Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Columbia, VA

Columbia — not the South Carolina capital or the Missouri college town — is a village and census-designated place in Fluvanna County, Virginia, standing at the confluence of the James and Rivanna rivers, where it was earlier known as Point of Fork.

The site was originally Rassawek, the capital town of the Monacan Indian Nation, and in 2020 the National Trust for Historic Preservation named its endangered historic remains among America's most endangered historic places.

During the Revolutionary War a Patriot arsenal under Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben stood at Point of Fork; Simcoe's Queen's Rangers captured it on June 5, 1781, after von Steuben rushed most of its stores across the James, and the rebuilt arsenal remained in service until 1801.

After the war the community took the name Columbia — the poetic name for the United States — and was incorporated as a town in 1788.

Columbia became a shipping point on the James River for Virginia's tobacco trade, establishing its own bateau freight line; its river junction linked Richmond to Lynchburg by the James and to Charlottesville by the Rivanna, and in the mid-19th century it was a stop on the stagecoach route between Richmond and Staunton.

The 2020 census counted just 76 people in the Columbia CDP, down from 83 in 2010, when the then-town's population had risen from only 49 people in 18 households in 2000 — a far cry from its 19th-century peak of 311 residents in 1870.

Columbia declined after passenger railroad service ended in 1958, and floods from Hurricane Camille in 1969 and Hurricane Agnes in 1972 destroyed many of its homes and businesses, leaving much of its main street burned or abandoned.

Until its dissolution Columbia was the smallest incorporated town in Virginia: residents voted to disincorporate in a referendum on March 17, 2015, the General Assembly revoked its charter on March 3, 2016, and the town ceased to exist on July 1, 2016, leaving governance to Fluvanna County.

Columbia is home to St. Joseph's Church and the Shrine of St. Katharine Drexel, built by William and Catherine Wakeham, English Catholic abolitionists who moved to Columbia in 1833 and whose hilltop home site came to be called Free Hill.

St. Katharine Drexel visited the chapel in 1901, arranged for Mass to be celebrated there regularly again, and founded a small school beside it for Black children, making St. Joseph's the center of one of Virginia's only historically African-American Catholic communities; set on high ground, the church was spared by the floods that wrecked the rest of town and remains an active parish.