Have you ever wondered how South Carolinians paid for goods and services before the advent of the U.S. dollar? The pound sterling formed the basis of their accounts until the 1790s, but the economic realities of frontier life obliged early Carolinians to embrace monetary tools and strategies that deviated from British traditions. For more than a ce…

Phebe Fletcher was an intriguing woman of eighteenth-century Charleston whose unconventional lifestyle earned both derision and respect from her neighbors. Born to a respectable family of unknown origin, she was allegedly “seduced” from the bounds of traditional feminine “virtue” and obliged to associate with “vicious” persons, Black and White, to …

Thomas Francis Meagher (1823–1867) was a famous Irish patriot of the mid-nineteenth century whose agitation for independence from Britain led to his exile from the Emerald Isle. After settling in New York in 1852, Meagher visited Charleston several times to deliver public lectures on history and politics. South Carolina’s Irish immigrants embraced …

The Shaw Community Center at 22 Mary Street in downtown Charleston embodies an important historical legacy: It arose shortly after the Civil War as a memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and members of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment who died in battle at Morris Island. Their comrades pooled money to establish in 1868 a school for African-American childre…

The Charleston County Public Library opened its doors to the public in 1931, but welcomed visitors unequally and conditionally until the early 1960s. Like nearly every other institution existing in the American South during that era, the Charleston Free Library, as it was then known, maintained separate facilities and unequal collections for two cl…

The recently renovated John L. Dart Library at 1067 King Street bears the name of a pioneering figure in the history of education in Charleston. Born free during the last years of slavery, Dart benefited from the first flowering of African-American schools after the Civil War and attained advanced degrees. He returned to his home town in 1886 as a …

Nearly a century before Charleston’s municipal headquarters moved to the northeast corner of Meeting and Broad Streets, residents gathered daily at this site to procure meat and other foodstuffs. The city abandoned this so-called “Beef Market” in 1789, following the construction of a new facility in Market Street, and the old market was briefly use…

The first exhibition game of American-style “scientific” football in the Lowcountry of South Carolina kicked-off in December 1892, when two teams of eleven college boys scrimmaged at Charleston’s Base Ball Park on Christmas Eve. Only few local youths had by that time seen or played the novel game developed up North, but their interest was keen. Fur…

Charleston’s venerable newspaper, the Post and Courier, is transforming its headquarters on upper King Street into an upscale mixed-use development called Courier Square. The present twentieth-century structures will soon disappear, exposing a piece of ground with a forgotten claim to fame. A few years before the American Revolution, a Scottish gar…

Native American ancestry provided a measure of legal immunity to mixed-race people in antebellum South Carolina. Check out the latest episode of Charleston Time Machine to hear examples of their legal victories.על ידי Nic Butler, Ph.D.

In the late winter of 1684, representatives of eight Native American tribes in the Lowcountry of South Carolina surrendered their traditional homelands to English colonists. A series of documents ostensibly signed on a single day that February ceded Indigenous rights to millions of acres between the rivers Stono and Savannah, ranging from the Atlan…

Petit Versailles, a forgotten residence in suburban Charleston, links the tragic stories of two women who expired prematurely during the second quarter of the eighteenth century. The modest house fronting the Cooper River was built for a child named Elizabeth Gadsden but occupied by her godfather, Francis LeBrasseur. Following their early deaths, F…

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, South Carolina’s colonial government raised a fortified trace of earthen walls and moats around the nucleus of urban Charleston. These defensive works constrained the town’s growth for more than twenty years, but then quietly vanished before a burst of civic expansion in the mid-1730s. Questions of when a…

Maritime traffic between Charleston and various ports in the Spanish-speaking Americas was once an important part of the local economy. Prohibited by British law for most of South Carolina’s colonial century, commerce with Cadiz, Havana, Vera Cruz, and other ports blossomed after the independence of the United States. The presence of a Spanish and …

In September 1973, a group of preservation activists coined the term “French Quarter” to describe a single block of urban Charleston that was slated for demolition. The site was added to the National Register of Historic Places that same month to deter redevelopment, and the new name soon became part of the local lexicon. Residents and visitors hav…

Patriots Point is a well-known landmark on the east bank of the Cooper River in the Town of Mount Pleasant, but its modern name obscures a much deeper history. Known as Hog Island before 1973, the site has been radically transformed by nature and humans over the past three centuries. Its evolution from a tiny but habitable island to an expansive, v…

Champneys’s Row was a conspicuous anomaly at the time of its construction in 1781, the only civilian edifice adjacent to the brick curtain wall defining the eastern edge of East Bay Street. The building’s height and novel placement violated provincial zoning laws, and the Champneys family persevered against community opposition to protect their inv…

