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We just returned from 4 days in Charleston and I wanted to thank y'all for this thread and your comments. I made a lot of notes and hardly used them because we ended up just wandering.
A few notes:
Old South Carriage Co tours - we did the haunted history night one and it was great. Inspired us to go look for John Calhoun between the cemetery and grave at St Philips
Market - yes very much a tourist trap but at least all in one spot
Transportation - we took the 211 Shuttle with CARTA around to get a feel for the city. We also utilized the bike taxis too which was actually really informative even though they aren't tours. But they were kids who grew up in the city so hello conversation.
Rodney Scott Whole Hog BBQ - well worth the ride over. Pulled pork was awesome but the banana pudding was the best I've had.
Peninsula Grill - fantastic meal, but even better bar. And the coconut cake is worth the money and calories. And I don't like coconut.
We just returned from 4 days in Charleston and I wanted to thank y'all for this thread and your comments. I made a lot of notes and hardly used them because we ended up just wandering.
A few notes:
Old South Carriage Co tours - we did the haunted history night one and it was great. Inspired us to go look for John Calhoun between the cemetery and grave at St Philips
Market - yes very much a tourist trap but at least all in one spot
Transportation - we took the 211 Shuttle with CARTA around to get a feel for the city. We also utilized the bike taxis too which was actually really informative even though they aren't tours. But they were kids who grew up in the city so hello conversation.
Rodney Scott Whole Hog BBQ - well worth the ride over. Pulled pork was awesome but the banana pudding was the best I've had.
Peninsula Grill - fantastic meal, but even better bar. And the coconut cake is worth the money and calories. And I don't like coconut.
We loved it there and will be going back.
Thanks y'all!
Nice to hear. Glad you enjoyed it. I have been told several times by transplants that basically - and one literally - they visited and went back home and packed their bags.
We just returned from 4 days in Charleston and I wanted to thank y'all for this thread and your comments. I made a lot of notes and hardly used them because we ended up just wandering.
A few notes:
Old South Carriage Co tours - we did the haunted history night one and it was great. Inspired us to go look for John Calhoun between the cemetery and grave at St Philips
Market - yes very much a tourist trap but at least all in one spot
Transportation - we took the 211 Shuttle with CARTA around to get a feel for the city. We also utilized the bike taxis too which was actually really informative even though they aren't tours. But they were kids who grew up in the city so hello conversation.
Rodney Scott Whole Hog BBQ - well worth the ride over. Pulled pork was awesome but the banana pudding was the best I've had.
Peninsula Grill - fantastic meal, but even better bar. And the coconut cake is worth the money and calories. And I don't like coconut.
We loved it there and will be going back.
Thanks y'all!
Glad you enjoyed and thanks for your notes! When you come back, it's worth taking the ferry out to Ft Sumter if you have the time. The ferry costs but entry to the fort is free so you can also rent kayaks and paddle over there on your own schedule if you wanted to do that.
I don't know if you walked around South Of Broad but I think you'd enjoy that too if the weather is nice. The Charleston Museum is well worth a trip for some more history.
There's no sign that folks moving here is slowing down. If you decide to join them, give me a heads up.
The following was sent to me by Aaron Renn, a well known writer/blogger among city geeks.
He forwarded the message from a “listserv” he’s on. For me personally, it resonates because two sets of my eighth great-grandparents settled Charles Town from England by way of Barbados.
Message from a listserv I'm on.
I am here in Charleston, South Carolina, which has the effect of mentally centering the traveler in a historical fountainhead, an epicenter of American civilization that persisted and flourished until the other epicenters chose to conquer it. From a high point on one of the old city’s few tall buildings, you can see the flat lowland expanse of trees and water stretching into the inland infinity, and get a sense of what this was for generations: a settlement, a fortress on the edge of the world, its peopling and lifelines stretching not towards the interior, but to Bermuda, Barbados, and thence to London.
The Charles Town was not American at the outset nor for nearly a century, but the farthest outpost of a Caribbean and Atlantic civilization. Boston, Jamestown, and New York were never besieged by Blackbeard, nor were their oldest homes still extant constructed of Bermuda stone, nor was their governance turned over entirely to the contours and offices of the established Anglican order until the American republic compelled a separation of the church and state. For all this, Charleston did not succumb to the ravages of wilderness and persist in a rudimentary state unto generations. It flourished and created within itself a singular city of vast and echoing beauty, whose eventual subordinated colonies in that green and forbidding interior were marked by their own distinctiveness — and ungovernability. We who inherit their achievement, the green frontier conquered, are to believe that this civilization was evil. I do not.
My dining companion yesterday, a Moldovan woman picking at her she-crab soup, expressed surprise that South Carolina turned out to be so much more cultured and European than North Carolina. Her prior experience was in dull and homogenized Charlotte. I explained that in and before the Revolutionary era, North Carolina was properly regarded as a mere colony and emanation of South Carolina: indeed the entire contest of Greene and Cornwallis in North Carolina was for the domination of the southern province. Thus the splendor of Charleston and the total absence of the same anywhere in North Carolina. The observation visibly bored her.
Charleston is a city of glory and also loss. It started a near-unwinnable war in a fit of arrogant belligerence and was shelled into destruction that ended its civilizational eminence forever. It was before that the site and arena of the greatest American defeat of our Revolution. This is only my fourth time here. The first time, I realized I was dating the wrong girl. The second time, I was hopelessly pursuing another girl. The third time, we were trying to make Rick Perry the President. This too fits the Charlestonian grand-history theme. This fourth time I will speak on — what else? — the Mexican border, and it will be a topic of sorrow. Still, not once is Charleston to be missed. Whatever brings you here, it teaches: this is how it started. Your ancestors were the sons and daughters of this city and its ways. My ancestor who was hung by the Loyalist commander of the King’s Augusta garrison was a son of Charleston’s civilization. My ancestor who was shot dead by his villainous Tory neighbors while on leave from Marion’s command was a son of Charleston’s civilization. Their sons and grandsons fought and fell at places like Chickamauga and surrendered with Johnston, having defended the very lands of the original green wilderness.
The city’s motto declares: “Ædes Mores Juraque Curat” — “She Defends Her Temples, Traditions, and Laws.” This is not American, not the guidepost of a republic captive to a Whig inheritance and illusion of progress. It is the motto of a city worthy of Athens or Rome in their early years, alive to the fallenness of man, hostage to pirates, contending with the savage frontier — and knowing that its only survival rested in rootedness in the timeless things. It is something else, which is why it had to be conquered. Yet it survives. Look into its walled gardens. There are the stone memorials to its more-recent heroes: Hampton, Beauregard, Calhoun. Look further back in time. There is the memorial to Elizabeth Hutchinson, who died nursing American prisoners on British hulks. Her orphaned son became a conquering President. There is the memorial to Francis Salvador, the first Jew killed for American independence. “Born an aristocrat, he became a democrat,” reads his epitaph. This is these people.
This is the city, in quiet glory, forever.
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