Irish immigrants who adhered to the Catholic faith were not free exercise their religion in South Carolina until several years after the American Revolution. In the years preceding the War of Independence, however, a handful of documents point to the existence of an “Irish Church” in Mr. Mazyck’s Pasture, just outside the boundaries of urban Charleston. In the next episode of Charleston Time Machine, we’ll explore clues pointing to the location and purpose of this forgotten institution, the identity of its visitors, and its connection to the more-famous “Liberty Tree” and the revolutionary “Sons of Liberty.”

Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield was born into slavery in Mississippi but gained freedom and education in Philadelphia. Her fine voice launched a musical career in the 1850s that took her across America, Britain, and to an audience with Queen Victoria. The “Black Swan” was a pioneering celebrity, and Charleston audiences eager to hear her voice packed several local concerts here in the winter of 1873.

Enslaved men in early South Carolina routinely shaved and coiffed their White owners. As the population of “free persons of color” swelled after the American Revolution, Black barbers in Charleston opened segregated shops catering to White customers. Desegregation altered that tradition in the twentieth century, but modern Black barber shops continue a tangled thread of shared history from our colonial past.

For more than a century, free people of African descent in the Palmetto State were required to pay a special "poll" or "head" tax every year to maintain their freedom. The amount of the tax and the range of exemptions changed over the years, and its application spread outward from Charleston as the state's population expanded in the nineteenth century.

Read more: https://www.ccpl.org/charleston-time-machine/south-carolinas-capitation-tax-free-people-color-1756-1864

To commemorate its fifth anniversary, Dr. Nic pauses the Time Machine for a brief review and progress report. Tune-in for an informal, behind-the-scenes chat about the path and process of the first 222 episodes and hear news about the future of CCPL's local-history podcast.

In December 1766, a man reported the theft of his wallet while passing through a crowd of enslaved people listening to a “banjer” playing on the waterfront of urban Charleston. A close reading of his description of the incident identifies clues that illuminate its context and help us reimagine a forgotten aspect of South Carolina’s musical heritage.

The declaration of war between England and Spain in 1702 provoked anxiety in South Carolina about the security of Charleston. The capital's waterfront fortifications provided some protection against invasion, but the rest of the town was undefended. After an offensive expedition failed to capture Spanish St. Augustine, the provincial government elected to build an earthen wall and moat around Charleston’s urban core.

In the decades after the founding of Charleston in 1670, more than a dozen tribes of indigenous people across the Lowcountry interacted with the growing population of White settlers and enslaved Africans. Disease, warfare, and displacement gradually reduced their numbers, however, and the first people of the Lowcountry were virtually extinct by the middle of the eighteenth century. https://www.ccpl.org/charleston-time-machine/first-people-south-carolina-lowcountry

For more than three centuries, the government of South Carolina has used a ceremonial sword to represent the state’s military strength and civil authority. The original “sword of state” disappeared from the state house in 1941, however, and its theft is now a cold case of historical proportions.

A Charleston law of 1793 required the proprietors of pubs and barrooms to assist physicians attempting to revive the bodies of “apparently dead” persons lingering in a state of “suspended animation.” This medical endeavor, based on cutting-edge science of the day, involved procedures both ghoulish and comical that blazed a path towards the modern techniques of resuscitation.