Just a three-hour drive from Charlotte, downtown Charleston is a destination for history buffs and anyone with a camera. Picturesque sites abound, from the pastel-colored houses along Rainbow Row to the iconic church steeples that earned Charleston the nickname “Holy City.” The buildings that house museums, shops, and restaurants, as well as the streets that connect them, are steeped in a history that spans centuries. Step away from the bustle on Broad and East Bay streets and follow Chalmers Street, one of the oldest remaining cobblestone thoroughfares in Charleston, and immerse yourself in the tangible history. It will lead you to the 1826 Fireproof Building designed by architect Robert Mills, a Charleston native who is most well-known for the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C. The Fireproof Building has survived the city’s many natural disasters, including the earthquake of 1886 and Hurricane Hugo in 1989, thanks to its unique design.
A National Historic Landmark, the Fireproof Building commands the attention of passersby on Chalmers and Meeting streets. Photography courtesy of South Carolina Historical Society
Today, the Fireproof Building is the headquarters for the South Carolina Historical Society, an organization founded in 1855. Consider the South Carolina Historical Society Museum as your starting point for any Charleston visit. Step inside and take the spiraling stone staircase to one of the museum’s six galleries filled with artifacts, manuscripts, and maps from the Society’s important Archives that tell the stories of South Carolina. Depending on which of the six galleries piques your interest, you can then embark from the Fireproof Building on foot to find your own history adventure. Read on for destinations where you can follow the city’s past from the of the early settlers to its 20th-century renaissance.
Inside the Fireproof Building, exhibits curated by the South Carolina Historical Society offer an interactive look at Lowcountry history. Photography courtesy of South Carolina Historical Society
Gallery 1 shares the experiences of residents at the start of British colonization, painting a picture of life from widely varying perspectives.
Learn the story of Rene Ravenel, a French Huguenot who settled on the Santee River. Read about Priscilla Ball, an enslaved woman living on a plantation near Charleston. See how Eliza Lucas Pinckney paved the way for establishing indigo as a major cash crop in the state, and learn about the Cassique of Kiawah, an Indigenous American chief who influenced Charleston’s present-day location.
Stroll underneath the live oaks at White Point Garden and pause to take in views of Fort Sumter to the east. photograph by Susanne Neumann/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Continue your adventure: See where the city began at White Point Garden, an expansive greenspace shaded by magnificent live oaks at the southernmost tip of the city’s peninsula that sits between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers. It was first known as Oyster Point, from the piles of sun-bleached shells left by Indigenous people. You may be surprised to learn this stretch of land wasn’t the colonists’ first choice of locations for their settlement. Nine years after building a city on the opposite side of the Ashley River, the burgeoning town moved to Oyster Point, expanding north up the peninsula over time.
Gallery 2 tracks the American Revolution and the rise of plantations and slavery through the colony. Remarkably, Charleston had the highest per capita income within the British colonies in North America. “Rice and indigo were huge crops that were making white people very, very wealthy,” says Katherine Pemberton, who works with the South Carolina 250th Commission.
In the lead up to the Revolutionary War, the city had its own tea party in December 1773 to protest British taxes, 13 days before Massachusetts’s much better known Boston Tea Party. Later in the war, British troops took the city in the Siege of Charleston, occupying it from 1780 to 1782, allowing them to control the main port for the Southern colonies.
“For so long, [Colonial history has] concentrated on the New England states,” Pemberton says, “but lost in that is the fact that South Carolina had a really strong role in the American Revolution.”
Enjoy a self-guided tour of the Exchange Building’s top two floors and a guided tour of the cellar-level Provost Dungeon. photograph by RiverNorthPhotography/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Continue your adventure: Visit the 1771 Exchange Building. Located at 122 East Bay Street, where it intersects with Broad Street, the Exchange represented the British government in colonial Charleston and played a crucial role in the city’s tea party protest in December 1773. Today it is a museum focusing on colonial Charleston and the American Revolution.
