Finding "My" Charleston…Digging down on the block I live on…to see what I can find.

Category: North of Broad history

  • The Who, When, and Why there was a Church and Graveyard under my Parking Lot

    I wrote two posts on this blog back in July on the graveyard under the parking lot of Canterbury House at the corner of Market and Archdale in old town Charleston, SC where I now live. I wrote several posts after that…trying to stay within my stated framework…digging down on the history of this one…

  • Catching up with other things…Hurricane Hugo 1989

    Late on the night of September 21, 1989, Hurricane Hugo ripped through Charleston, unleashing 138-mile-per-hour winds and 20-foot tidal surges. Just as the violent swirl of wind, rain, and devastation threatened to completely overwhelm, the eye of the storm passed over and an eerie quiet settled on the coast. In his path of destruction, Hugo…

  • The Cemetery in the Parking Lot…

    First, Dr. Sally Lorbach, Executive Director of Canterbury House, ended her brief history of the building of Canterbury in our monthly newsletter in 2022, with a surprise…for me, anyway…I will quote her: “A couple of interesting facts about Canterbury House property prior to its construction… The last post was about the building of Canterbury’s new…

  • The Context for building “East”, 1991-2000

    The 1994 plan to build Saks Fifth Avenue at Market and King became a catalyst to upgrade the neighborhood, as we saw in the last post. I had learned of the plan while browsing through the local newspaper, The Post and Courier’s on-line archives. Continuing to browse, I found articles for 1996-2000…It was only in…

  • The 1994 Saks Fifth Avenue project changed everything

    Saks Fifth Avenue decided to build a new store in old Charleston, SC. At the corner of King and Market…of course. King Street, for other non-Charlestonians, is the old and still thriving business district…more later…What wasn’t so apparent was that Saks would commission a complete and thorough archaeological and social dig into the area they…

  • Narrowing in…

    So, now I had an overview, a lay of the land…as it were. And I had already decided to narrow in on my block as a focal point. But first a few issues: Research When I was researching local history in St. Charles, MO, I was working in an old archive…so I could physically delve…