TTC-Downtown Palmer Campus will Host Spirit Week Oct 29-Nov1

First Eastside Scholarship Recipient Now Enrolled at the Downtown Palmer Campus

Congratulations to Terrence Broughton, one of our first Eastside Scholarships recipients! We are so proud to partner with the Eastside Community Development Corporation and the Cigar Factory to support this young man in his dream of working in law enforcement. Terrence is a recent graduate of Burke High School.

Save the Date: Stop the Violence Unity Day on Sept 29th

Eastside History Series: Charleston’s Back Yard by Dr. Susan Millar Williams

Hanover Street Garden, 2012

With the East Side fast becoming one of Charleston’s most desirable neighborhoods, it is hard to remember that it was once a place where the city relegated eyesores and polluters. Tanneries released foul odors and noxious liquids into its creeks and marshes. Hogs and cattle were slaughtered at “butcher pens” that supplied meat for the city market. Garbage carts dumped trash in the streets, slowly building up new land from the detritus of life downtown. The city dump, with its flocks of buzzards, gave way to an incinerator that spewed showers of ash. Industrial engines and locomotives alike belched clouds of smoke.

In its heyday as an upscale suburb, Hampstead, as it was then known, boasted an expansive park and a handful of palatial homes. It even had a botanical garden, near the site of the now-vacant grocery store many Eastsiders still think of as the Piggly Wiggly.

But for almost a century, Hampstead was also the place where Charleston warehoused its poor. The City Almshouse once occupied the corner of Columbus and Drake Streets, where the former Wilmot J. Fraser Elementary School now stands. The building was not originally designed to house unfortunate people. Like the structure we now know as the Cigar Factory, it was built as a textile factory, with a central tower and open floors to accommodate spindles and looms. When that first textile factory went broke, only a few years after it opened, the building was repurposed to provide board and lodging for people too old or too sick to support themselves.

The Almshouse was, at least for its time, a benevolent institution. Outside of the city, there was no official provision for helping what one nineteenth-century writer bluntly called “the lame, the halt, the blind, and the poor.” In spite of a rule that required six months residence inside the city limits in order to qualify for free care, it was not uncommon for rural people to come to town and beg the authorities to admit them to the Almshouse or the city hospital. But as Walter J. Frazer points out in his book Charleston! Charleston!, the Almshouse was also a place where people deemed “unworthy” were punished for the crime of being poor. It was governed by a Master and a Matron, and the residents were referred to as “inmates.” There were a lot of women among the “indoor pensioners,” some of whom were pressed into service to care for motherless infants, and in the years after the Civil War there were a fair number of disabled Confederate veterans. The Almshouse also distributed food to nonresidents, who were called “outdoor pensioners.” The “rations” were pretty basic—rice, grits, sugar, flour, maybe a little bacon. But they helped tide families over from one week to the next. 

The Almshouse served only white Charlestonians. Black paupers were sent to an even grimmer institution on the other side of town. 

The Almshouse after the earthquake.

At 9:06 on the night of August 31, 1886, a tremendous earthquake rocked Charleston, bringing down the central tower and shattering some of the walls. The master and matron managed to get all one hundred terror-stricken residents out of the building safely, even though many were, as the City Yearbook crudely put it, “cripples and imbeciles.” In addition to providing temporary shelter for the displaced. the city was faced with the huge task of repairing or replacing most public buildings, including the Almshouse. Even with donations pouring in from all over the nation, the cost was staggering.  Committees were put in charge of collecting bids from contractors and figuring out what to do.  And most of the bids came in far higher than the city was prepared to pay. The Almshouse was no exception.

 

Francis S. Rodgers

Alderman Francis S. Rodgers proposed that the city buy the venerable Mills House Hotel, on Meeting Street, downtown, and convert it into a new Almshouse.  Once one of the city’s fanciest luxury hotels, just steps from Hibernian Hall, the Mills House had been used for years as a boarding and apartment house. It was already laid out with individual rooms and areas for cooking and dining.  It did have lots of stairs, which would create problems for inmates with mobility issues. But in other ways, it seemed well suited for use as what we would now call a residential care facility.

