Charleston Time Machine

Charleston’s historic East Bay Street began in the 1680s as a public wharf or quay adjacent to the tidal mudflats of the Cooper River. To improve the logistics of maritime commerce and to protect the adjacent buildings, South Carolina’s provincial government initiated a public-private partnership that triggered the evolution of the broad waterfront landscape we see today.

What happens when politicians refuse to concede defeat and won’t leave office? During a period of smoldering racial and political tensions in post-Civil War Charleston, the city’s incumbent mayor and aldermen created a six-month legal soap opera by repeatedly refusing to heed the results of a municipal election and ignoring court orders to vacate their offices. https://www.ccpl.org/charleston-time-machine/charlestons-contested-election-1868 #chsnews #chsreads

In early twentieth-century South Carolina, conservative White men manipulated the state’s legal framework to silence dissenting voices. The national campaign to dismantle barriers to Black suffrage gained steam in the 1930s and gradually undermined local traditions of White supremacy. Before the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s, a series of legislative changes unlocked the door to Black voting.

Read more: https://www.ccpl.org/charleston-time-machine/decline-voting-suppression-south-carolina-1900-1965

In post-Civil War South Carolina, White conservatives regarded suffrage as a privilege that the state’s Black majority did not deserve. The destructive war was followed by a fierce partisan battle over the fundamental right to vote. At the end of this violent and bigoted struggle, the Palmetto State adopted legal barriers that silenced the political voice of its Black citizens.

Learn more: https://www.ccpl.org/charleston-time-machine/rise-voter-suppression-south-carolina-1865-1896

To secure the natural landscape for colonial settlement, South Carolina’s early government offered bounty money to white, black, and Native American hunters for destroying “beasts of prey” that menaced settlers, crops, and livestock. Commencing in the coastal Lowcountry in 1693 and spreading westward to the Piedmont, bounty hunters pursued panthers, wolves, bears, and bobcats to extirpation by 1790.

The records of early South Carolina contain thousands of personal names applied to many generations of people held in legal bondage. By sampling this body of names, we detect trends and evidence of resistance that help us understand their experiences and acknowledge the personal identities of the men and women who once formed the state’s enslaved majority.

More: https://www.ccpl.org/charleston-time-machine/recall-their-names-personal-identity-enslaved-south-carolinians

The house of Nicholas Trott, one of the most important figures in colonial South Carolina, disappeared more than two centuries ago, but its former site is now part of a popular venue. The discovery of a trash pit in what was once Trott’s back yard unearthed curious artifacts that provide a new window into the narrative of early Charleston.

Did South Carolina's cantankerous Chief Justice Nicholas Trott (1663–1740) really live in a small house on the south side of Cumberland Street, or is there some flaw in this popular tale? The definitive answer lies buried in the archival record, where we find the details of a romantic story spanning 300 years.

The roots of voter discrimination in South Carolina are embedded in colonial-era traditions of exclusion that continued through the Civil War. The long campaign to establish the right for black men to vote in the Palmetto State finally succeeded in 1867, but that seminal event sparked a racially-charged backlash that reverberated through the generations to the present.

The City of Charleston addressed rising volumes of garbage in the early 20th century with traditional methods of open dumping and the new science of incineration. The advent of new landfill practices in the 1950s ended municipal trash burning, but creative recycling preserved one historic structure and smokestacks that anchor an important part of the city’s trashy history.