Discovering the story behind a 50-year-old mistake

Like all great quests, this one starts with a story from my childhood. I was probably only 12 years old when my dad told me a story about how a postcard company had mistakenly claimed that the Capstone building on the campus of the University of South Carolina was named after a Confederate general. The postcards were sold around South Carolina, but then pulled some time later after the mistake was discovered.

I was fascinated by how this could happen. Was it a mistake? Some placeholder text left by accident? A prank? My dad didn’t know and guessed it was some kind of joke that accidentally got left in. How long was the postcard for sale? Did people notice the mistake right away? And did people really believe that Capstone was anything but a descriptive name?

As a kid, I collected baseball cards. And one of the things I always loved was the rare “error” card. Baseball card companies would make mistakes, then reissue corrected cards. (See: Billy Ripkin’s 1989 Fleer card.) The error cards would be worth more because they were less common and the Capstone postcard seemed like an error card to me. I set out to find a copy of the infamous postcard.

After I went to college in Columbia, whenever I happened to stop in an antique store or a used book store, I’d look for the postcard. I’d randomly search eBay or Google to see if I could find the postcard. I found plenty of vintage Capstone postcards, all with the same image, but none included a claim that the building was named after a Confederate general. I knew the story was true. When I started to work at the university, there were people around who had heard the same story that my dad had told me. But there were very few details, and no evidence. The search continued off and on for over 20 years, with no luck.

Let’s take a detour and talk about Capstone for a second. There are plenty of buildings around the South named for notable Confederates, but Capstone is clearly not one of them. Capstone is a 18-story tower that was built in a residential neighborhood next to the University of South Carolina campus. It’s a residence hall that features a rotating restaurant at the top and was intended to be the anchor of campus expansion. Today, it essentially marks the eastern edge of campus and the tower has been equipped with a garnet cap that lights up to celebrate campus achievements.

A couple of months ago, I was relaying the story of the postcard to a colleague as we discussed the final History Commission report on the naming of University of South Carolina buildings. I did a quick Google search for “Capstone postcard” and the first result was the image of the same Capstone postcard I’ve seen many times before. I followed it to the California-based Etsy seller and clicked to see the back:

Ultra-modern dormitory on the campus of the University of South Carolina is unique because of the gold-hued revolving restaurant on top of the structure. The building is name in honor of Commodore Epaminondas J. Capstone, famous for his service to his school, state and the Confederacy.

That was it! Every other vintage Capstone postcard I’d seen was exactly the same, but didn’t have that final sentence. I took screenshots and clicked purchase as quickly as I could.

So our fictitious “General Capstone” wasn’t a general… he was a “Commodore” in the Confederate Navy. Thankfully, Epaminondas J. Capstone is quite the unique name, which makes it simple to track down the rest of the story.

A Google search turned up an entry in “Correct Mispronunciations of South Carolina Names” for Capstone, mentioning that the postcard was “an unintentional hoax because the photographer (who wrote the description for the postcard) accepted as fact a facetious editorial in Columbia’s State newspaper.”

Jump over to Newsbank’s South Carolina Historical Newspapers database — thanks Richland Library for the access — and finding the State’s editorial was easy. Published on January 3, 1968 and titled “Sons of Carolina,” it takes the the university to task for giving buildings descriptive names instead of naming buildings after accomplished South Carolinians. The editorial even includes the exact language from the postcard. But reading the editorial, it’s hard to imagine that anyone would read this obvious parody and accept it as fact.

Another aside… I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that in 1968 — in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement — that a Southern newspaper was demanding that state universities embrace their Southern heritage and name buildings after accomplished South Carolinians. In October of that year, the board of trustees at the University of South Carolina gave in to pressure and renamed many of their buildings after “honored” South Carolinians — several of which have now been recommended for renaming. The State’s editorial board cheered this decision and took a victory lap with a follow-up editorial in October 1968.

Capstone, however, was not renamed.

Further searching on other newspaper databases turned up a number of partial reprints of the editorial in the Greenwood Index-Journal and USC’s student newspaper, The Gamecock. This was common practice at the time. Newspapers would reprint a snippet of another publication’s editorials and sometimes provide their own commentary. These reprints were shortened and stripped of much of the humorous context of the editorial. The Index-Journal ran an editorial on January 5, 1968 titled “E.J. Capstone,” stripping most of the State’s more absurd examples and adding their own commentary, arguing that buildings should not be named for living people like legislators and board members. I imagine shortened editorials like these triggered the misunderstanding by the photographer, who probably never even saw the original State editorial.

The Record, Columbia’s afternoon paper, ran an article about the postcard on March 2, 1968, noting that “some people really do believe everything they read in the newspapers.” The Record noted that the postcard went into circulation around Columbia that week. Because of the immediate attention to the embarrassing error, I imagine most of the postcards were recalled and destroyed immediately, which is likely why very few of them still exist.

My postcard arrived from California a few days after I ordered it. It included a nice note from the seller commenting that my postcard was “a nice find.” Yes, it was. Quest completed. Now I just have to figure out how to display my “error card.”

Bob Wertz writes about design, technology and pop culture at Sketchbook B. Bob is a Columbia, South Carolina-based designer, University of South Carolina Ph.D. student, researcher, college instructor, husband and dad. He’s particularly obsessed with typography, the creative process and the tools we use to create. Bob occasionally and begrudgingly posts to Twitter and Instagram. He wears a mask and got vaccinated to protect his community. #TeamModerna