Category: History

The first Catholic cathedral in the South was begun in #Charleston in 1850, with a brownstone, Gothic Revival design by Irish-born architect Patrick Keely of Brooklyn, New York. The church was finished an consecrated in 1854 as the Cathedral of St. John an St. Finbar, but was destroyed seven years later in a great fire that swept the city in 1861. Keely was called on again to design a replacement structure on the same site, but it was nearly 30 years later. Charleston’s fortunes were decimated by the Civil War, the the Catholic diocese had barely enough money to build at all, and the replacement church, named the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist was constructed piece-meal over 17 years and after Keely’s death in 1896. Consecrated in 1907, the cathedral opened unfinished, lacking a steeple that  cost too much, and for more than a century, it was a flat-topped structure until the current steeple was finally completed in 2010. We go past the church on my tour on most days, and I point out that my parents were married in the structure. <img.src=”Charleston Architecture” alt=”Cathedral of St. John the Baptist”

At the corner of Broad and East Bay streets in #Charleston #SC, the details of the scenic 1853 building are exquisite and eye-catching. The building was created as a bank by the same man that many believe Margaret Mitchell fashioned her character of Rhett Butler in “Gone With The Wind”, whose real name was George Alfred Trenholm. Trenholm’s building was in use as a bank well into the 21st century, when it was at last converted into a restaurant and condominiums. But the classic details still adorn the old bank and provide a glimpse of what customers saw when entering more than 150 years ago. <img.src=”Charleston Architecture” alt=”Number One Broad Street”

Many of the #historic grave stones in the burial ground of the First Baptist Church in #CharlestonSC are leaning up against the north wall of the property – and there’s an interesting reason why. The lot was purchased in 1696 by a group that moved to the city from Kittery, Maine. At that time, Maine was part of the Massachusetts colony, and the group from Kittery were being persecuted by the Massachusetts Puritans for religious beliefs that ran counter to those accepted in the colony. The people in the group called themselves Antipedobaptists, believing that infants did not have the capability to choose to be baptized and that baptism  into Christianity had to be a conscious adult choice. The Puritans reacted harshly, so the group moved to Carolina, as the colony was then called, which offered  freedom from persecution for all beliefs at part of its colonial constitution. The group built a small wooden meeting house on a lot they bought on #Church Street, which was surrounded by a small graveyard. As the years progressed, the group changed its name to Anabaptists and then Baptists, and grew in numbers. Eventually the old structure was replaced with a church in the 1740’s, and the current church on the site added in 1822. Because the newer building required a much larger footprint on the small lot, the church was built on old grave sites, and the stones moved to the wall to remember this buried beneath. <img.src=”Charleston Historic Sites” alt=”First Baptist Church”