 Hi my name is Rachel Walling and I'm a preservation planner for the City of Columbia. Today I'm going to talk a bit about the Wales Garden Architectural Conservation District, run through a brief history of the area as well as some fun facts. The area known today as Wales Garden was originally a plantation that after the Civil War and in the late 1800s was started to be divided up and sold. One of the folks who bought the land was the Student Development Company, which was a group of prominent well-to-do local businessmen. They bought 80 acres of the land to set aside for development of an exclusive neighborhood. In 1912 members of the CDC, the City Development Company, approached the Olmstead Brothers for help in planning the neighborhood. The Olmstead Brothers are of course the successors Frederick Law Olmstead who's responsible for Central Park as well as the Biltmore State Gardens in Asheville, North Carolina. The CDC did not actually end up going with the Olmstead plan but they did keep one feature that was recommended by Olmsteads and that was a wide avenue that kind of ran through the entire neighborhood, a broad avenue, a median, lots of street trees and that of course is Saluda Avenue which today runs from Blossom Street down to the southern border of the neighborhood which is Hayward Street. The CDC were also able to secure some early amenities from the neighborhood. One of these was railroad tracks for the trolley that ran up Saluda Avenue so having public transportation for their exclusive neighborhood early on. Part of the reason they were able to secure this was that one of the directors of the CDC, Edwin Wales Robertson, was also the president of the Columbia Electric Street Railway Light and Power Company so he was able to ensure that public transportation was part of Wales Garden early on. They were also able to secure other infrastructure such as Water Sewer as well as paved streets early in the development of their neighborhood. In 1915 the first lot was sold. I'm going to talk a bit about the early development of the neighborhood in a moment but development of the neighborhood did go on through the 1950s. Really the early 1950s is when most of the neighborhood was completed to see the neighborhood basically as it looks today. Skip forward to 2008, the neighborhood was locally designated as an architectural conservation district. So early development was partly influenced by covenants that were attached to the deeds to early lots. People who were buying lots when the neighborhood was first being developed were encouraged to purchase as many lots as they wished to create lot size that they desired. So this resulted in a wide variety of lot sizes throughout the neighborhood. You see some very large lots along Soluda and some more modest size lots around other streets such as Canary. Covenants were also attached to deeds early in the Wales Garden. These included prohibitions against apartments, stores, businesses being built in the neighborhood, as well as restrictions against one-story houses and houses costing less than $7,500. So you really see that in some of the older homes being built. These were large two-story houses because that was what was allowed to be built at the time. But you also see that with the development of the neighborhood those restrictions were relaxed or eventually completely eliminated fairly early on because in the 1920s late 1920s and 1930s you see apartment buildings being built. You also see smaller bungalows coming into the neighborhood. Another development at this time was Myrtle Court. This of course today is known as part of Wales Garden, definitely part of the Wales Garden neighborhood. But early when it was first being developed it was a distinct neighborhood on its own and as proposed it would include 13 bungalows as a strictly high-class residential development that was near but not part of Wales Garden. This was started in the early 1920s and one of the early houses that was built here in 1923 was described in the newspaper as the first thatched roof house in Colombia. Of course this was a faux thatched roof not a actual traditional thatched roof that you think of in England and this was made by folding under the edges of the roof to give it kind of that thatched roof look. This house was built in 1923 and that roof type has been maintained since that time so it's almost a hundred years that that house has had that type of roof. The Wales Garden District also has two landmark buildings. One of these is the Heslop House at 203 Saluda Avenue and the Lyles-Gudminton House at 1917 Seneca Avenue. These are both beautiful examples of two different styles. Heslop House being a Spanish Mission Revival style house and the Lyles-Gudminton House being a classical revival style house. That house was also a wedding gift for Evelyn Robertson Lyles who was the daughter of Edwin Wales Robertson who was one of the original directors of the CDC who built Wales Garden. So that's some fun facts about the Wales Garden Architectural Conservation District. If you have any questions about this or other historic districts within the City of Colombia please contact us at preservation at columbiasc.gov