starbucks the other day that the Birkenstock store was gone.

I wonder what the deal with the palm tree in back was?

When I first saw Coldstone closed last week, I wasn't going to make a post on it because it seemed clearly temporary, but I was puzzled when the down-time stretched into this week. What kind of high-tech equipment does an ice-cream store have that can't be fixed by a commercial refrigeration repairman in a few hours?

I hope it is temporary, but this is similar to the way the Bruster's closing started. Coldstone is pretty good too, though they make it very embarassing for both the customer and the staff to tip there.

Update 10 June 08:

Well, it's pretty much as I feared. The "equipment problem" signs were disingenuous as closing signs often are. Based on what I see inside the store now, it's gone.

This is the second upscale creamery that Forest Acres has lost recently. Luckily there's still old reliable Baskin Robbins up the street and Zesto's chocolate dipped soft cones (umm!) across from Richland Mall..

UPDATE 21 April 2010: Added full street address to post title.