Charleston Time Machine

Charleston was once a heavily heavily-fortified town, enclosed by defensive works that accumulated over successive eras of warfare with our enemy neighbors. The campaign to fortify Charleston commenced early in the town’s history, but precisely how early is unclear. Today we’ll focus on the earliest years and ask—how prepared were Charlestonians of the 1680s to defend their homes? The answer just...

Ropemaker’s Lane is a place name in Charleston that evokes images of antique men twisting long fibers into useful objects. That scenario is accurate, but it represents one facet of the site’s long history. To gain a fuller picture of its development over the past three centuries, lets reach back to the town’s early days and meet the people who created the lane and inspired its present name.

The City of Charleston, in my opinion, needs an official nickname, and perhaps even an official symbol. There are a few contenders out there, ranging from cheeky epithets to marketing slogans, but I think there's only one real option. Rather than inventing something new, or adopting something with a murky historical pedigree, I propose that we embrace Charleston's original nickname, which endured...

Charleston’s history is filled with stories that have a bright side and a not-so-bright side, and both aspects deserve to be told. Consider, for example, the story of Eliza Akin’s 1842 bequest to the city, which was intended to establish an institution to shelter the abandoned newborns of Charleston. Despite Miss Akin’s best intentions, the official politics of discrimination succeeded in stunting...

If you’ve ever wondered what Christmas was like on a Lowcountry plantation in Antebellum times, William Gilmore Simms has the answers. His 1852 novella, The Golden Christmas, is a sunny take of romance and comedy that floats carelessly above the thinly-veiled darkness of slavery. Today we’ll take a quick overview of its author, its storyline, and its fatal flaws, and then sample a bite-sized porti...

The mass execution of 49 pirates in Charleston in 1718 is described in historical documents with a frustrating paucity of details. Despite the drama and trauma associated with this event, an air of mystery still hangs over the precise location of the pirates’ last stand. Today we’ll look closely at the local historical evidence and examine the larger legal framework that dictated the demise of so...

Over the course of five weeks in the autumn of 1718, Charleston witnessed 13 trials of 58 men accused of piracy. Clerks made a paper record of this entire courtroom spectacle, most of which was published in 1719, but few people have seen the text of this dramatic narrative. This episode contextualize this valuable historical record and provides a summary of the confusing sequence of trials.

This month marks the 300th anniversary of one of the dramatic episodes in the history of Charleston—the trial and execution of 49 pirates captured off the Carolina coast in 1718. In this episode, we’ll explore the background preceding these extraordinary trials and focus on the efforts of South Carolina mariners to capture two of the most notorious pirates, Stede Bonnet and Richard Worley, and bri...

Have you seen the tail of the horse in the portrait of George Washington that hangs in Charleston’s City Hall? Do you know the tale of how that painting’s origin, and why the horse’s rear-end is so prominently displayed? The popular version of this story isn’t entirely accurate rendering, so let’s use the Time Machine travel back to the early 1790s and explore the documentary evidence behind this...

As we conclude the 100th season of “Daylight Saving Time,” let’s pause to reflect on the concept of time keeping in Charleston’s past. Before the invention of “standard time” and “time zones, who determined the official time for our city, and when did we start synchronizing our clocks with those of other communities? Join me as we “fall back” in time and review the horological habits of our less h...

In the spirit of Halloween, today’s program concerns one of the most prevalent and legitimate fears held by the people of eighteenth-century Charleston. I’m talking about taphophobia—the fear of being buried alive. Premature burial was a real concern back in that era, when the line between life and death was poorly understood. Today we’ll explore a few cases that are sure to leave a haunting impre...

The Akin Foundling Hospital was a short-lived, long-forgotten municipal institution located on the west side of Meeting Street in Charleston. Established in 1843 at the bequest of Miss Eliza Akin, the building was intended as a refuge for abandoned infants, but the structure’s poor condition hampered its mission. Today we’ll survey the City of Charleston’s management of the institution and look fo...

