Palmetto Engine House

Front: This 2-story brick building dates to 1867 and originally housed the Palmetto Fire Engine Co., a volunteer firefighting association incorporated in 1858. It was designed by architect A.Y. Lee and replaced an earlier engine house that burned in the 1865 Columbia fire. In 1903 the City formed its first paid fire department and began operating the building as Engine House No. 2. It remained a fire station until 1921. Reverse: Sadie Carnaggio Tronco opened Iodine Grill here in 1941. Born in Colorado, she moved to Columbia with her Italian immigrant parents in the 1910s. She began selling “real Italian spaghetti” from her and her husband James’s Iodine Fruit Store by 1935, later offering the same at the Grill. The restaurant here became known as Tony’s Spaghetti House in 1944 and was renamed Villa Tronco in 1949. Descendants continued to operate it under that name after Sadie Tronco’s death in 1988.