Rodgers was at the time one of the wealthiest men in Charleston. His brand-new mansion on Wentworth Street, complete with stained glass designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany, had survived the earthquake with minimal damage. And as the News and Courier was careful to note, he had good intentions. But Rodgers’s proposal to move the Almshouse “was received with a shudder.” A

The Mills House. (National Archives.)

firestorm of public outrage erupted. One letter to the editor suggested that moving “the paupers” to the Mills House would be like housing the insane at City Hall. They would “desecrate” the handsome building by their very presence.

 “It is very well,” the paper declared, “to keep the paupers in the background, away off in the outskirts of the city, where there is plenty of land to cultivate, and where the sad spectacle of broken-hearted poverty may not offend the vision of those who sit down in their own comfortable homes.” In other words, the poor belonged in Charleston’s back yard.

City Council soon voted to repair the original Almshouse.  The poor would remain in residence there for more than half a century, though in 1913 its name was changed to the gentler-sounding “Charleston Home.”

Free HIV Testing on Feb 24th

East Side History Series: The East Side and the Railroads

by Susan Millar Williams, Ph. D. 

Approaching the Palmer Campus from East Bay Street, you can’t help but notice the railroad line along the Cooper River. In fact, most of the time you can’t see the river at all because the tracks are crowded with auto transport cars tagged with graffiti.

Ruins of the Northeastern Railroad station.

You may have seen articles recently about the Lowcountry Low Line, a proposed linear park that will run along one of those old railroad right-of-ways, between King and Meeting Streets. That long, narrow strip was once the path of the South Carolina Railroad. Other railroad lines also came through the East Side, including the Northeastern Railroad and the Charleston and Savannah Railroad.

When the Charleston Museum published a history of the East Side in 1987, they titled it Between the Tracks.  The area grew up around railroads that carried goods and people in and out of the city. There was one passenger depot on Line Street, one on Mary, and another on East Bay. The Northeastern had a terminal on Chapel Street, which burned during the evacuation of Charleston in 1865. 

In the early twentieth century Union Station was built at the foot of Columbus Street, more or less where we now see all those outgoing BMWs.

There were also lots of buildings on the East Side where railroad workers performed repair and maintenance. Other businesses, like Eason Iron, which once stood at the corner of Columbus and Nassau Streets, produced parts and engines for the railroads. Boarding houses and rental properties in the area catered to the hundreds of railroad workers who shoveled coal, greased engines, handled baggage, loaded freight, and did whatever else it took to keep Charleston and its port connected with the nation’s interior. A company called Wharton and Petsch produced boxcars and platform cars, employing machinists, carpenters, finishers, and blacksmiths who made good wages.  

Robert Smalls

In order to ship those goods in and out, the railroads had to connect with the ships docked at wharves further south. But then as now, people who lived and worked downtown were wary of noise and pollution, including, in the early years, sparks thrown off by the steam driven engines. They fought to keep the rail lines north of what is now Calhoun Street. That meant that in order to transfer freight from  ships to trains, or from trains to ships, the goods had to be unloaded, loaded onto drays (horse-drawn wagons), driven several miles, unloaded, and reloaded.

Enterprise Railroad, as depicted on its letterhead.

In 1870, South Carolina representative Robert Smalls joined with three other black legislators, Joseph Rainey, Richard Cain, and Alonzo Ransier, and other investors to form a company called the Enterprise Railroad, which would move goods between the wharves and the railroad depots in horse-drawn cars that ran, like trolleys, on tracks. The Enterprise is said to have been the only United States railroad ever under black ownership. 

The East Side is still a major hub of rail and sea transport, though shipping containers now dominate the landscape and the steam and horse power of earlier years have given way to fossil fuels.     

Celebrate our Pillars of Palmer: Eastside Day Video and Library Archive Now Available

Palmer Campus in Downtown Charleston, South Carolina celebrated its 2017 Eastside Day Celebration during Spirit Week at Trident Technical College by recognizing retirees, college faculty and community allies by naming them as Pillars of Palmer for significant contributions to the college and the Eastside community. Listen to their stories regarding what the recognition meant to them. The videos and photographs of the honorees were produced by Trident Technical College students in the Film, Media and Visual Arts Division.

 

 

Celebrate our Pillars of Palmer: See the New Portriat Gallery

 

 

You can see our new portrait gallery honoring our Pillars of Palmer - faculty, staff, and community members who have contributed to the college and to the community.  You can see the physical exhibit by visiting our Library Commons on the Palmer Campus, and you can also read about it in our online exhibit. 
 

