Charleston Time Machine

The historic landscape of urban Charleston contains several large unmarked public cemeteries that are filled with the remains of thousands of nameless bodies interred by local government. Those buried between 1672 and 1794 are contained within a well-settled neighborhood on the city’s west side, where the forgotten graves were built over and ignored by successive generations.

Although the telegraph is functionally irrelevant in the 21st century, its legacy is more important to our modern lifestyles than we realize. The advent of the telegraph in the 1840s sparked a bold new era of telecommunication that connected South Carolina to an international conversation and brough Charleston “one line” in the winter of 1848.

The identity of the author of a well-known Charleston poem from 1769 is obscure, but clues imbedded in the manuscript suggest a candidate whose unfamiliar name recalls a distant era of local maritime history, and whose biography provides a colorful backdrop for the creation of a famously bold description of the colonial capital.

Granville Bastion, a brick structure mounting a dozen cannon, stood at the south end of East Bay Street from its creation in 1697 until its partial demolition in the 1780s. A new investigation of its genesis reveals that South Carolina’s oldest English fortification was originally conceived as one corner of a four-bastioned structure that was never completed.

Since the first bookmobiles hit the road in Charleston County in 1931, generations of drivers have carried books to remote corners of the county to foster a love of learning outside of traditional libraries. As CCPL’s thirteenth “mobile library” prepares to continue this ninety-year-old tradition, let’s review a brief history of the county’s books (and more) on wheels.

Dedicated recreational space was not part of the vocabulary of urban planning in colonial South Carolina, so early Charlestonians were obliged to borrow private land for use as public greens. The earliest evidence of a shared space for sport and leisure in our community points to a forgotten suburban site once known as the Bowling Green.

Charles Shinner garnered prestige and wealth after his arrival in South Carolina, but the enforcement of a controversial British law in late 1765 triggered a tidal wave of political resistance that undermined his life and career. During his final years, Shinner buried his wife and children while fighting a losing battle to defend his character against vengeful political assassination.

Charles Shinner was an obscure Irish lawyer whose wealthy English client nominated him to be Chief Justice of South Carolina. He and his young wife arrived in Charleston in 1762 and settled into a prosperous life. In the face of growing political opposition in the mid-1760s, the defects of Shinner’s education soon undermined his career and endangered his family.

Catherine was cheated out of freedom by an unscrupulous master, but she boldly asserted her independence and found an attorney to lobby for her emancipation. While they petitioned for justice, Catherine’s predicament was confounded by unresponsive litigants and the shifting sands of statute law. Legal manumission remained elusive, but she gained a measure of freedom in her later years.

In the early 1800s, a trio of French Charlestonians agreed to allow an enslaved woman named Catherine to purchase her own freedom. After laboring for many months, Catherine amassed the required sum and paid her master, Antoine Plumet. Rather than setting her free, Plumet defrauded Catherine and died without honoring their bargain. Undeterred, Catherine asserted her freedom until the law intervened.