Charleston – the US Deep South

Wednesday, 18 December 2024

In 2022 I made a little USA and Canda Road Trip with British travel journalist Simon Calder. We started in Milwaukee, went north to Green Bay, Wisconsin, spent a night in delightful Eau Claire, cut across to Hibbing, Minnesota and managed to visit Bob Dylan’s childhood home and finally finished our travels together at Winnipeg, Manitoba in Canada. From there Simon returned to Europe while I turned south and finished my road trip in Fargo, North Dakota.

◄ Charleston Fire Department

Time for another US road trip with Simon, but this time also with Mrs Calder – aka Charlotte Hindle. We met up in Kansas City, Missouri and our road trip went east to St Louis, still in Missouri, and then looped back west to Kansas City again, but by a different route. From there Simon and Charlotte headed back to London while I continued east to Charleston. I’ll get back to our road trip, but meanwhile Charleston.

▲ I started my Charleston travels with a visit to the Ryan Old Slave Mart Museum, an important place to start since Charleston’s beautiful appearance is down to working the slaves to death. At its peak the South Carolina slave population outnumbered the whites and the whites were terrified they would revolt. They had treated them so badly – as the museum makes clear – that a slave revolt would have served them right. South Carolina was one of the 13 British colonies which in turn became the 13 original states when the USA emerged from the Revolutionary War with Britain. That’s why the US flag – the stars & stripes – has 13 stripes.

▲ I continued my Charleston explorations with a stroll down Rainbow Row with its beautifully painted houses and through Battery, the park at the end of the peninsula

◄ Nathaniel Russell House, towards the southern end of the Charleston peninsula is a very fine and very well-kept old mansion built by the wealthy merchant and slave trader it is named after. The elliptical spiral staircase ascends for the full three stories of the house and is its most notable feature.

▲ Aitken-Rhett House

The Joseph Manigault House and the Aitken-Rhett House are conveniently situated either side of the Charleston Museum. I was particularly taken by the Aitken-Rhett House because it is ‘preserved’ rather than ‘restored,’ which meant left as it was and gently decaying. There’s particular emphasis on the slaves, their lives, their quarters, their work places here. Amusingly, when I arrived they said I could get a cheaper two-house ticket to cover the Nathaniel Russell house as well, ‘but I’ve already been there and they didn’t offer me the cheaper option’ I complained. So they refunded my ticket and sold me the cheaper one! The house has a very good do-it-yourself tour with an iPod and headphones.

▲ The ‘Confederate submarine’ H L Hunley

The excellent Charleston Museum is the place to analyse the city’s tangled, complicated, dramatic history – the American Revolution, then the build up to the Civil War, ie the antebellum (before the Civil War) slave period, the Civil War itself, the aftermath, the long segregation period, civil rights. It’s a complicated place with lots of dark history.

Outside there’s a replica of the intriguing ‘Confederate submarine’ the H L Hunley. There’s a separate Hunley Museum which I’d really like to have visited, but it’s only open on weekends. The Hunley certainly had a tragic history. It sank on a test run in 1863 which killed five crew members. Salvaged and repaired it sank again just over two months later, this time killing all eight crew members including its designer Horace Lawson Hunley. Salvaged again it sank the US Navy warship USS Housatonic in 1864, but in the process was also sunk, again killing its entire crew of eight. The Hunley was not finally found until 1995 and was salvaged in 2000. It’s a replica of the Hunley which you see outside the museum and it’s very clear how cramped the submarine would have been for the eight-man crew who cranked the vessel’s propeller by hand. And how extraordinarily difficult it would have been to escape.

I wish I’d had longer to explore Charleston but I did have time for a pint of beer at Meeting at Market, appropriately at the junction of Meeting and Market. From where a walk up Market St to Broad St took me to at Gaulart & Maliclet, aka ‘French & Fast’. It’s small, as my Lonely Planet guidebook suggested, but not super-crowded and my ‘seafood bastille’ was perfect. Of course we are in the USA so at the conclusion of my meal the payment screen started with a 20% tip and went up from there. Fortunately that wasn’t a problem because my two glasses of wine were just US$6 each, the following night I was in a New York restaurant featuring wine at US$75 a glass. With the 20% tip ‘French & Fast’ came to a bargain US$65.57.