John C. Calhoun State Office Building
1015 Sumter Street
Constructed 1926
Designed by Harold Tatum and Milton Medary
Renovated 1953-1954 by Heyward B. Singley
Renovated 1983 by Stevens & Wilkinson
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John C. Calhoun State Office Building, 2019. Historic Columbia collection
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John C. Calhoun State Office Building, 2019. Historic Columbia collection
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John C. Calhoun State Office Building, 2019. Historic Columbia collection
The first building constructed for the exclusive use of state government adjacent to the State House, the John C. Calhoun State Office Building originally housed the highway department, courtrooms for the South Carolina Supreme Court, and offices for other agencies that had previously leased office space throughout the city at great expense to the state. The building’s limestone material and Renaissance Revival style compliment the state house completed two decades previously. In the early 1950s, it was renovated and named after John C. Calhoun, the nineteenth-century U.S. Congressman, Secretary of State, U.S. Vice President, and U.S. Senator from South Carolina. Calhoun arguably shaped the course of the South as the champion of nullification. His final speech, delivered weeks before his death, argued for the state’s constitutional right to secede in response to northern subjugation.