Local Stories in South Carolina
17 places·1 county
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History·Charleston County
Ashley Phosphate Rush
Drayton Hall on the Ashley River was one of the plantations where South Carolina's phosphate rush was dug. The state's phosphate industry began in late 1867 on plantations near Charleston, after Francis S. Holmes, St. Julien Ravenel and the chemists N. A. Pratt and C. U. Shepard found that the local stinking stones held unusually high levels of bone phosphate of lime, prized for fertilizer.
History·Charleston County
Bench by the Road
The Bench by the Road on Sullivan's Island is a black steel bench, six feet long, placed by the Toni Morrison Society beside the Intracoastal Waterway behind the Fort Moultrie Visitor Center and dedicated on July 26, 2008. It answers a remark Morrison made in a 1989 interview with The World magazine: that there was no memorial, no plaque, not even a small bench by the road for the enslaved Africans brought to America.
History·Charleston County
Denmark Vesey Statue
A seven-foot bronze of Denmark Vesey, holding a Bible in one hand and a bag of carpenter's tools in the other, has stood on a black granite plinth in Hampton Park since its dedication in February 2014. Vesey was a Charleston carpenter who had won $1,500 in a lottery in 1799 and used it to buy his freedom. He was hanged on 2 July 1822 for organizing a planned uprising of enslaved people, modeled on the Haitian Revolution, to take the city and sail to Haiti.
History·Charleston County
Earthquake Bolts
Earthquake bolts are iron rods run through the brick walls of a building and fastened on the outside with a large washer and nut, often hidden under a cast-iron cap shaped like a star, a cross, an S or a lion's head. After the earthquake of 31 August 1886, repair crews threaded them through hundreds of damaged Charleston buildings to tie walls to floors.
History·Charleston County
First Historic Zoning Law
On 13 October 1931 Charleston City Council ratified a zoning ordinance that drew a line around part of the lower peninsula and declared the buildings inside it worth protecting. It was the first historic district zoning law in the United States. The ordinance created a 138-acre Old and Historic District and a five-member Board of Architectural Review, drawn from bodies such as the Real Estate Exchange and the South Carolina Art Association, to review changes to the buildings within it.
History·Charleston County
Martyrs of the Race Course
In the last year of the Civil War, Confederates turned the Washington Race Course, the South Carolina Jockey Club's track since 1835, into an open-air prison for captured Union soldiers. At least 257 of them died there of exposure and disease and were buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand.
Museums & Art·Charleston County
Philip Simmons Workshop
The blacksmith Philip Simmons made most of his ornamental ironwork at his home workshop at 30½ Blake Street on Charleston's East Side, now kept by the Philip Simmons Foundation as a museum. Born on Daniel Island on 9 June 1912, he moved to Charleston at seven and at 13 apprenticed to Peter Simmons, no relation, a smith born enslaved in 1855 whose shop stood at the foot of Calhoun Street.
Transport·Charleston County
Pitt Street Bridge
The Pitt Street Bridge is the surviving stub of the old crossing over Cove Inlet between Mount Pleasant's Old Village and Sullivan's Island, and its line is older than the structure. In 1777 troops under General Christopher Gadsden finished a bridge across the marsh nearly a mile long, laid on barrels and topped with iron sheets.
History·Charleston County
Shelled South of Broad
From August 1863 until Confederate forces left Charleston in February 1865, Union guns on and around Morris Island fired into the city. The first shot came early on 22 August 1863 from the Swamp Angel, an eight-inch Parrott rifle weighing 16,500 pounds, mounted in a sandbagged battery built on the marsh. It was laid on the city by a compass reading on the steeple of St. Michael's Church and fired incendiary shells 7,900 yards.
History·Charleston County
Smalls Takes the Planter
Before dawn on 13 May 1862, Robert Smalls, an enslaved harbor pilot, took the Confederate transport Planter from its berth at Southern Wharf, the southernmost of the old East Bay wharves on the Cooper River, and delivered it to the Union blockade. The ship's three white officers, Captain Charles Relyea, first officer Samuel Hancock and engineer Samuel Pitcher, had gone ashore for the night. At about 3 a.m.
History·Charleston County
St. Michael's Bells
The eight bells in the steeple of St. Michael's Church, at the corner of Broad and Meeting Streets, have made the Atlantic crossing several times. They were cast in London in 1764 and shipped to the new church. In 1782 the departing British carried them off as a prize of war, and a London merchant bought them and sent them back. Two of them later cracked and returned to England to be recast.
Industry & Science·Charleston County
Sweetgrass Basket Stands
The sweetgrass basket stands along U.S. 17 north of Mount Pleasant are roadside booths where Gullah Geechee basket makers have sold coiled grass baskets since the 1930s. In 2006 the South Carolina General Assembly asked the state Department of Transportation to sign U.S. 17 North from Venning Road to Sewee Road as the Sweetgrass Basket Makers Highway, and the same year the sweetgrass basket became the official state Lowcountry handcraft.
History·Charleston County
The Heywards' Follywood
Follywood was the summer house DuBose and Dorothy Heyward built in 1933 at 712 West Ashley Avenue on Folly Beach, and in the summer of 1934 it was one of the places where George Gershwin and the Heywards worked on Porgy and Bess. The opera came from DuBose Heyward's 1925 novel Porgy, and Heyward had urged Gershwin to come to the Lowcountry to hear Gullah life at first hand.
History·Charleston County
The Last Legal Landings
For the final 22 months of the legal slave trade into the United States, nearly every ship bringing captive Africans to Charleston landed them at Gadsden's Wharf on the Cooper River, whose frontage ran from Calhoun Street south to Laurens Street. On 17 February 1806, Charleston's City Council ordered that incoming vessels carrying enslaved people go only to that wharf. The first cargo sold there under the rule came off the ship Duddon, with 173 people, in a sale recorded on 22 February 1806.
Military·Charleston County
The Signal Shell of 1861
The shell that opened the bombardment of Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, and with it the Civil War, was fired from a mortar battery at Fort Johnson on the James Island shore of Charleston Harbor. Early that year state troops built two batteries of two 10-inch mortars each at Fort Johnson, and the signal came from the east battery, on the front beach facing Fort Sumter, under Captain George S. James. By the most detailed account, Lieutenant Henry S.
History·Charleston County
The Sugar House
The Charleston Work House stood on Magazine Street at the corner of what is now Logan Street, beside the Old Charleston Jail, and it was where the city punished enslaved people for a fee. An enslaver who wanted someone whipped needed no court: they paid the city and city employees did the flogging. News accounts of the city's plaque describe whippings as often as 40 times a week, with salt rubbed into the wounds at extra cost.
Music History·Charleston County
We Will Overcome
The song that became the civil rights anthem We Shall Overcome had its first widely acknowledged performance as a protest song on the picket line at the American Tobacco Company's cigar factory, 701 East Bay Street, during a strike that began on 22 October 1945. The plant employed about 1,400 people, some 900 of them Black women.