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

Tag: Older Women Writers

  • 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…

  • The Time Between “West” and “East”

    The problem with the archaeological chronological approach to history is that many different years/artifacts demand our attention at once. One often has to sort out what era two things laying side by side in the dirt are from. So, as mentioned, I am doing the two Canterbury buildings more or less together. The building we…

  • Some interesting sites….

    From time to time, I plan to post the links to sites that have popped up on my newsfeed, Facebook page, or sent to me by friends who know my interests…mostly St. Charles Historical Society fellow researchers…one who also has family in early Charleston…small world. A Grad Student Found the Largest Known Slave Auction in…

  • Finding myself at Canterbury House…

    One thing about historical research; it rarely sticks to the rules. Not even one as simple as simply starting at now and digging down in time. After another round of dithering, I decided I will have to work on The Canterbury House complex as a whole and start with the first building built in 1970,…

  • 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…

  • Land if you can find it…

    I began researching Charleston the old-fashioned way…the way I learned to do it at the St. Charles archives…the earliest timeframe first. Before settling on my block in Charleston as my home base, I began to accumulate copies online of old maps. I am going to share an old one here out of chronological sequence (and…

  • First, getting the lay of the land…

    My first visit to Charleston, before moving here three years later, just happened to be during Hurricane Matthew. My son and his family had recently moved to Mt. Pleasant, and it was their first hurricane. They asked the local old-timers on their street what to do. They did what they said…battened down the hatches and…

  • Out my back window…

    What really jolted me into thinking I had to research something on Charleston, too, was this: My apartment is on the back side of 165 Market overlooking the parking lot. After my family unloaded the U-Haul and I shuffled things around and everybody left and I had had enough, I sank down into a living…

  • Where I am in Time and Space

    After reading the easily available books…the “low hanging fruit,” I found myself searching for information on my part of Charleston…which led to an epiphany. It was incredibly simple…why not just dig down on the block I now live on…see what happened in this block and the ones across from the four streets…now my neighborhood….my exact…