Olympia Armory
A New Deal work crew built this barrel-vaulted brick gymnasium for the children of a Columbia cotton-mill village — its stepped parapets and Art Deco lines a small, sturdy piece of federal design reaching into a company town.
At a glance
The Works Progress Administration built the Olympia Armory in 1936-1937 as a gymnasium for the school serving Olympia, one of the historic cotton-mill villages that grew up around Columbia, South Carolina’s textile mills. The one-story brick building displays Art Deco and Moderne design influences: a rectangular plan, a barrel-vaulted roof, and stepped, parapeted end walls that give an otherwise modest gym a sense of civic weight. It now serves as headquarters for the South Carolina State Guard.
Key facts
- Built: 1936-1937
- Builder: Works Progress Administration (WPA)
- Style: Art Deco and Moderne influences
- Original use: School gymnasium for the Olympia mill village
- Address: 511 Granby Lane, Olympia, South Carolina (Richland County)
- Heritage: NRHP #94001571 (1995)
- Current use: South Carolina State Guard headquarters
History
Olympia grew up as a mill village around the Olympia Cotton Mill on the outskirts of Columbia, one of dozens of company towns that South Carolina’s textile industry built to house its workforce in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the 1930s, the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration was funding public building projects nationwide, and a school gymnasium for the Olympia mill village was among the projects it built between 1936 and 1937.
The building outlasted its original purpose. As the mill village school system changed, the gymnasium found a second life, and it now houses the headquarters of the South Carolina State Guard, the state’s volunteer military reserve force. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1995 as a well-preserved example of WPA-era civic construction in the Art Deco idiom.
What you see
The armory reads as a compact exercise in Depression-era civic Deco: a plain rectangular brick volume given monumentality through a barrel-vaulted roofline and stepped parapets at each end, the kind of geometric massing that let WPA architects dress up modest public buildings on tight budgets. Less than an acre in size, the building relies on its silhouette rather than surface ornament to make its architectural case.
Practical information
- Status: Active South Carolina State Guard headquarters — exterior viewing only
- Best view: From Granby Lane, taking in the barrel-vaulted roofline and parapeted end walls
- Photography: Exterior freely photographable from the public street
Getting there
The Olympia Armory stands on Granby Lane in the Olympia neighborhood on Columbia’s south side, a few minutes’ drive from downtown Columbia. Columbia Metropolitan Airport is about 8 miles southwest.
Nearby
- Downtown Columbia, South Carolina — a short drive north
- University of South Carolina campus — a few miles northeast
- Other historic Columbia mill villages (Granby, Whaley) — nearby on the city’s south side
Sources
- Wikipedia: Olympia Armory
- National Register of Historic Places, NRHP #94001571
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