First-person accounts in Gallery 3 detail individual reflections during Charleston’s tumultuous periods of secession, war, and Reconstruction. Photography courtesy of South Carolina Historical Society
The objects in Gallery 3 tell stories of South Carolina in the 19th century. The prosperity of the state’s plantation economy, which depended on the labor of enslaved workers, ended with the Civil War.
The intersection of Meeting and Broad streets is known as Charleston’s Four Corners of Law, designated by St. Michael’s Anglican Church (pictured), the county courthouse, city courthouse, and federal courthouse. photograph by Bodhichita/iStock/Getty Images Plus
In this gallery, a display about Confederate soldier Augustine Thomas Smythe sheds light on his experiences aboard the CSS Palmetto State and from his post at the steeple of St. Michael’s Anglican Church, the recognizable white church at the corner of Broad and Meeting streets. From there, he observed attacks on Fort Sumter through the lens of a telescope.
A scrapbook of Union soldier Erastus Everson informs the story of post-war South Carolina. He worked for the Freedman’s Bureau and served as newspaper editor, and his observations provide insight into the state’s Reconstruction era.
Continue your adventure: Visit St. Michael’s Anglican Church, just down the street from the museum. Smythe’s wartime perch has survived for more than 260 years — through wars, hurricanes, and the earthquake of 1886. To dive deeper into Civil War history, you can also catch a ferry from the South Carolina Aquarium to Fort Sumter, where the first shots of the war rang out on April 12, 1861.
Learn about the regional rise of art, literature, and cuisine through an interactive touchscreen and other displays in Gallery 5. Photography courtesy of South Carolina Historical Society
Galleries 4 and 5 examine the impacts of the powerful earthquake that hit the Lowcountry in 1886 and the historic preservation and arts movements that emerged in its aftermath.
The Charleston Renaissance, roughly spanning from World War I to World War II, was a cultural movement that helped shape the city as it is today. Multiple factors spurred this renaissance, including the loss of war-torn Europe as a destination for wealthy travelers.
“Since it was a time of great change and modernization coming to a city that resisted modernization for a long time, it was an odd confluence of past and present,” Harlan Greene, a Charleston native, author, and historian, says of this period. Artists and writers reacted to this clash of old and new. Artists and writers reacted to this clash of old and new. “Trying times often bring out responses in creative people.”
Continue your adventure: Stroll along Tradd Street where artists Elizabeth O’Neill Verner and Alfred Hutty lived. Verner created etchings and drawings of local street scenes, and some of her illustrations were included in a special edition of DuBose Heyward’s book, Porgy. Just around the corner on Church Street, the setting for this book, Catfish Row still stands. DuBose and his wife, Dorothy, adapted Porgy into a play, then collaborated with brothers George and Ira Gershwin to create the opera Porgy and Bess.
“There are so many visual reminders because of the preservation efforts that began at this time. This made sure that these buildings would survive,” Greene says.
Visit the Africa to America gallery to see pieces of colonoware pottery and other artifacts. Photography courtesy of South Carolina Historical Society
Within Gallery 6, you can learn about the contributions and struggles of enslaved people in colonial South Carolina. The culture they brought from their communities in Africa included music, food, and skills that continue to be a part of South Carolina to this day. This gallery showcases artifacts from plantations and examples of the ways enslaved people used Lowcountry resources to create everyday objects, like traditional sweetgrass baskets and handmade earthenware called colonoware.
Continue your adventure: Sweetgrass basket-weaving is a 300-year-old tradition with African origins. See sweetgrass basket-weaving on the south-of-Broad side of Meeting Street as basket-weavers craft their products in real time outside of the post office and St. Michael’s Anglican Church. Before weavers begin their baskets, supplies are harvested by hand from native plants — including the long stems of bulrush and sweetgrass. Makers adds their own touches to baskets, trivets, and trays they create from the enduring African design.
Ready to map out your trip uncovering Charleston’s deep and storied past? Click here to learn more about the South Carolina Historical Society’s programming and research and to start planning how you will discover this history while out and about in the city.
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