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    Charleston's Historic Cemeteries
    Charleston's Historic Cemeteries
    Charleston's Historic Cemeteries
    Ebook208 pages1 hour

    Charleston's Historic Cemeteries

    By Frank Karpiel and Harlan Greene

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    About this ebook

    Life in colonial Charles Towne was dangerous--epidemic diseases, primitive medical practices, and a harsh environment led to the early demise of rich and poor alike.


    When Charleston's founders moved their settlement across the Ashley River to the peninsula in 1680, they hoped for protection from pirate and Native American attacks, as well as increased trade and healthier living conditions. While they were able to secure more protection for the residents and improve trade, health conditions rapidly declined. The graveyards and public burial grounds quickly filled, and today, Charleston's historic cemeteries are almost as common a sight downtown as the churches that define the city. These tree-shrouded glades invite tourists and residents to explore the resting places of Charleston's most illustrious and interesting personalities. Charleston's Historic Cemeteries offers a guided pictorial tour of the elaborate gravestones and elegant inscriptions dedicated to Charleston's famous and infamous alike, including William Rhett and the pirate Stede Bonnet, Rhett's adversary. With dozens of illustrated stories about the transformation of funerals, tombstones, and mourning customs in America over the past 300 years, this collection details how Charleston became the home of a historically unique, city-wide gallery of mortuary sculpture.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateAug 5, 2013
    ISBN9781439643778
    Charleston's Historic Cemeteries
    Author

    Frank Karpiel

    Images of America: Charleston's Historic Cemeteries offers a selection of the most interesting images and stories from local and national archives and museums, along with a map to guide visitors. Author Frank Karpiel is a historian and educator living in Charleston.

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      Book preview

      Charleston's Historic Cemeteries - Frank Karpiel

      Charleston

      INTRODUCTION

      Charleston’s cemeteries, churchyards, and public burial grounds are time capsules reflecting the city’s 350 years of history and offering a glimpse of the lives of the famous, infamous, and ordinary. Fortunately for tourists and natives alike, the majority of Charleston’s most interesting graveyards are located within the walkable historic district, making for an interesting and thought-provoking exploration. In the area south of Calhoun Street lie more than a dozen intact churchyards dating from the 18th century, offering visible evidence of the transformation of Charleston’s burial traditions, gravestone art, and stone carving. They also indirectly relate the story of the city’s economic and social evolution, from early settlement to current city.

      From the city’s beginnings in the 1670s, Charleston’s founders focused on moneymaking rather than the religious piety that characterized the Puritans of New England. They were quick to adopt a slave-powered economy aimed at growing crops for export. A rich land with a small white population, the settlement became irresistible to immigrants from Great Britain and the Caribbean region. More than 50,000 British had settled on the tiny island of Barbados, which had a shortage of arable land. Ambitious to re-create a plantation system perfected over decades, white Barbadians supplied expertise, capital, and abundant trade contacts.

      Families that now personify Charleston’s history—the Rhetts, Wraggs, Manigaults, Mazycks, Middletons, Brewtons, Rutledges, Lucases, and Laurenses—relocated to Charleston from Europe, England, and the Caribbean. They created a thriving trade outpost, selling products harvested from the inland regions—deerskins, timber, turpentine, and resin—while experimenting with cash crops such as tea, sugar, indigo, and rice. Business was good. By the 1720s, large homes and impressive churches symbolized the town’s success.

      Beginning with St. Philip’s in 1680, most denominations built houses of worship with adjoining graveyards. These wooden churches and grave markers fell victim to the frequent conflagrations that engulfed the city. The fire of 1740, for example, destroyed more than 40 percent of Charleston’s structures. As a result, brick and stone construction became more common by 1760 and was ultimately mandated by law. Mirroring these changes, slate, marble, and sandstone grave markers replaced wooden boards as permanent memorials. Many of those tombstones, particularly those made of slate, remain in pristine condition today.

      Prosperous and diverse congregations endowed their new churches with monumental porticoes supported by impressive columns and large steeples. Funerals and gravestones also grew more elaborate. The gravestones, however, were not the massive structures that became more common in the late 19th century. Instead, families hired skilled craftsmen to carve distinctive headstones with elaborate inscriptions and highly detailed art. In the process, they created a citywide gallery of sophisticated sculpture focused on death and the afterlife that was unparalleled in Colonial America.

      These memorials to the deceased were compelling enough to draw the artisans and other professionals—ship captains, carpenters, candle makers, and blacksmiths—into also hiring carvers for their family memorials. Soon, skilled stonecutters from England, Scotland, and New England traveled to Charleston in the cooler months to conduct business. Some permanently relocated here, creating family businesses that would continue for a century or more.

      The most prolific of the stonecutters—Henry Emmes, John Bull, William Codner, John Stevens, and Thomas Walker, among dozens of others—had unique styles and signed their names at the bottom of their clients’ gravestones. Their styles are described in the sections of this book discussing individual cemeteries and tombstones. Their customers maintained the British tradition of inscribing the deceased’s accomplishments, family relationships, and admirable personal traits on the funerary monuments.

      Graves of the 18th century usually did not include the sort of religious symbols that became common in the 19th and 20th centuries. Although inscriptions might include Biblical quotations, images on tombstones were more likely to convey the haunting message "memento mori" (remember, you will die). Skulls, crossbones, skeletons, and, by the 1760s, soul effigies (faces with wings attached) and putti (small children) were often present. Stone portraits of the deceased also appeared on Charleston graves beginning in the 1730s, especially among wealthy or prominent families. Portrayals of young women in low-cut dresses, dignified ministers, young boys, and elderly ladies can be viewed at most of Charleston’s early churchyards.

      The cemeteries that still exist in downtown Charleston are only the visible tip of the deathly iceberg. As George Rogers writes in Charleston in the Age of the Pinckneys, Life was short, and mortality was high. A great deal of social mobility existed because early death was a frequent visitor to all social classes in the 18th and 19th centuries. Epidemic diseases such as yellow fever, smallpox, diphtheria, malaria, and scarlet fever combined with primitive medical care, lack of sanitation, harsh winters, and stifling hot and humid summers limited the average lifespan of white settlers in South Carolina to only 30 years in the early 18th century.

      By 1768, the public burial grounds (areas now underneath Franklin and Queen Streets) as well as churchyards were completely filled. The city’s board of police designated a new public burial ground between Magazine and Queen Streets. It included a separate section for slaves. In 1792, that burial ground was full and a new cemetery was chosen beyond the city boundaries, between present-day Calhoun and Vanderhorst Streets, west of the current Marion Square. For the next century, public burial grounds were designated, used, and, oftentimes, forgotten, with the land sold off and developed.

      Present-day Charleston residents are continually reminded of this historical reality. During the recent rebuilding of the Gaillard Municipal Auditorium, workers unexpectedly discovered more than three dozen burials that indicated the presence of a graveyard dating from the late 17th or early 18th century.

      In 1850, the city designated a large public (and nonsectarian) burial ground at a former plantation north of the city center. As part of a trend toward rural cemeteries like Mount Auburn in Boston and Greenwood in New York, Magnolia Cemetery, next to the Cooper River, became a popular spot for family outings and picnics. It had roads, pathways, landscaping, and interesting architecture and sculpture. Still in use, over 35,000 people are buried at

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