Charleston Time Machine

Can you imagine navigating the streets and roads of Charleston County between dusk and dawn without the aid of street lamps? The earliest inhabitants of this area relied on moonlight to guide their steps at night, but a campaign to provide nocturnal illumination commenced in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. The number of street lamps fueled by whale oil, then manufactured gas, then electricity gradually increased over the decades, establishing the comforting but unnatural glow that brightens the night sky over modern Charleston.

Thanksgiving, an American holiday rooted in harvest celebrations, acknowledges the bounty of food so many of us take for granted. This tradition in South Carolina recalls the meals shared by English adventurers who landed at Albemarle Point in 1670. They arrived with modest supplies of perishable provisions and planned to sow fresh crops immediately, but a series of misfortunes quickly eroded their food security. The survival of the infant colony depended on contributions from hospitable Native Americans who sustained the hungry immigrants during a season of need.

The place-name “Charleston Common” applies to a large swath of land reserved for public use since 1735. Conscious that the provincial capital lacked a traditional English common, South Carolina’s colonial government designated approximately eighty-five acres abutting the Ashley River for the perpetual use of all inhabitants. Municipal leaders violated that trust through a series of questionable sales, however, leaving just fifteen acres of the forgotten common at three sites now identified as Colonial Lake, Moultrie Playground, and Horse Lot Park.

The trial of Hispanic carpenter Joseph Lortia, accused of confederating with pirates aboard the Cuban schooner Nuestra Señora, unfolded through a series of episodes within South Carolina’s executive Council Chamber in July 1734. Conflicting testimony from the survivors recounted Lortia’s odd behavior at sea and challenged Anglo-American judges to determine the measure of his guilt. After settling the carpenter’s fate in court, Governor Robert Johnson restored the vessel’s remaining treasure to the widowed Doña Petrona de Castro, who sailed from Charleston with her newborn child.

The young Cuban widow, Doña Petrona de Castro, suffered in the shadows during the first half of this story, but moved to center stage after the bloodied vessel Nuestra Señora docked in Charleston. When her disheveled treasure came ashore in late June 1734, the pregnant lady’s plight attracted the personal attention of South Carolina’s respected royal governor. Under his personal supervision, members of the provincial government secured the señora’s private property and initiated steps designed to render solace to their distressed Hispanic guest.

The terrified survivors of a murderous mutiny aboard the Cuban schooner Nuestra Señora sailed from the Bahamas under the command of a hired English pilot in mid-June 1734. They sought to return to Havana with no questions asked, but the crew’s curious behavior alerted the new captain to mortal danger ahead. A secret pact forged in desperation spawned a violent counter-mutiny that spilled more blood and further depleted the crew, forcing the weakened schooner to make an emergency detour to the British port of Charles Town (now Charleston), South Carolina.

An affluent Cuban merchant and his young pregnant wife set sail from Havana in May 1734 on a peaceful voyage to Hispaniola aboard their private schooner, but a piratical mutiny at sea claimed many lives and set the vessel adrift. Aided by a passing Bahamian mariner, the Nuestra Señora de la Concepçion came to Charleston in distress and gained protection from local authorities. Interviews with the survivors sparked a formal trial that imposed British law on foreign visitors and delivered resolution to a grieving Hispanic widow and her newborn daughter.

Line Street isn’t the most glamorous thoroughfare in the City of Charleston, but it recalls a significant episode in the community’s history. During the darkest days of the War of 1812 with Britain, thousands of men and women—both enslaved and free—rushed to construct a zigzag line of fortifications across the peninsula between the rivers Ashley and Cooper to protect the city against the threat of hostile invasion. The peace of 1815 rendered their work superfluous, but the erasure of the “lines” after the Demark Vesey Affair of 1822 left a permanent record of the war on the urban landscape.

Just beyond the boundaries of urban Charleston, a hundred-acre pasture straddling modern Meeting Street hosted a variety of public events during the second half of the eighteenth century. Crowds flocked to Newmarket, as the site was called, to toll their livestock, to watch racehorses traverse a one-mile oval, to witness the auction of large gangs of enslaved people, and to see Native American visitors camping beyond the pale of South Carolina’s colonial capital. In this episode of the Charleston Time Machine, we’ll explore the tangled history of one of the community’s earliest and least-remembered suburbs.

From the dawn of the Carolina Colony to the early twentieth century, residents of rural Charleston County enjoyed no police protection beyond their own vigilance. Ancient customs, imported from England and transformed by the institution of slavery, obliged free men to patrol their own neighborhoods on horseback, apprehend lawbreakers, and deliver them to justice. A paid rural police force gradually emerged in the early 1900s, fostered by the proliferation of automobiles, and eventually led to the creation of the modern Sheriff’s Department in 1991.