Honoring the Past: Gerald Mackey

We here at Trident Technical College seek to honor the past, for knowing where you come from helps you get where you’re going. Gerald Mackey embodies the history of these buildings we move through today. He started his career teaching African American students in the segregated CA Brown High School that created this campus. When Trident Technical College bought the building for its downtown campus, he eventually ended up running it. The TTC downtown Palmer Campus grew under his leadership. 

Preserving for the Future:  Dr. Susan Millar Williams and Mary Edwards

We here at Trident Technical College also work to preserve the past and the present for the future. We see ourselves as stewards of the land, the buildings, and the memories of the people who move through them. Our next two honorees serve as our most prominent recorders of the history of this campus and the community around it.

Dr. Susan Williams reads, writes, and talks about our local history, making what has been invisible, visible. She has published numerous books and articles, worked on documentaries, and given lectures on local history. She charts the landscape of memory, and encourages others to do the same.

Mary Edwards lives in the Eastside, and knows it like few others. She was also a graduate of CA Brown High School. She brought that knowledge with her to Trident Technical College, enriching the development of Eastside Day and other community projects. She gives voice to her community within the walls of the academy, representing and honoring those who came before her, and paving the way for those who will follow.

Connecting the Community: The Presidents, former and present, of the Eastside Community Development Corporation

If you want something done in the Eastside, you need to talk to the Eastside Community Development Corporation. We at Trident Technical College strive to be a part of the community we serve, and our strongest partner has been the Eastside Community Development Corporation.  They came in our gates, and got us outside those gates. They help us make the gates irrelevant. These presidents serve their community, creating programs, organizing events, supporting businesses, and fostering education. We honor the work this organization has done, and the people who helped make it happen.

Celebrate our Pillars of Palmer: Library Archive Now Available

 

Created by Maureen Myers and her staff in the Palmer library, the Eastside Collection stands as an important research guide for students writing about their local community as well as for faculty developing curriculum that includes local history. It also allows us to celebrate the work of our faculty, staff, and students in doing research, sharing community resources, and educating the public about the importance of the Eastside community.  And it helps to demonstrate Trident Technical College's commitment to the community it serves.

Eastside History Series: Cigar Boxes

by Dr. Susan Millar Williams

Growing up in Arkansas in the 1960s, I thought of cigar boxes as a real treasure, and I often begged the local drugstore to let me have their discards. Most of the ones I managed to get hold of were made from cardboard printed to resemble wood grain, and they had once held Roi-Tans, which sold for five cents each. Little did I know then that I would someday work in Charleston, right across the street from the building that once housed the American Tobacco factory, where those boxes (and the cigars they contained) were made.

One of the most famous brands associated with the factory was called the Cremo, and it gave the factory its local nickname, Cremo College. Roi-Tans and Cremos were marketed as more sanitary than other brands because they were made by machine and pre-drilled so that the smoker did not need to bite off the tips.

Most boxes were designed to double as counter displays, so that merchants could prop them open like this and sell the contents individually.

Both the cigars and their boxes were manufactured on site at the Charleston factory, the boxes at the end of the building now occupied by Garden and Gun magazine. I ordered this one, which is made of cedar, on E-Bay. You can see the grain of the wood in this shot, along with the logo. 

The Revenue Act of 1864 required that all cigars be packed in boxes. On the back of my box is a revenue stamp that links it to the Charleston factory (on the right). 

These men (to the left) are posing in front of the Charleston factory not long after the turn of the century, along with huge cedar logs that were once used to make cigar boxes. The finest were made of Spanish cedar, though others were made of other woods, including poplar, sometimes with a thin veneer of cedar. Most were fastened together with small nails, and printed paper trim was pasted on. 

The Unity Day Fun Bike Run Walk is Sept 23rd

Eastside History Series: 2 Amherst St.- The Belser House (also known as Presqu'le)

by Dr. Susan Millar Williams 

We know that this handsome Adam-style house was built between 1802 and 1808 by someone whose last name was Belser, but it’s not clear whether his first name was Jacob or Christopher. It has come to be known as the Christopher Belser House, and also as Presqu’ile, a French word that means peninsula. It may have been designed by Gabriel Manigault, but again, no one is positive. 