From modest beginnings in the 1690s to great wealth in the 1750s and extinction in the 1840s, the lesser-known Akin family of South Carolina left an important legacy on Meeting Street that most of Charleston has long forgotten. Before we can appreciate the history of the Akin Foundling Hospital, we need to learn a bit about the family fortunes that inspired our community’s first and only home for...

Between 1670 and 1808, nearly one thousand cargos of enslaved Africans entered the port of Charleston. This fact represents one of the most important chapters in the history of our community, but we the people of Charleston still struggle to wrap our collective brains around this weighty topic. How can we tell this important story to our children and to the millions of visitors who come here each...

In 1868, the City of Charleston passed an ordinance making it illegal for a person to appear in public dressed in a manner “not becoming his or her sex.” Why would they do such a thing? The answer is wrapped in the confusing world of post-Civil War Charleston, a place filled with Union soldiers enforcing federal laws, formerly-enslaved people starting new lives, and members of the old guard trying...

Has this ever happened to you: There’s a knock at your front door late at night. You open the door to find a messenger with a letter and a soggy burlap bag. You open the letter—it’s news about a series of recent murders. You look inside the bag and find two human heads. What do you do? If you’re the governor of South Carolina, and its January of 1745, you breathe a sigh of relief, and say “Thank y...

In the summer of 1744, two Native American men of the Notchee tribe murdered several Catawba Indians in cold blood near Four Holes Swamp. Fearing a general Indian war, the government of South Caorlina interceded and tried to maintain peace between the tribes while hunting down the murders. This dramatic story has all the elements of a prime-time detective series, but it survives only in the manusc...

The historical definition of “the Neck” once encompassed all the land between the rivers Ashley and Cooper, but the steady growth of development whittled it down until it was finally swallowed by annexation in the late twentieth century. In this episode, we’ll complete our chronological tour of Neck geography and consider how the identity of this once blighted area is about to be reborn as the fin...

How well do you know “the Neck,” that curious stretch of no man’s land bounded by the rivers Ashley and Cooper, and squeezed between the urban centers of Charleston and North Charleston? The geographic identity of "the Neck" evolved in multiple stages over the past three centuries, in step with the growth of the local population and with the rise of commercial development, but few know the details...

In honor of the 235th anniversary of the incorporation of the City of Charleston, I’d like to draw your attention to a little-known but incredibly important fact about the history of this city: During the early days of the Federal occupation of Charleston in the spring of 1865, nearly all of the city’s public records mysteriously disappeared. Because of this large-scale loss of records, our abilit...

Sesame, or “benne” seeds represent an important vestige of the African cultures that came to South Carolina three centuries ago. Lowcountry settlers observed the value of the benne seed, adopted its African name, and once sought to produce it on an industrial scale. For a brief moment in the 1740s, it looked as if South Carolina would become a benne colony. That commercial venture never materializ...

South Carolina’s first police station was a brick “Watch House” constructed around 1701 at the intersection of Broad and East Bay Streets in Charleston. Built to shelter both the town’s nocturnal watchmen and the lawbreakers they caught on the streets at night, the Watch House was once a vital part of daily life in early Charleston.

After last week’s cliffhanger, we now return to the story of Charles Barker Nixon, a traveling magician and escape artist who came to Charleston in 1876 to be buried alive for the amusement of a crowd of spectators. This week we’ll witness his rise from the grave, learn how the feat was accomplished, and hear the pathetic conclusion to the story of Professor Nixon.

Over the course of a few weeks, this flamboyant, bohemian showman enthralled and terrified the local population by holding séances and speaking of ancient Egyptian prophecies. Nixon’s story is a tragi-comical tale set in the depths of the Reconstruction-era Charleston, about a mysterious enchanter who baffled the nation by charging admission to his funeral and inviting spectators to watch him rise...

For the first century of its existence, the urban landscape of Charleston was dominated by an evolving ring of fortifications designed to protect the city against potential invasion by Spanish, French, and later British forces. Our provincial legislature repeatedly devoted large sums of tax revenue for the construction and repair of walls, moats, bastions, and related works, resulting in what was...