“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 growing pressures brought to bear against legal segregation by the federal court system, that culminated in the 1954 Supreme Court decision in "Brown v. The Board of Education" of Topeka, Kansas...
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The WPA undertook large, as well as small, construction projects, and the character of some of their projects began to change in 1939 and 1940, as the nation turned its attention to the war that had...
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A WPA nurse's aid and a county health doctor give an inoculation against typhoid to a small African-American patient in Charleston. Photo by Wilson, WPA. Courtesy of the South Caroliniana Library.
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Billy Sunday meeting in Charleston, October 25, 1923, "Charleston Evening Post." Many people think of the 1920s as a period devoted to pleasure, in which jazz, the dance named The Charleston...
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A special issue of the "Charleston Evening Post," June 28, 1926, welcoming the labor unions to a convention and proclaiming South Carolina supportive of labor. This newspaper is unusual, both for the...
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Although this photograph of Battery Jasper, located several hundred yards east of Fort Moultrie, was taken in the late 1890s, it shows the construction of the coastal defense system around the fort...
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The advent of a new century made many leaders of the South begin to talk of a New South, where industry and diversity would end the poverty and backwardness that had characterized too much of the...
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Scarcely had the city of Charleston recovered from the 1886 earthquake than the entire coast, including Charleston, was struck by a devastating hurricane in 1893. It created extensive damage in the...
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Hundreds of people were left homeless by the destruction of the 1886 earthquake. Others feared to stay in their homes lest there should be another quake, or weakened walls collapse. Here, families...
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The force of the 1886 Charleston earthquake knocked this train from its tracks. Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.
