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. The gun burst on its thirty-sixth round the next evening, but other batteries kept up the bombardment for the rest of the war. Few people were killed or hurt, but the shelling forced civilians out of the city south of Broad Street.
The bank building at One Broad Street, on the corner of East Bay, stands on that line. Built in 1853, it was sold in damaged condition in 1866 to William L. Trenholm and Theodore D. Wagner, associates of John Fraser and Company, the South's largest blockade-running house. During a 1978 restoration workers found a cannonball hole in one of its ceiling beams, and more holes later turned up in the basement; the account of the restoration does not say what made them. After the 1886 earthquake it was tied together with iron rods hidden behind ornamental lion heads.
The bombardment of the city itself lasted about 545 days. Civil War News counts more than 12,300 shells fired into Charleston, falling on more than 260 of those days; it gives 587 days for the siege as a whole.
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