America's Most Historic City — the Battery's antebellum mansions survived the Civil War intact, the Charleston single house is the most distinctive urban vernacular in America, and the Gullah Geechee food tradition at Husk is the most significant African-American culinary heritage in the country
Charleston, South Carolina is the cultural and architectural capital of the American South — a peninsula city between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers where more pre-Civil War architecture survives than anywhere else in the United States. The Battery is lined with antebellum mansions that watched Fort Sumter fall in April 1861, opening the Civil War. The Charleston single house — a narrow, single-room-wide form with the front door opening onto a side piazza — is the most distinctive residential vernacular in American architecture. The Gullah Geechee culture (the African-descended culture of the S…
Charles Town was founded in 1670 and became the wealthiest city in colonial America by 1740 — wealth built almost entirely on the forced labour of enslaved Africans who cultivated indigo and rice. Historians estimate 40% of all enslaved Africans brought to North America arrived through Sullivan's Island in Charleston Harbor. The Civil War began at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on April 12, 1861. Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (Mother Emanuel, founded 1816) has been a centre of African-American civil rights for over two centuries and was the site of a racially motivated massacre…