South Carolina - Day 9 - Charleston

Charleston KOA, Ladson

Wednesday, 17 May 2023

today's route

closer view of Charleston area - note that Charleston is
actually on a narrow peninsula - see map below right

Charleston Old & Historic District

Although Google told me the various drives today would be fairly short, I guessed (correctly) that it would actually take hours, so we left Yemassee KOA by 8:30.

I passed a sign saying, "The ACE Basin - one of the Last "Great Places."  Which, of course, meant nothing to me but I wondered what great place I was missing.  The ACE Basin (Ashepoo, Combahee, Edisto Rivers) is one of the largest undeveloped estuaries on the US Atlantic coast.  A large section of it has been declared a National Wildlife Refuge.

Speaking of the Combahee River, I crossed it on the Harriet Tubman Bridge, which I thought was an odd choice of name, because I connect her with her successful work in the general Maryland area in freeing slaves.  But the bridge is aptly named because it was here that she worked with a US Army regiment of mostly freed slaves from SC plus 3 steamships to successfully liberate more than 750 enslaved people, including children.

I crossed several good-sized rivers and noticed that this area was obviously "the low country" - flat with lots of water everywhere.

Along the road I passed a sign that said: "God Recycles - He Made You From Dust."

I heard on the radio about a woman whose family had a time where naloxone was needed, and she ended up taking a class on how to use it properly.  She said with the class she was given some free doses.  She said not enough people know about this training and should check into it.  So I did look it up, using Texas as a sample area, and found it wasn't as straightforward as that sounds.  

There seem to be training modules available for organizations to use, but I couldn't see an easy list of who was using such a module.  It looked like the Red Cross might be a source, and the state has established a Texas Opioid Training Initiative, which might also be a source.  I wasn't planning to sign up or anything but do think, if I'm going to be doing community assistance of some kind, that the training might be useful.  Something to keep in mind.  Presumably all 50 states have something like this, since everybody keeps saying opioid use is rampant throughout the country.

I came to Charleston both to see what the city looks like and to run a few errands.  My first sight was a pair of drawbridges over the Ashley River.  One was built in 1926 and, when the traffic level got too high for the bridge to handle it all, a second was built alongside in 1961, using the same style, which  I appreciated.  Both bridges are now one-way.  So often when cities build companion bridges to handle increased traffic levels, the new one looks super-modern while the original one looks like an anachronism - which I've been ascribing to ego on the part of the 2nd architect.  I couldn't get a photo while I was driving and am sorry that I couldn't find any available online.  If you go, the bridges were on US-17, on the west side of Charleston.

I stopped at the bank and at a grocery store, but I was eager to see the city.

I had a list of buildings I hoped to see, and Google gave me detailed directions to each of them - and those directions became largely useless almost at once.  It turned out that Charleston is a little lax about street name signs, so I made the correct first turn off the highway and then promptly missed the 2nd turn, and then got completely lost on streets that I last saw in Philadelphia.  You know, very narrow, residential, clearly built to handle horse-and-buggy traffic and (because of the houses) never widened.  Not so much of a problem for a passenger car but I kept worrying my RV would scrape something.

And they wind around on each other, so every time I'd turn onto a different street thinking I could get back to a street on my directions, I ended up winding around in a different direction and finding yet more streets I'd never heard of.  Finally, I found a street where I could see parking was allowed and where there was room enough for my RV to pull over, and I fired up my hotspot and my computer and tried to find on Google's map of Charleston where the particular street I was on (King St. at that time) was located and how I could get anywhere else.  And that worked.  I managed to find myself, and then route myself from there back to some of the places I wanted to see, which would get me back on Google's directions, so off we went.

King Street came out at the water right by White Point Garden, shown in the photos below.  (All photos are from the internet - I was too busy concentrating on driving to be able to take pictures, but these show what I saw.)

White Point Garden is known for palmettos . . .

. . . and live oaks and weddings (clearly a perfect spot).

The garden ended by going around a corner by The Battery, which is both a specific location where an artillery battery was located for coastal defense during the Civil War, and also what's now a railed walkway along the ocean, alongside some pretty amazing houses.

A view of Battery Street.

I'd originally hoped to be able to stop at a park and nearby dog park along Battery St. but didn't even bother to try, given the driving problems I'd been having.  I'd found another dog park farther north that looked more accessible, so I continued with my driving tour.  

Speaking of tours, I saw lots of horse-drawn tours that, given the kinds of streets in Charleston, looked like a good idea.  Especially since I also saw hordes of tourists everywhere.  Charleston is a lovely city with many layers of history, and tours at the pace of a walking horse seemed about the right level for picking up information about this place.

I passed what's now called the Old Exchange and Provost Dungeon, built in 1771.  

Old Exchange Building

The city of Charleston says as a historic building, the Old Exchange Building ranks with Faneuil Hall in Boston and Independence Hall in Philadelphia, presumably because of the amount of US history that it's seen.  For instance, the British used it to house POWs during the Revolutionary War; it was a post office in the 1800s, and the postmaster had to defend a shipment of pamphlets advocating abolition from destruction by angry Charlestonians; it served as an army HQ during WWI and a USO canteen during WWII.  The Daughters of the American Revolution now operate a museum there.

