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. Enslavers who fell behind on fees could forfeit the person to the city, which could put them to work or sell them and keep the money. The place was known by a euphemism, the Sugar House. The property began in 1738 as housing for poor white residents, according to the city's plaque.
An 1806 ordinance limited a flogging to 20 lashes, no more than twice a week, and a standard flogging cost 25 cents. A treadmill was added in 1825; it held up to 24 people, who climbed it in three-minute turns for as long as eight hours a day. Denmark Vesey was held at the Work House in 1822, and in 1849 Nicholas Kelly led prisoners in a revolt there and was later hanged.
An 1838 narrative by a man who had escaped slavery, printed in the abolitionist paper The Emancipator, described the Sugar House to Northern readers. The building was badly damaged in the earthquake of 31 August 1886 and was never rebuilt. The site stood as an empty lot with little to mark it until the City of Charleston unveiled a plaque there on 13 July 2022.
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32.7786, -79.9364
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