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Calling Conway and Summerville "coastal" is kinda pushing it. It's almost like claiming Richmond is a coastal city in Virginia.
If Conway is pushing it, then Savannah is in the same boat as it is actually a little farther from the coast than Conway is. And Summerville is urbanized Charleston through and through.
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Also, the historic fabric is...eh? Good for the south, but nothing spectacular. A few blocks of 19th century storefronts, some old churches, wood framed homes, etc. You can tell they were towns of a few thousand people in the antebellum era, not substantial cities.
The question is where you draw the line though. If you use the historic "fall line" (where the piedmont ends and the coastal plain begins), then you could say Rocky Mount/Greenville/Wilson/Goldsboro/Fayetteville are all coastal NC cities, that Columbia is a coastal SC city, that Augusta is a coastal Georgia city, etc.
Indeed, Pensacola was founded a whole 250 years before Jacksonville, Pensacola just might be older than most if not all the cities that have been discussed
Pensacola wasn’t founded in the 1500s. It had a settlement there, but it was abandoned for over a century. Just like Manteo doesn’t claim its founding with the Lost Colony. Historic Pensacola has buildings from around the beginning of the 19th century I think. St. Augustine is the more historic Florida (and American) town.
I used to frequent st Augustine in the 90s, early 2000s...it was a nice quaint beach town...went there a couple years ago and could not believe how much it changed. Beach side extremely busy with very "uppity attitude" types. I used to love St Augustine but it has definitely changed.
Charleston and Savannah are the unquestionable leaders if the metric is the surviving amount of antebellum structures in their historic cores. While Savannah is perhaps the most atmospheric and contains hundreds of 19th century structures, it really can’t hold a candle to the antiquity of Charleston’s oldest buildings. Surveys of both historic districts show that there are 100s of surviving 18th century buildings in Charleston while Savannah contains a mere handful. Tradd street alone in the south of broad neighborhood contains several times more pre revolutionary buildings than all of Savannah. While Charleston did indeed suffer great destruction during the war, it is not true that even a majority of the city was destroyed. Similar to Richmond’s destruction, the damage was extensive and total in some concentrated areas while leaving much of the city relatively intact. Additionally, Charleston’s many hundreds of antebellum buildings stretch throughout the peninsula and outnumber Savannah’s impressive total.
Depending how you measure it, St. Augustine or Georgetown actually contain more 18th century buildings than Savannah, but Savannah still blows either away by the sheer number of surviving antebellum structures. Outside of St. Augustine, Florida does not really have any really significant historic towns, which makes since given its rather pitiful population and state of urbanization in the early days of the republic. St. Augustine really is a sad case, as the tourism and commercialization is so extensive that it makes what would be a very beautiful and unique small city feel like a cross between Disney world and colonial Williamsburg.
New Bern and Wilmington are North Carolina’s best surviving examples, but neither come close to Charleston or Savannah. A list of the populations of cities and towns in the four states being discussed illustrates the state of urbanization at the time of the 1790 census. Most of these numbers are close estimates based on Spanish colonial censuses or the 1800 census data if 1790 is missing.
Compare this to a list of southern cities in 1860, and you will get a relatively good idea of the prominence of cities and towns during these eras. Of course, the historical populations don’t completely account for a city’s current state of historic preservation, but they are pretty useful for understanding the potential for a certain area to contain preserved buildings. For example, the three largest southern cities in 1860 (NO, Charleston, Richmond) have 3 of the 4 best preserved urban cores. Savannah wasn’t quite on their level population wise but still boasts a remarkable degree of surviving buildings.
Key West is absolutely historic (it was the largest city in Florida in the 19th century). It's just not really southern in terms of either architecture or culture.
Charleston has lots of surviving pre-Civil War buildings (some going back to the 18th century), though the classic "Charleston house" (narrow, often brick, side entrance) was built as late as 1890.
I prefer Savannah's architecture, and the Olmstead plan is wonderful because there is so much green space. Charleston was a city of wealthy estates, meaning very little space was set aside for parkland. However, Savannah's rowhouse vernacular really isn't that unique nationally - it's basically a Mid-Atlantic city which happens to be in the Deep South. Charleston doesn't look like anywhere else in the country however.
This is underselling Virginia a bit, because there are beautiful historic portions of Norfolk and Portsmouth as well.
Virginia's not in the poll, but I would probably put it in second after SC, taking into account all of that and Old Town Alexandria. If you included Richmond as "coastal" it would be even clearer, since Richmond has a pretty wide selection of rowhouse-ish neighborhoods within the urban core (probably 50,000 people live in this area, making it much more functionally like a city than the tourist-dominated downtown areas of Charleston and Savannah).
Savannah's famous Squares were designed by Englishman James Oglethorpe in the 1730's, not Olmstead.
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