Charleston Pictures 2

The next two houses are mansions along the Battery. The Battery is the area along the seaside where they had all the cannons facing out to sea during/before the civil war. Now there is a park in front of the houses, next to the sea, and the whole area in general is called The Battery. There are some incredible houses there. The one pictured below (I think) is the one that still has a piece of a cannon (before the Confederates deserted the city, they blew up all the cannon so the Union wouldn't be able to use them) sitting in the attic. With all the poverty during Reconstruction, the family didn't have the money to remove it and fix the attic. By the time anyone had enough money to fix things, they decided that it was important enough, historially-speaking, to preserve. So it's still there in the attic today!

This is just a pretty mansion along The Battery. I'm sure it belonged to someone important at some time, but it's been awhile since I took the tour now, and I can't remember who!


This is a house I'd like to own someday, which was in the regular residential area of the Historic District. "Regular" in the Historical District meaning "at least 1 million."


This is another house I wouldn't mind living in. I noticed quite a few houses with this neat, unfinished-cement-looking exterior. I bet there's a name for it, but I have no idea what it is.


This is a sign outside this incredibly neat, quiet graveyard at St. Michael's church. It's this tiny, walled garden cemetery, and it has Charles Pinckney and John Rutledge buried there. If you can't remember who they are, check Wikipedia. The neat thing about this cemetery was that it was so old, it had people buried in it who died in say, 1707, and it also had people who died in the late '90s...I wonder who you had to be to have a space reserved there....


I found John Rutledge's grave, which is so old that you can't read the lettering, so they had these helpful signs beneath it. I ran out of time before I could find Charles Pinckney's grave

(I had to go get started on the tour).

Below is the house where George Washington stayed when he made his one visit south of Virginia. Everyone tried to do everything for him, and treated him as a sort of king, because as the first President, no one really knew what to make of that position. They knew how to treat kings & queens, and so they tried to treat him that way too. He would have none of that - he insisted on paying rent everywhere he went. Also, at almost every evening event, they would have a sort of throne-like chair reserved for him, but he would never sit in it, and always insisted that the ladies of the party sit there instead.


Below is an epitaph on a local doctor's tomb in St. Michael's cemetery that really impressed me. I don't know if it'll enlarge if you double-click on it, but I included what it said just in case. It reads:

"Sacred to the memory of Benjamin B. Simons, MD. 1776-1844. As a Physician, he was eminent. As a Surgeon, he had no superior in the United States. As a man he was scrupulously just, with stern integrity and uncompromising honor. He was eminently distinguished in his day and generation."

I thought this was a good reminder of our predecessors, and what enormous shoes we have to fill.