Shortly after the creation of the nation’s first municipal orphanage in 1790, the citizens of Charleston contributed generously to the construction of a large and well-documented edifice on Boundary (now Calhoun) Street that housed thousands of children between 1794 and 1951. The location of the institution’s initial home, visited by President George Washington in May 1791, is far less remembered, however. A search for clues to the location of Charleston’s first Orphan House leads to a forgotten Pinckney family property in the heart of Colleton Square.

Colleton Square is a place-name rarely heard in Charleston today, but millions of people tramp through its historic boundaries every year. Granted to an aristocratic English family in 1681, the creek-side tract was subdivided in the 1740s by investors who envisioned a residential and commercial neighborhood fronting a working canal. Their efforts flourished after the removal of intrusive fortifications, but the subsequent transformation of the canal into Market Street at the dawn of the nineteenth century obscured the character and identity of the colonial square.

During their year-long incarceration, the criminal trio accused of plotting to blow up Charleston’s powder magazine had ample time to argue among themselves and plan their escape from the insecure jail. Only two of the villains survived to face the king’s law in the spring of 1732, prompting suspicion of foul play at the prison. In the dramatic conclusion of this explosive story, we’ll learn who escaped the gallows and why the government’s efforts to close the dangerous magazine dragged on to the summer of 1746.

Every successful thief (and screenwriter) knows that a daring robbery requires a powerful and well-coordinated distraction. That criminal axiom was evident in Charleston during the spring of 1731, when a gang of house-breakers allegedly planned to blow up the town’s brick magazine used for the storage of gunpowder. Authorities foiled the plot by arresting and executing the villains, but the inherently dangerous magazine in modern Cumberland Street persisted. Although citizens campaigned to move the powder elsewhere, a suite of issues delayed the completion of a more remote magazine until 1746.

The earliest recorded performances of drama, dance, and opera in Charleston occurred during the late winter of 1735, when a group of thespians advertised a brief series of ticketed events at a familiar venue. Their stage was a multipurpose room within a tavern at the northeast corner of Broad and Church Streets, which South Carolina’s provincial government rented periodically for judicial proceedings. These “Court Room” events were not the first dramatic productions in the colony, but they formed an innovative prelude to the creation of Charleston’s first purpose-built theater.

Charlestonians got their first taste of Hawaiian culture in December 1901, when a band of Pacific Islanders represented the newly-acquired territory at the South Carolina Inter-State and West Indian Exposition. Local audiences were entranced by their mellifluous songs and the rhythmic gestures of scantily-clad hula dancers swaying to curious sounds produced by strumming ukeleles and guitars played in a most unconventional manner. After performing for segregated audiences—Black and White—in the Palmetto City, the roving Hawaiians trekked inland to impart a lasting influence on the vernacular music of the American South.

The site known as Union Pier has been a transportation crossroads for centuries past and potentially continuing well into the future. Now slated for redevelopment, the seventy-acre industrial complex on the Cooper River waterfront includes the vestiges of historic trails used by earlier generations to facilitate access between land and water via streets, alleys, ferries, streetcars, and freight trains. On the next episode of Charleston Time Machine, we’ll review the accretion and deletion of various pathways and consider their cumulative role in shaping the future landscape.

Frolicking in the ocean surf is today a familiar activity along South Carolina beaches, but recreational swimming was a novelty in centuries past. “Surf bathing” first achieved local popularity on Sullivan’s Island in the early 1800s, when the proprietors of oceanfront resorts began providing amenities like “bathing machines” to encourage shy swimmers. While the dearth of appropriate swimwear rendered skinny dipping a constant complaint, a rising tide of ocean tourism during the nineteenth century drew legions of Lowcountry residents and visitors to the island’s beautiful front beach.

Have you ever wondered how South Carolinians paid for goods and services before the advent of the U.S. dollar? The pound sterling formed the basis of their accounts until the 1790s, but the economic realities of frontier life obliged early Carolinians to embrace monetary tools and strategies that deviated from British traditions. For more than a century, inhabitants of the Palmetto State used foreign coins, paper bills, promissory notes, and sophisticated credit schemes that fueled upward mobility and set the stage for the financial systems we use today.

Phebe Fletcher was an intriguing woman of eighteenth-century Charleston whose unconventional lifestyle earned both derision and respect from her neighbors. Born to a respectable family of unknown origin, she was allegedly “seduced” from the bounds of traditional feminine “virtue” and obliged to associate with “vicious” persons, Black and White, to forge an independent career in a patriarchal society. She acquired a colorful reputation as a woman of dubious morals, but Charlestonians long remembered and praised the benevolent care she rendered to ailing soldiers during the American Revolution.