Charleston Time Machine

Today we’re going to travel back in Lowcountry history to explore the roots of a site in urban Charleston called Vendue Range.  Almost everybody who’s been to Charleston in the past twenty-odd years has probably visited Vendue Range, but the small site may not have made much of an impression besides serving as the path to the popular splash fountain in Waterfront Park.  Most visitors are a bit confused by the street’s odd name, and I’ll bet very few locals know much about the origins of this Charleston landmark.

In our last episode, we talked about history of the Charleston park called Marion Square from the early 1700s through the American Civil War, so let’s resume the narrative with the Confederate evacuation of Charleston in February of 1865.

Today we’re going to explore the history of a specific piece of property in urban Charleston called Marion Square. I’m sure most of you know the piece of land I’m talking about, but in case you’re new to the Lowcountry, we’ll begin with the basics.

Today we’re going to travel back in Lowcountry history to explore the life story of a man who lived in the Charleston area in the eighteenth century and today is remembered by very few people. I’m talking about a man named Thomas Grimball, who was born in rural South Carolina in 1744 and died in Charleston in 1783. Never heard of him? Don’t worry, you’re not alone.

I’ve been collecting information about the history of bicycles in our community for several years now, and almost all of the information I’ve gathered comes from old Charleston newspapers. At first I wasn’t even looking for information about this topic. I was actually browsing through some post-Civil-War newspapers a few years back, looking for facts to use in a program about Civil Rights history, when I happened to stumble into a very brief description of the first bicycle in the Lowcountry, which appeared on streets of downtown Charleston on the 14th of February 1869.

If you want to understand the expansion of South Carolina in the first half of the eighteenth century, or if you simply want to learn about the roots of our state’s German population, you need to hear this story, so stick around.

In the past two episodes we’ve focused on the “normal” legal parameters that shaped the lives of women in early South Carolina, but the legal rights and “disabilities” of enslaved women, free women of color, and Native American women in early South Carolina were not quite the same as those of their free white counterparts.

In our last episode, we began to survey the rights and “disabilities” (to use an old legal term) that framed the lives of women in the first century of South Carolina. In this episode we consider the antiquated options for marriage dissolution and explore the precarious legal existence of widows, with examples from the lives of real women to illustrate our points.

This week we’re traveling back in Lowcountry history to talk about women. Every March we celebrate women’s history month, and in the past I’ve presented some programs on various aspects of this topic around the community. Rather than profiling the lives of famous South Carolina women, or talking about famous events in local women’s history, I’ve taken a different tack and tried to focus on the bigger picture, and to include the voices of obscure women.

Today we’re going to travel back in Lowcountry history in search of something to drink. Time travel can make a body thirsty, you know. Let’s imagine that we’re traveling back to colonial South Carolina, that is, sometime between the arrival of the first European settlers here in 1670 to the 1770s, the era of the American Revolution.