TRAVEL: The Charms of Charleston, South Carolina

Explore Charleston's history, cuisine, shopping, architecture and more.

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Lifestyle

It’s riddled with quirky charms, like “front” porches on the houses’ side called “piazzas” and joggling boards, pliable wooden sitting planks for bouncing or coquettish courting.

All around town are decorative wrought-iron works, carved pineapples symbolizing hospitality, cobblestone streets, lush gardens tucked into small spaces and beautifully preserved homes. This is Charleston, South Carolina, with multiple layers and stories to tell.

And oh, the food. Prepare to indulge in endless versions of fried green tomatoes, shrimp and grits, luscious BLTs lubricated with pimento cheese, bacon bits enhancing many dishes, hush puppies, succotash, crabcakes and southern egg rolls with collard greens and tasso ham. A local, Richard Knoth, summarized, “It’s small but cosmopolitan. There are no bad restaurants.”

Preservation Prioritized

Charleston prides itself in its welcoming Southern hospitality and strong preservation ethic. Camellias and palmettos green up the city.   With a skyline of church steeples and no skyscrapers, the Federal, Greek Revival, Queen Anne and Georgian houses of the 18th and 19th centuries symbolize the city’s past as once a center of affluence. A port town established in 1670 on a peninsula between two rivers bordered by rich marshy environs, Charleston boomed by exporting rice, indigo and cotton and importing enslaved African Americans. Marauding pirates were hanged on live oaks. 

Explorations

The Museum of Charleston offers a thorough introduction to the area, from the Pleistocene epoch to Paleoindians on, from rice farming to Charleston ladies’ turkey feather fans and the sieges by the British in 1780 during the Revolutionary War and Union troops during the Civil War in 1863. 

The museum does not shy away from tumultuous periods, like enslaved people’s passage from Africa crammed in a ship’s hull that took that six weeks and the 1960s civil rights movement.

Visitors can get a peek into the 19th century life of Charleston’s wealthy by touring several grand manses like the Federal-style Joseph Manigault House. Manigault, in the French Huguenot line and one of America’s richest people of his era, made his fortune on the backs of enslaved people farming his rice plantation, symbolized by the mahogany bedposts carved as rice plants. He was so insistent on architectural symmetry in his mansion that the dining room’s parallel second door is a fake.

A transplanted Rhode Island businessman and slave trader, Nathaniel Russell built a Federal-style, neoclassical house, now restored to its 1808 grandeur of Charleston’s Golden Age. It has plaster gesso made of horsehair and glue applied to wood trim, gilded capitals, detailed decorative woodwork and a three-story, free-flying staircase, one of the few in the United States. In the “withdrawing room” women read poetry and men drank Madeira.  In the drawing room, they drew together, guides explain. 

On the town’s mansions, one visitor quipped, “These were rich people showing off to rich people.”

The Market and More

A must-do meander is a stroll through the old city market, three buildings erected in 1841 where up to 300 vendors retail eclectic local crafts like shell art, paintings, knitwear, iron work and benne wafers, a special Charleston cookie from the antebellum era.

Show-stoppers are the sweetgrass baskets woven on site by Gullah women practicing a centuries-old West African craft using sweetgrass, bulrush and palmetto.  “I learned from my grandma,” Vickie Gentile told me. The Gullah-Geechee people, who live from North Carolina to Florida, are descendants of enslaved West Africans who labored on coastal plantations.

Rich blue products pop off vendors’ tables because another traditional South Carolina product is indigo used in the 18th century to dye materials deep blue, a color prized by Europeans. Indigo grows well in South Carolina’s low country and was a staple in the export economy. Enslaved people managed and harvested the plants and extracted blue dye. Today textile artists like Arianne King Comer honor that heritage.

Shoppers can find both antiques and more modern products along King Street, the “Soho of the South,” at local boutiques like The Finicky Filly and mainstream stores like Le Creuset, Brooks Brothers and Lululemon.

The Old Exchange and Provost Dungeon, a Georgian-Palladian style, 1771 building with Romanesque arches, is a Charleston landmark, a commercial exchange and custom house of 1.5 million bricks handmade by enslaved workers.  The building has survived two cannonball attacks and many hurricanes. 

Plunging into the basement dungeon, a military prison, is an eerie adventure. Here in 1780, the British held 50 to 60 American prisoners who slept on bricks and had only one meal a day so they would be weak and docile. The then nearly pitch-black room had no air flow, fleas, ticks and high rates of dysentery and cholera. Buckets were the toilet. On a more upbeat note, Charlestonians tout that in 1791 local elites entertained George Washington on the building’s main level.

