Back in the Saddle in S.C.

29 Oct 09—We went into Charleston today and worked on getting our 10,000 steps again. We started at the visitors center, where we picked up a booklet titled “Charleston’s Museum Mile”, which outlines a one mile section of Charleston that includes 6 museums, 5 historic houses, too many to count churches, and a host of other interesting buildings.

We started at the Aiken-Rhett House, (Rhett was considered the father of secession)

and what was interesting to me right off the bat was not so much the house, but the houses around it. As we went on thru the day, we noticed over and over again that some of these historical sites, beautiful though they may have been, were smack dab in the middle of some otherwise rundown areas. This rundown house was 2 doors away from the Aiken-Rhett House.

And this beautiful church was directly across the street from this key store.

It seems like the city can't make up its mind what it wants to be. Anyway, we could have toured the Aiken-Rhett house, but most of it was closed to tourists, so we skipped it, and went straight to The Charleston Museum, the oldest museum in the United States. Outside the Museum was a copy of the H. L. Hunley submarine,

and inside we went from the Revolutionary War,

to the Civil War (or the War Between the States as they call it...notice how sympathetic this writing is),

to a room with old-time brides dresses.

I wasn’t terribly interested in the Revolutionary War…just read gobs about it in DC…so we skimmed most of that and concentrated on The War Between the States. Before we got to that though, there was a section on early settlement of the colonies and the land grant system that was interesting. Basically, it said that the wy the land was given in very large lots of acreage to the people of high status pretty much led to the need, as they saw it, for slaves.

Check out these numbers below.

So next we headed to the Confederacy Museum…run by the Daughters of the Confederacy, this building also serves as the entrance building to the Old City Market, which I will talk about later.

Thought this museum would be really good, but it was about to close, so we didn’t get to do the tour. We did, however, get to go in for a minute, and learned it consisted of one room of memorabilia…won’t go back tomorrow. I thought it would be a lot better than that.

Finally we hit what they call the French Quarter, and very much looking like New Orleans, we were suddenly on cobblestone roads and headed to the Old Slave Mart Museum (still another change in less than a mile of this city). To me this was the highlight of the day. They didn’t want us taking pictures for some reason, but I just had to anyway. This building was actually built to be used as a slave market…specifically for the trade of native born slaves. The international slave trade had been outlawed back in 1808 (I think), so by the time this was built only domestic slave trading was going on. The picture titled "Before the Sale", explains how they would fatten up and dye the hair of slaves about to be traded. I especially found the info interesting on the one pictured with George Washington. And we shouldn't forget that slavery wasn't exclusive to the south...see the picture of the burning at the stake.

Walking back in the direction of the Visitor Center where we parked, we browsed a bit at the Old City Market, which is actually a 6 block long series of buildings, one after the other filled with arts and crafts, hand-made to manufactured, everything from jewelry to sweatshirts to paintings to what seems to be the biggest attraction…sweetgrass baskets. These baskets were made back in the slave days, the skills to make them handed down from mother to daughter (mostly), and are still being made today. A medium sized basket can take up to 2 days to make…so needless to say they are also very expensive. I picked up what I thought was medium-sized basket and it had a price tag of $300.00! Everything you see here is small to medium.

I took a few pictures of some interesting churches…all right in the mix of the city…and most having their own graveyards. There is another walking tour just to see all the churches, so I will have to see if we have time for that at the end of the week.