Archibald Grimke

We do know for sure that it was owned (and expanded) by Henry Grimké, brother of the famous Sarah and Angelina Grimké, who had three sons by his slave Nancy Weston. One of them, Archibald Henry Grimké, grew up to be a prominent lawyer and author.  A graduate of the freedmen's schools who went on to earn a degree from Harvard Law School, Archibald served as American Consul to the Dominican Republic from 1894 to 1898 and as a national vice-president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). 

Another of Henry and Nancy’s sons, Francis James Grimké, became a Presbyterian minister and helped found the NAACP. The third son, John, moved to Florida and cut off ties with his family.

Sarah and Angelina Grimke

Sarah and Angelina left Charleston as young women and became famous for their writing and lectures on abolition and women’s rights. They apparently discovered the existence of their mixed-race nephews when they read one of Archibald Grimké’s essays and realized that he shared their name. 

Stair Tower, Historic American Survey, Library of Congress

As far as I can tell, Archibald, Francis, and John never actually lived in this house, since Henry moved his family to the country after he started having children with Nancy Weston. However, Henry’s association with Presqu’ile gives the Eastside neighborhood a link to some of Charleston’s most renowned nineteenth-century authors and activists, and to a famous twenty-first century novelist. Sue Monk Kidd’s 2014 novel The Invention of Wings explores the inner lives of Sarah and Angelina and a slave girl, Hetty, who was given to Sarah on her eleventh birthday. 

The Belser house was damaged in the earthquake of 1886. A photograph by George Cook shows the stucco fallen from one of the gables, exposing the brick underneath.      

The Belser House in 1958
Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress

In 1951 the building was purchased by the Baptist Association, which used it for outreach services. Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Ravenel bought the house in 1973 and began restoring it to its former glory. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Spiral Staircase seen from above
Historic Buildings Survey, Library of Congress

Eastside History Series: "Don’t Blame the Weather" by Katharine Purcell, Ph.D.

Enough Pie’s Wave of Hope installation
 in front of St. Julian Devine Community Center.

Want to know whether you need to pack the car or the johnboat to travel to campus? American College of the Building Arts professor Christina Butler advises you to take a look at this map and if any of the streets on your route had a former life as a tidal creek, then bring a paddle.

Speaking at Enough Pie’s  "Awakening V: King Tide,"   Butler told an audience at the Cigar Factory on Thursday, May 11, 2017 that Charleston’s flooding woes are due just as much to early colonial building practices as they are to current climate change. And in spite of all of the repairs and new drainage projects, things will only get worse.

The problem? Eighteenth-century settlers found very little desirable real-estate on the peninsula, so they quickly set out to make their own. Anything that could not be repurposed was tossed into creeks and marshland. That meant that streets and building sites were created atop animal carcasses, vegetable material, human and construction waste, and even the corpses of British and Hessian soldiers! All of the land east of East Bay Street and north of Market Street rests on this great garbage dump, including the Hampstead area where Palmer now stands. Needless to say, in those days, ships arriving to the city could smell it before they could see it.

And who was responsible for hauling and spreading the debris? Butler says that enslaved West Africans did much of the work. This onerous task was ongoing, as each tide pulled the fill into the harbor--so much so, that dumping regulations were soon put into place so that shipping lanes would not be blocked.

West African sweat and labor built much of the land in Charleston, and West African ingenuity was used to keep it in place. Early drainage engineering first employed on the peninsula was based on the trunk systems used in rice cultivation, and by the 1850s, brick and mortar versions were buried beneath the city streets. In fact, we are still depending upon those nineteenth-century tunnels to keep our feet dry.

Unfortunately, those tunnels and the more recent pump projects are still resting on an unstable 300-year-old garbage dump. Add to that, the booming construction business on the peninsula and the rising global tides might make us all wish we were sporting gills.

East Side History Series: Faber-Ward House 631 East Bay

This photograph was taken on May 17, 1958 as part of the Historic 

American Buildings Survey. The building then was in a sad state of disrepair.

by Susan Millar Williams, Ph D. 

Built in the 1830s by rice planter Henry Faber, this grand house was—like its neighbor across the street, Presqu'ile—built on a spit of high land along the river. Its uses since that time reflect Charleston’s turbulent history. Faber died at age 57 and was buried in St. Philip’s churchyard. His brother Joseph completed the house. Then he sold it to Joshua John Ward, sometimes called “the king of the rice planters.” Born at Brookgreen Plantation near Georgetown in 1800, Ward was the largest slaveholder in America during his lifetime. He was considered the greatest and most innovative of the antebellum rice planters, developing a long grain version of the famous Carolina Gold variety which, during its brief heyday, commanded the highest price of any type of rice on the world market. He also served as Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina from 1850 to 1852.  Ward also (briefly) owned Presqu’ile, which is also known as the Christopher Belser house.

