Charleston - Low Country Style
Charleston’s Plantation Past Shapes its Present
Snuggled cozily where the Cooper and Ashley Rivers meet, Charleston made its fame and fortune from shipping crops of tobacco and rice grown on the plantations.
Southern culture began in South Carolina’s Low Country around 1670, when a small band of settlers set up shop across the Ashley River at Charles Towne Landing, now an active archeological site. Charles Towne Landing is a good place to begin a visit to modern Charleston, not only to get a sense of the size of the original settlers’ village and the stockade that enclosed it, but for the excellent museum at its visitors center.
Begin at Charles Towne Landing
Artifacts found in the ongoing excavations are not only displayed, but are interpreted in the context of their time and the segment of life or commerce they illustrate. A visit there gives a new appreciation for the rigors of the voyage to the new world, the challenges of building homes and planting crops, and the way of life that evolved as this primitive outpost grew.
A few years later these first settlers picked up everything and moved to the peninsula, where Charleston was born. It soon became a major colonial city and port due to its magnificent harbor and site at the confluence of two great rivers.
Explore the Antebellum Past
Antebellum Charleston rose with the prosperity of the plantation society and the growth of a sizeable merchant and shipping class. The enormous wealth generated by rice plantations encouraged the owners to build large mansions in the city, many of which remain today. But less affluent people also lived in the city, and they left behind an equally charming collection of homes and commercial buildings that show the full scope of the city’s lively past.
Fort Sumter, the harbor fortress where a single cannon shot loosed the four-year bloodshed of the Civil War, symbolized the end of that planter society. On Meeting Street, at Market Street, the Confederate Museum recalls that conflict. It fills the second floor of the city’s 1841 Market Building, a downtown landmark with its high portico and iron-railed double staircase.
Charleston’s Ethnic Traditions
Amid the modern crafts and souvenirs inside the market halls – which extend for several blocks – are traditions that run deep in the city: tender benne wafers to sample, pralines, and the basket weavers at work. Sweet grass baskets are as much a part of Charleston as the wrought-iron fences that enclose its gardens and dooryards, a legacy of the African slaveswho made up much of its early population. The carved cypress baskets are art treasures.
Africans were not the only ethnic group to influence Charleston’s civic personality – in fact, it had more different ethnicities that any other part of the Old South except Louisiana, an influence that shows in it cooking, as well as its buildings. Many foodies credit the early French influence with Charleston’s preoccupation with good food, and the differences between this city’s cuisine and that of its neighboring states.
Museums and historic homes are a good place to get a sense of what life was like at various periods of Charleston’s past. The 1748 Powder Magazine, the only remnant of the fort that once stood here, now houses an exhibit about early Charleston that picks up where the Charles Towne landing museum leaves off. The Heyward-Washington House, built in 1772, paints a lively picture of the sophisticated world of the pre-Civil War gentry.
For a walking tour of Charleston’s historic architecture click here.
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