“Charleston County and the city of Charleston, its county seat, are the most historic locations in the state.” Situated in the Lowcountry, the county serves as a popular vacation destination but also relies on the business that results from its port. The area in general serves as a large cultural and economic hub for the state.
Charleston County was founded as Charleston District in 1769, and the district became smaller after some of its lands were used to create Colleton and Berkeley counties. The county and its seat were named after King Charles II.
The city and county are saturated with Revolutionary War and Civil War history. Three signers of the United States Constitution and two famous abolitionists resided in Charleston County, and the Civil War began when soldiers fired shots from the county’s Fort Sumter.
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“M” is for Medical University of South Carolina. At the request of the Medical Society of South Carolina, the General Assembly established the Medical College of South Carolina. It opened in 1824 as a...
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“C” is for the Charleston Riot [1876]. As the crucial local, state, and national elections of 1876 approached, tensions between the races in South Carolina reached a boiling point. In Charleston black...
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The Dock Street Theater and St. Philip's Church, as they appeared in the 1940s. The parish of St. Philip's, founded in the 1680s on what is now the site of St. Michael's, was the first Anglican parish...
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The Catholic Church did not enjoy the original toleration that characterized other non-Anglican forms of worship in South Carolina. The first mass was not celebrated in Charleston until 1789. But by...
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Bishop Reverdy Ransom (seated), Mrs. Ransom, and the State Presiding Elders of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1932. Morris Brown, a free African-American, formed Charleston's Emmanuel...
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This photograph of the Circular Congregational Church was taken in the 1930s. The congregation was founded as the first Dissenter church in the colony of South Carolina in the 1680s or 1690s, and...
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James B. Edwards was a dentist before he was elected as the first post-Reconstruction Republican Governor of South Carolina in 1974 (see Inauguration Of James B. Edwards). At the end of his term as...
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The Medical College of South Carolina, postcard view in 1909. Physicians in Charleston organized a Medical Society of South Carolina in 1789, and the organization became an important promoter of many...
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Roper Hospital, named after a Charlestonian who willed extensive real estate to the Medical Society of South Carolina (see The Medical College Of South Carolina) for the establishment of a hospital...
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The Charleston Orphan House was founded in the late 18th century, but the main building pictured here was constructed between 1853 and 1855. The city abandoned the building in 1948 in favor of less...