Joshua John Ward

During and after the Civil War, while Union troops occupied Charleston, the Faber-Ward house, as it came to be called, was converted into a hotel for emancipated slaves. During the Jim Crow era, when white” hotels were not open to African-Americans, it again served as a hotel for black guests. The name of the hotel at this time, according to local lore, was The Hamitic, an obsolete ethnic designation, akin to the current term Semitic, that refers to African origins.  According to Alphonso Brown, in A Gullah Guide to History, the building a “house of ill-repute” in the 1940s and 50s, catering to seamen and others who worked along the nearby waterfront. If only we knew more about what happened in this house during all these seasons of its life! I wish someone would undertake to dig out more of its post-war history.

The house as it looks today.

The Historic Charleston Foundation bought the house in 1964. In 1969 it was set on fire by vandals, but the building survived. Today the main structure and its outbuildings are used as office space.

Want to take a quick look inside and see the spiral staircase that soars up to the cupola? Click on this YouTube video or watch at the top of the article. 

Mobile Farmers Market Coming to Eastside on Wednesdays, 9:00-11:00

Light the Night on Jan 27th

Eastside Small Business Network Event on Feb 6th

Eastside History Series: Denmark Vesey and the African Church

On the corner of Hanover and Reid Streets once stood an institution called the African Church. The building first opened its doors in 1818, after hundreds of black Methodists resigned from existing churches and formed a new congregation in protest over white attempts to control them.  Morris Brown, whose memory lives on in Charleston through the African Methodist Episcopal church that now bears his name, was one of the founders.

In 1822, a number of members of the Hampstead church were arrested for plotting to seize arms and kill slaveholders, including Denmark Vesey, a former slave who had won enough money in a lottery to purchase his freedom. In the trial that followed, the words “he belongs to the African Church” were repeated over and over. Vesey and thirty-four other men were executed and the church was burned to the ground.

Eastside Produce Stand Open on Saturdays in Hamstead Square

You can now buy fresh produce from local farmers on Hampstead Square on Saturdays from 3:00 until dark. The Post and Courier reported that the city of Charleston opened "Eastside Produce @ Hampstead Square" on Saturdays so that many downtown residents can again have easy access to groceries within walking distance. Many in the peninsular neighborhood were left without a grocery store after Bi-Lo's sudden closure earlier this month." You can read more at the Post and Courier article, "City of Charleston Launching Produce Stand to Fill Bi-Lo's Void"

East Side History Series: Bischoff’s Square

by Susan Millar Williams, Ph. D.

The row of four more-or-less identical houses that line Columbus Street across from the Cigar Factory were built in the 1880s as part of Bischoff’s Square, a subdivision created and financed by Jennie Bischoff. There are also at least four of these houses still standing along Drake Street, and two on East Bay. Mrs. Bischoff, the widow of Henry Bischoff, lived in an older, grander home which was located on the same block as the Josiah Tennent House. (That structure, called the Tucker House, is long gone.)

Mr. and Mrs. Bischoff were both born in Hanover, Germany, before the Civil War. Like many of his fellow German immigrants, Henry sold groceries and liquor, but he also developed a profitable sideline concocting patent medicines. In addition to the South American herb for which it was named, Carolina Tolu Tonic contained lots of sugar and whiskey, which no doubt made it pleasant to drink, if not particularly healthful. Bischoff took advantage of the relatively new art of chromolithography, invented in Germany, to promote his products. The blog Bottles Booze and Back Stories, includes wonderful images of Bischoff’s whimsical trade cards, which were often collected in scrapbooks by children and ladies.

In 1874, during Reconstruction, Henry bought three rice plantations along the Edisto River near Jacksonboro, South Carolina and renamed them collectively as Rice Hope. He died four years later, in 1878, leaving Jennie to manage his fortune. She invested some of it in these modest but attractive frame single

houses, each of which includes six rooms and an upper and lower piazza. The ones on Columbus feature a bay window, but as far as I can tell, the others do not.