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. Furman University brought its record to bear against the first team ever fielded by South Carolina College (USC), battling for the title of state champio...
Dec 15, 2023•32 min
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 gardener named John Watson developed the site as South Carolina’s first commercial nursery, cultivating both native and exotic plants for sale. The war d...
Dec 01, 2023•36 min
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.
Nov 17, 2023•33 min
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 Atlantic Ocean to the Appalachian Mountains. On the next episode of Charleston Time Machine, we’ll explore the forces driving this historic bargain, parse ...
Nov 09, 2023•31 min
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, Francis’s wife, Ann, quit the property and withdrew into a life of religious introspection that lead to suicide. Petit Versailles disappeared during th...
Oct 27, 2023•28 min
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 and why the earthworks were dismantled have baffled generations of historians and inspired competing theories. On the next episode of Charleston Time M...
Oct 13, 2023•36 min
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 later a Cuban consular office in Charleston between 1795 and 1959 provides framework for tracking the rise and fall of forgotten trade routes that bro...
Sep 29, 2023•29 min
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 have embraced and expanded the concept of Charleston’s “French Quarter” over the past half-century, but few recall the curious circumstances of its creat...
Sep 15, 2023•27 min
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, vacant marshland, to a thriving community atop a mountain of dredge spoil, illustrates the shifting dynamics of tidal forces and human engineering that...
Sep 01, 2023•32 min
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 investment. Details of the modification and eventual acceptance of Champneys’s Row in the 1780s illuminate an important moment in the history of Charlest...
Aug 11, 2023•30 min
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 witness to his tumultuous experience. On the next episode of Charleston Time Machine, we’ll trace the dramatic rise and fall and rehabilitation of both J...
Aug 04, 2023•26 min
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 popularity of swimming costumes in the nineteenth century did not eradicate skinny-dipping, however. Poor people and those bereft of modesty continued to sw...
Jul 21, 2023•33 min
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. The most modest members of the genteel set drove bathing machines into the frothy surf, while bolder swimmers scandalized their neighbors by shedding t...
Jul 14, 2023•21 min
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 Mazyck before Thomas Gadsden sold it to Captain George Anson of the Royal Navy. Anson’s tenure defined the property for decades, and the tidal beachfront k...
Jun 30, 2023•25 min
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 sultry summers more bearable and encouraged the influx of tourists and new residents. In the next episode of Charleston Time Machine, we’ll crank up the ...
Jun 16, 2023•29 min
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 enjoyed little more than squatter’s rights for the next 162 years. The island’s colonial legacy, mis-remembered by later generations, precluded the possi...
Jun 02, 2023•29 min
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 “Celestials,” South Carolina planters soon rejected the premise. Four years later, William Ah Sang, a connoisseur of Asian tea, became Charleston’s fi...
May 19, 2023•34 min
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 the turn of the nineteenth century. Subsequent wharf construction and landfill obscured the site’s colorful history, but the proposed redevelopment of ...
May 05, 2023•22 min
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 growing community. On April 21st, Charleston Time Machine will recall the library’s memorial efforts of the 1940s and the changes wrought in later de...
Apr 21, 2023•24 min
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 early residents to use an alternative, long-forgotten market site prior to 1735.
Apr 07, 2023•36 min
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 conductor in the Palmetto City that continued until her death in 1919.
Mar 24, 2023•21 min
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’Sullivan as a stoic Irishman struggling within an Anglocentric framework, we might lift the veil shrouding his enigmatic story and expand a curious narrative...
Mar 10, 2023•31 min
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 February 24th, Charleston Time Machine will profile the life and times of Margaret Daniel, one of the most interesting free women of color in Charleston’s pa...
Feb 24, 2023•30 min
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 explore the brief careers of the city’s first Black detectives and the political forces that ended their employment.
Feb 10, 2023•22 min
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 a series of hurricanes in the early 1700s, it was substantially rebuilt several times and finally leveled after the American Revolution. We’ll trace ...
Jan 27, 2023•35 min
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, across the first bridge connecting the city to the Parish of St. Andrew. We’ll explore the commercial roots of a nine-mile path that evolved into a vital t...
Jan 13, 2023•28 min
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 against their authority, while enslaved people feared violent rebukes of their festive joy. Conversations about the history of Christmas in the South b...
Dec 16, 2022•24 min
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 verdant lots. Economic gloom eventually crushed the corporate scheme, but the footprint of the circular neighborhood survived and evolved into the moder...
Dec 02, 2022•29 min
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 the forested landscape, the grid of streets and lots created 350 years ago framed the growth of Charleston and continue to shape the way residents and...
Nov 18, 2022•34 min
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 1672 paid Etiwan Indians to abandon the land between the rivers Ashley and Cooper. The Charleston Time Machine explores the context and the evidence o...
Nov 04, 2022•34 min