John Champneys was a Charleston factor and wharf owner whose loyalty to the British Crown deranged his life during the American Revolution. While surviving documents provide details of his imprisonment, exile, and return, the slender row of brick stores Champneys built during the war at the southeast corner of East Bay and Exchange Streets bear wit…

The cheapest and simplest form of bathing in early South Carolina was an ancient practice shared by numerous cultures around the world: one simply walked to the nearest creek, river, or beach and jumped in. Because specialized bathing garments did not exist until the early nineteenth century, most outdoor bathers swam in the nude. The rising popula…

Before the advent of air conditioning and running water in the Charleston area, Lowcountry residents of all descriptions pursued a number of indoor and outdoor strategies to gain relief from the sultry summer heat. Some soaked in tubs within private residences and commercial bathing houses, while other paid to plunge into exclusive riverine pens. T…

Charleston’s new International African American Museum (IAAM) stands on ground formerly known as Gadsden’s Wharf, a man-made structure built along the Cooper River waterfront shortly before the American Revolution. During the previous century, however, the site formed part of a plantation that passed through the hands of John Coming and Isaac Mazyc…

The technology behind the creation of artificial ice, pioneered by a physician from South Carolina in the mid-nineteenth century, spawned new concepts of personal comfort and health in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Artificially-chilled air, a refreshing luxury that debuted after the jazzy era of Prohibition, rendered Charleston’s sul…

Sullivan’s Island holds a unique place in the history of South Carolina. Reserved in the late seventeenth century as a maritime lookout, quarantine station, and military post, this attractive barrier island remained in the public domain for nearly three centuries. Private residences began appearing on Sullivan’s Island in 1791, but their owners enj…

In the wake of the American Civil War, planters across the South considered the pros and cons of recruiting Chinese laborers to sustain the region’s agriculture traditions. An interstate summit on the topic, held in Memphis in 1869, stoked racial fears and produced mixed results. While some communities moved forward with plans to hire thousands of …

A windowless warehouse on Charleston’s Union Pier conceals a forgotten site of historical significance. Near the present southwest corner of Concord and Pritchard Streets, a projecting point of sand and shells known as “the Hard” or “Rhett’s Point” served as a focal point of maritime activity from the dawn of recorded history in South Carolina to t…

Charleston County’s newest library, the Keith Summey North Charleston facility, represents a major expansion of the Cooper River Memorial Library, erected in 1948 to honor some of the local men and women who served in World War II. African-American citizens gained access to the facility in 1963, and the building expanded over the decades to serve a…

Following the precedent of “market towns” in England, the founders of Charleston created a public marketplace with stalls for the sale of meat, fish, and produce, as well as a cage, stocks, and pillory to punish malefactors in public view. The town plan of 1672 reserved a prominent central space for such purposes, but a number of factors induced ea…

Blanche Petit was a child prodigy on the piano whose European career commenced at the age of nine in 1851. After she performed in New York the following year, her family settled in Charleston, where her influential father died suddenly in 1856. Thirteen-year-old Blanche then launched an illustrious career as a professional musician, teacher, and co…

Florence O’Sullivan was among the first European settlers who came to Carolina in 1670, and he played a significant role in the growth of the colony during the ensuing years. Few details of his life or his personality survive, however, beyond a litany of complaints and accusations made by his English contemporaries. Perhaps by considering O’Sulliva…

Margaret Daniel was neither rich nor famous, but the sparse details of her career provide a window into life in Charleston around the turn of the nineteenth century. Between the 1780s and her death in 1817, she accumulated real estate, catered fancy dinners, hosted exclusive business meetings, and briefly ran a school for Black children. On Februar…

Americans love novels and movies that portray detectives following a trail of clues to solve a crime. In our community, the City of Charleston hired its first plainclothes detectives in 1856, during the era of slavery, but a handful of Black detectives joined the force shortly after the Civil War. On February 10th, Charleston Time Machine will expl…

If you’ve ever walked along the east side of East Bay Street in the heart of Charleston, you’ve stood atop a forgotten brick wall that once defined the city’s waterfront. This half-mile-long “wharf wall” or “curtain line” commenced in the 1690s to separate the street from the harbor, but it quickly evolved into a defensive fortification. Damaged by…

Can you imagine Savannah Highway as a narrow toll road traversing a patchwork of rural plantations? The present broad ribbon of asphalt covers a modest country path created more than two centuries ago by a private corporation. Its purpose was to funnel agricultural goods, animals, and people from the hinterland to markets in urban Charleston, acros…

During the era of legal slavery in the United States, most people living in bondage enjoyed a brief respite at Christmas. Their holidays often included celebratory meals, music, and dancing, sometimes in company with their White neighbors. This seasonal liberty also generated great anxiety, however: Slaveowners dreaded Yuletide acts of resistance a…