Along the north side of the Exchange Building, people held public slave auctions for the first half of the 1800s.  Then the city passed an ordinance banning public auctions, so enterprising human traffickers created an area for private auctions.  One of the largest was called Ryan's Mart and included several buildings.  One of those is shown below.

Old Slave Mart Museum

This building was opened as a private auction site in 1856; the date of its closure seems unclear: some websites said it closed in 1863 when Union bombardments started, but the museum itself says there were still people being held for slavery here when Union soldiers liberated them in 1865.  The site has pens for holding both people and cattle, both to be auctioned off.  If such auctions continued for more than 50 years here in Charleston, there must have been hundreds of thousands of people passing through here to be enslaved.  And that's just in this one city.  

Time out for a rant: We weren't taught this in school when I was growing up, and with all the bizarre complaints these days about how schools shouldn't be teaching things that would make students uncomfortable, apparently today's kids won't be learning it either.  (Although these uneducated kids have learned to taunt and discriminate against their classmates who aren't like them.  But the complainers don't seem to worry about those kids being uncomfortable.)

Okay, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Take note, by the way, of the street in that photo of the slave mart.  Those are cobblestones and there are several streets in this area paved with them.  Nobody needs speed bumps with this kind of pavement - especially for my RV which carries all my household goods and all my critters (and me).  It was a bouncy ride.

Around the corner and a block or two away I came to the French Huguenot Church.

French Huguenot Church

This church was built in 1845 in the Gothic Revival style, after 2 previous versions had been destroyed.  The French Huguenots were Calvinists, a Protestant sect that has come in and out of favor over the centuries.  King Charles II originally encouraged them to leave France for Charleston in 1680, and they were followed by many others.  This church fell into disuse in the 20th century but has been revived and now holds regular weekly services - the only French Huguenot church in the US still in regular use.

As I continued down aptly named Church St., it looked like the street dead-ended at a large church.

St. Philip's Episcopal Church

Actually, Church Street bent to the left around St. Philip's, but for a short time I wondered if Google had misled me once again.  St. Philip's was built in 1836, and the spire was completed in 1850.  Buildings around here seem to last a long time, despite 45 hurricanes making direct hits to the SC coast just since 1851 (I think that's when they started keeping records).

In this southern peninsula historic district I saw many examples of what's called the Charleston Single House.  They look like these:

What you're looking at are houses that are one room wide (hence: "Single House") and usually 3 rooms deep.  What looks like a front door in these photos is actually a door to that porch that runs along the side of the house.  The actual front door is halfway along the porch.  It typically leads to a foyer and staircase; to one side of the entry is typically the living room separated from the kitchen by an open archway; to the other side is a bedroom; the floor plan of the (typically 2) upper floors is usually similar.  This style was developed to accommodate the narrow lots that Charleston was originally platted for - and the porch (or veranda or piazza) was needed for the hot sticky weather Charlestonians enjoy.  There were whole streets of these houses which, as you can see, are very attractive.

I saw lots of blooming oleander everywhere.  I saw lots of very old areas and very rich areas and very old rich areas.  I don't even want to think about what one of those single houses costs these days.

I felt somewhat triumphant when I managed to get us through the maze of streets and out a mile or so to the Hampton Park dog park.  This was a very large dog park in a residential neighborhood, and Dext found lots of very active big dogs.  I was surprised to see him being more active this time than I've seen him in ages and hope it means he's getting back to his old self, though it was likely he just found someone he liked to play with.

While I waited, I talked to an interesting young woman who had moved here with her boyfriend from Tampa, along with her very active boxer mix.  She told me that during her junior year of college she did a year's internship in Mongolia, specifically in Ulan Bator.  I've never actually heard that name pronounced and at first didn't understand what she was saying.  I wished she could stay longer so I could find out more.

And I talked with a second young woman who was about the polar opposite.  This woman was a science major and said she'd aimed to go into occupational therapy but didn't want to do the extra degree work.  She said now she just wanted to marry a rich guy and not have to worry about that forever.  She really said that.  I couldn't help myself: I said, "It doesn't work that way.  When you're 45 he'll find some cute 25-year-old and divorce you and you'll get screwed in the divorce settlement."  She left soon after that dose of reality.  Maybe I shouldn't have said it, but I think it was likely good for her because she was looking like she seriously thought she'd hit on a solution for her life, and I'll bet she never forgets what I said.

This situation is one of the odd side effects of the women's movement of the 1970s: we now have an entire generation of women who have grown up believing they have choices in life, unlike my generation of women who thought we were all meant to get married and have babies and live happily ever after.  In fact, you may have a marriage that lasts happily forever - there are many of them - but you just can't plan your life around it.

From the dog park I found gasoline for $2.95/gallon - I like these cheap gas prices in South Carolina - and then drove 10 miles north to the KOA, where we'll stay for 3 nights.