“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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The Brotherhood Gospel Singers of Mt. Pleasant were organized in 1977 from the members of several church denominations in the Mt. Pleasant area. The Gospel Singers perform a style of unaccompanied...
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During the 1920s, the crop that a sharecropper planted was often controlled by the market to which he sold it. Many sharecroppers' wives were able to find a market for some of the vegetables from...
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One of the more unusual agricultural ventures in South Carolina has been the successful tea plantation located in Summerville. Here in the Pinehurst Tea Gardens are the fragile tea plants in the...
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Charleston County, east of Meggett, May 1936. The caption on the photo states this is the, "Packing shed on the farm of Chas. E. Gibson, truck farmer, morning scene, crating cabbage as it is cut and...
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A Native American family near Summerville uses a sorghum cane grinder in their yard. Photograph by Marion Post, January 1939, for the Farm Security Administration. Courtesy of the South Caroliniana...
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William May Wightman (1808-1882) was chosen as the Bishop of the Southern Methodist Episcopal Church in 1866, after a distinguished career as an educator and Methodist minister. Educated at the...
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John Wesley (1703-1791), the founder of the Methodist Church, was in South Carolina only briefly, but the denomination he founded has had a profound effect on the province and state. From a small...
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Thomas Sumter (1732-1832) was, at his death, the last surviving general of the Revolutionary Army. Born in Charlottesville, Virginia, he fought in the French and Indian Wars as a Virginia militia man...
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William Loughton Smith (1758-1812) was one of the leading Federalists in South Carolina in the early national period. Educated in schools in London, he studied law at the Middle Temple and returned to...
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A former slave who became a state legislator and U.S. Congressman, Robert Smalls (1839-1915) was born in Beaufort, and moved with his master to Charleston in 1851. During the Civil War, he was pressed...