Long before the rise of the present municipality, a group of capitalists coined the phrase “North Charleston” in 1912 to describe a bold development scheme on the west bank of the Cooper River. The heart of the proposed, 6,000-acre city was an upscale segregated community called Pinewood Park, nestled within a circular array of broad streets and ve…

How did a maritime forest between the rivers Ashley and Cooper become the urban streetscape we call Charleston? The spark of this long transformation occurred in 1672, when South Carolina’s Surveyor General drew a plan for a town on the verdant peninsula called Oyster Point. Although John Culpeper’s “model” of the town was imperfectly inscribed on …

Charleston on the peninsula called Oyster Point became the capital of South Carolina in 1680, but plans for the port town commenced a decade earlier. The first step in its creation was an act of displacement ignored by later historians. Like the Dutch colonists who purchased Manhattan from Native Americans in 1626, English settlers around the year …

Many years ago, a local family dedicated a small, wooded island near the Ashley River as a solemn refuge for their deceased relations. A mortuary vault of brick and stone sheltered numerous coffins from the passing seasons, but could not repel the intrusion of gnawing vermin and curious humans. After scores of visitors vandalized the secluded crypt…

During a decade of naval warfare in the 1740s, a number of British warships and privateers brought scores of Spanish-speaking prisoners to Charleston. South Carolina’s provincial government confined most of these mariners within cramped facilities behind iron bars, but provided comfortable accommodations and relative freedom to the gentlemen office…

The powerful hurricane of mid-September 1752 destroyed nearly every watercraft in the vicinity of Charleston, with two dramatic exceptions. His Majesty’s warship Mermaid was driven ashore near the Wando River, while HMS Hornet nearly capsized in the harbor. Descriptions of these harrowing events, written by the officers of both ships, have gathered…

In early September 1739, dozens of enslaved men residing near the Stono River launched a violent campaign to gain their freedom. The events of that bloody uprising, commonly called the Stono Rebellion, form a pivotal and well-known episode in the history of South Carolina, but our understanding of its geography is imperfect. We'll review the docume…

The waterways of coastal South Carolina once teemed with a large variety of wooden sailing vessels, all of which required frequent maintenance to keep their hulls in ship shape. The work of careening, or rotating a vessel to expose its lower hull, was difficult and dangerous, but so routine that few records of this work survive. In this episode of …

Ice was a summer luxury in antebellum Charleston, brought southward in huge blocks by ships from New England. The invention of ice-making machines after the Civil War transformed the industry, but a sour economy and consumer skepticism delayed local adoption of the new technology. Cheaper “artificial ice” finally debuted in the Palmetto City in 188…

Along a shady stretch of Highway 162 in Hollywood, South Carolina, stands a humble marker for Clementia Village. Local lore describes the site as the location of forgotten “ghost town,” but a search for its history reveals a different story. Formerly a part of a large rice plantation, the land bubbled with a font of spring water after the earthquak…

Like most American colonists during the turbulent spring of 1775, the people of South Carolina were anxious about British military preparations to suppress the first sparks of the Revolution. When two Irishmen in Charleston expressed views that offended their pro-American neighbors in June, an elite secret committee ordered the pair to be stripped,…

Ship traffic flowing in and out of Charleston Harbor has played a vital role in the local economy for more than 350 years. For most of that time, however, a network of shifting sandbars at the mouth of the harbor complicated the passage of all large vessels. Early maritime trade blossomed with the aid of skilled pilots and navigational buoys and be…

In 1724, the Royal Navy sent Captain George Anson with HMS Scarborough to protect the rice-producing colony of South Carolina. British sailors assigned to the Carolina Station received a gallon of strong beer each day, but supplies in the port of Charles Town were limited. Captain Anson served his king and likely made a small profit by operating a …

In Part 2, we conclude the story as we follow Oqui Adair, the Chinese gardener, southward from Washington D.C. to the land of Sea-Island Cotton and slavery in the Palmetto State. During the second half of his colorful life, another Civil War forced Oqui to flee far from the fertile coast, but he found asylum, love, and family in the capital of Sout…

In Hong Kong in the autumn of 1854, a young man boarded a U.S. naval vessel and embarked on an American adventure. Arriving in New York, he worked briefly in Washington D.C. before moving to South Carolina to create a formal plantation garden on Edisto Island. Displaced by the American Civil War, he found asylum at the State Hospital and raised a f…

Robert Smalls became an American icon when he absconded from Charleston with the steamboat Planter in May 1862 to free his family and friends from the bonds of slavery. To better understand the details of his escape, inquiring minds want to identify the location of Smalls’ residence within the city. Later biographies don’t mention an address, but S…