Slavery’s Story Told 

Some of the realities of slavery come to the fore at the Old Slave Mart Museum, a warehouse, pen, morgue and open-air auction complex that supported the domestic slave trade, active after 1856 as an “indoor” business because Charleston had banned street auctions. Congress prohibited trans-Atlantic slave importing in 1807. 

Here, traders “prepared” African Americans for sale by bathing and shaving them so they would look “spry and smart” and separated them by skill, gender, height and skin tone. Exhibits explain that enslaved people diked swamps and cleared forests, changing South Carolina’s landscape. In protest, some feigned hysteria, slowed down the work and mutilated themselves.  Shackles and branding irons convey some of the horrors like owners burning letters or symbols into the enslaveds’ flesh for identification and punishment.

The International African American Museum traces centuries of pain and achievement, exploring how people of the African diaspora transformed communities and left legacies of resistance and achievement, from those first enslaved to the nine 2015 murders at Mother Emanuel Church to Barack Obama to George Floyd. Africans started farming 10,000 years ago and brought spiritual traditions, food, dances, music and talents to the Americas. Over 12.5 million were kidnapped and forced into servitude in places like Charleston where they faced violence, cruelty and oppression and despite those terrors, forged new identities and fueled Southern economies. One display quotes Ron Daise, a Gullah performer: “Mine is a living culture, not one of some 200 years ago. It’s a culture that continues to shape our communities.”  

Carriage Tours

Rumbling around the city in a horse-drawn carriage is an all-time favorite and city officials lovingly praise their steeds and their care.  Many of the carriages and horses, Belgians, French Percherons and American draft horses, all in the Clydesdale family, come from Amish country. The horses have veterinary exams three times a year.

Excursions are meticulously scheduled throughout the historic district, and in accordance with local ordinances, horses are equipped with leather collection bags to maintain the area's pristine condition. If a horse's “deposit” misses the bag, the coachman-guide alerts the city’s equine sanitation crew who promptly show up to clean up.  

Knoth, with Carolina Polo, gave me a streetside farrier lesson with Marion, fondly named for Frances Marion, a South Carolina Revolutionary War hero nicknamed “the Swamp Fox.”  Knoth’s horses have an iron shoe nailed onto the hoof plus a second on top he calls “Air Jordans” made of tire rubber to absorb pounding and designed to avoid tearing up the asphalt. 

The city also has walking, bus, harbor and food tours.

Plantations once defined the Old South and several take visitors back to that time. At the Magnolia Plantation, 66 acres today down from 2,000 at its height, enslaved people grew gold rice.  My guide explained that the mansion, with an exterior of mixed concrete, mud and pebbles, was built “after the war” because Union troops burned down the former house. It has a fireplace in every room, large windows for relaxation (of the owners and guests), original heart pine floors and beds with mosquito nets. Eleanor Roosevelt visited, George Gershwin played the piano and John James Audubon drew birds here.

Under towering live oaks draped with dangling Spanish moss, the garden is designed in the picturesque style, not heavily pruned in the then-European style and features one of largest collections of camellias in the country, some planted in the mid-1800s.  On the “Slavery to Freedom” walk, guides lead visitors to four slave cabins. In the plantation’s heyday, women planted rice and men cleared swamps, dug canals and built walls.  A “nature train” takes guests through the swamp of dwarf palmettos, cypresses and long-leaf pines, to spot wood ducks, white ibises, herons and sunning alligators.

The Military, Then and Now

Charleston has military stories too. Confederate forces fired the Civil War’s first shots on Federal troops at Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor on April 12, 1861.  Earlier, in 1776, colonists inside a palmetto log fort, today’s Fort Moultrie, defeated the British Royal Navy. 

At today’s fortress-like, Romanesque-style Citadel, established in 1842, cadet-led tours describe student life there and the college’s program that educates “the whole person.”  Students whisk around in fatigues and carry their bookbag in their left hand so their right hand is always ready to salute approaching officers.

Back to the Cuisine

Charleston is a culinary playground for gourmands and nons.  A few more mainstays: she-crab soup, tomato pie, Gullah red rice, boiled peanuts, low-country boil (also called “Frogmore stew”), char-grilled oysters, oyster bisque, okra soup, buttermilk fried chicken, praline souffles and of course, stacks of mouth-watering fried green tomatoes.

Charleston is where “history meets hip,” tourism promoters say.

A Few Travel Tips

American Airlines has a non-stop flight from DCA to Charleston and United flies direct out of Dulles. Downtown Charleston has multiple hotel choices. The Ansonborough is a converted paper warehouse repurposed into a boutique hotel that has retained it thick brick masonry walls, exposed timber framing and tall ceilings. An added attraction is its speakeasy poker room hidden behind a bookcase.

The city is very walkable to many sites and eateries and has a free downtown shuttle and pedicabs.

For more information, visit: www.explorecharleston.com

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