We borrowed some made from furnace vent pipe.  There were easily that tall.  The vent pipe was 8-10 inches in diameter and made of metal.  I think you can buy it by the foot at Lowe's or a lumber yard. The columns would probably be an investment but should store fairly easily.  They had wooden tops and bottoms (capitals?) and were painted white.  I think there was a plywood circle in the middle in a place or two to keep them stable.

We built some once from 12" cardboard concrete forms.  Ours were 12' tall with gold fancy capitals and sculpted looking bases - most of all of that was made from blue (or you could use pink) insulation foam.  Spray painting it gold might eat the foam as some solvent based paint will. SO what I did was paint them flat black first and that sealed the foam so spray painting it with gold paint didn't eat into the foam.  BUT we "stacked" the concrete forms together putting in 4 small blocks of wood about 2" wide by 6" long, in each one and screwed from the outside to the inside.  Then we stacked the next form and secured that to the wooden blocks with wood screws.  By the way you CAN get 6" and/or 8" concrete forms too - they need not be 12" for only 7' forms unless you want really heavy looking columns.  Also we cut 1" strips of blue sheet foam and glued them on with liquid nails - about 1" apart and the columns looked FLUTED as well.  Check the link below and see the photo of one of the columns.  The fluting was glued down 1" apart. Being 12' tall we had to add a 4' section atop an 8' section of fluting strips.  But it worked. Painted white isn't too obvious.  The bases where some lumber (but if I had to do it all again it would be all foam) and also used some pipe insulating foam which is round with a hole in it.  Split that in half for the rounded sections around the base and around the capital too. The capital had a base of the cardboard concrete forms with lots of foam to dress it up - including the 1/4" blue foam for those "leaves" at the top. If you need further explanation on how I made them let me know and I'll detail it for you in greater depth.

Hi Charlie, I have 8 columns made out of inexpensive cardboard "SonoTube" concrete forms.  They are about 8' high and about 1' wide, with wooden tops and bottoms, plus wheels.  And they are professionally painted to look like ancient marble.  I used them for the throne room in "Narnia the Musical". This season I used them again in a high school production of "The Complete Works of Shakespeare Abridged".    

In this photo you can see three of these tall columns stored up-stage-right near the cyc: "Abridged"

Where are you located Charlie?

Good luck, Dana

Thank you David. I appreciate that.    

My design theory on "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged" is what I call "overt theatricality".  I imagined that an old troupe of community players slapped together a show out of various stock items they used on every show over the years.

Notice the styrofoam clouds...kind of like Monty Python.   (Not to mention the corny "ghost" on a fishing pole!)

And I built 8 three-sided periaktoi out of 24 of my 2' wide stock ground-row flats that I had kicking around for years.  We painted them to appear as 3 different stock theatrical scenes in order to create some vaudevillian wings. 

My low-budget solution to make these periaktoi stand up on their own was to insert a 10' high steel lighting boom inside each of them...so they spin like a roll of paper towels on a spindle! Quick and simple...but most of all, they were "Murphy's Law"-proof!

And I painted the rustic stage floor with overly-wide planking to help show that these thespians have been "playing the boards" for a long, long time.   

Also notice how I used some PAR cans along the pit as old-fashioned "footlights", as well as our two trap doors.  These little touches helped to set the comedy in a "theatre environment".  In fact, I didn't use the main drape during pre-show...this staging is what the audience saw as they came in.

Another freebie:  The comedy calls for a "sex scene" to be played out between two puppets! So I dug out a trunk in my attic to find the old puppets from a TV kids show that I hosted in the 1980's! 

The giant castle turret was recycled from "Into the Woods" 15 years ago! 

And the castle interior was made of stock flats from "Taming of the Shrew" seven years ago!  After all these years I finally found a good use for those stock flats...at zero expense!   I mounted these flats on the same rolling wagon that I used just two weeks earlier as the big bandstand in "Grease"!

Speaking of that middle school production of "Grease" - it called for a bar to be used center stage during the living room scene.  Well two weeks later, I re-used this same bar in "Shakespeare, Abridged" for a brief "cooking show" gag.  

So, with a little "creative recycling", this entire set for "Shakespeare, Abridged" cost me just 300 bucks for paint and supplies!

Anyhow, back to Charlie's original topic about making columns.  Here are two more photos of my "marble" columns from a 5th grade musical: Photo 1 - Narnia Columns. Photo 2 - Narnia Column, Close-up    

And this is a good picture of the columns being used in a comical scene from "Shakespeare Abridged".

I thoroughly enjoyed seeing all the set pictures. I loved both columns and I loved all the sets from Mr. Lowell