Historic Charleston Walk

Welcome to Charleston's City Market. You're at Market Hall, which faces Meeting Street. Behind it, a continuous run of one-story market sheds stretches for 1,240 feet, across four city blocks, all the way to East Bay Street. The market dates from the 1790s.

In 1788, Revolutionary War general Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and other landowners along an old canal donated a strip of reclaimed marshland for what was first called the Centre Market, running from the harbor docks to Meeting Street. When the city's Beef Market burned in 1796, beef sales moved here too. Market Hall itself was added in the early 1840s, designed by Charleston architect Edward B. White.

Look at the band below the roofline: it alternates ox skulls and rams' heads, symbols of a meat market. And a common myth is wrong. Enslaved people were never sold in the City Market. Today the stalls sell everything from jewelry to Gullah sweetgrass baskets.

This is St. Philip's Church. Established in 1680, St. Philip's is the oldest European-American religious congregation in South Carolina.

Its first church was a wooden building at Broad and Meeting Streets, where St. Michael's Church stands today. After a hurricane damaged it in 1710, a new church was begun here on Church Street and finished in 1723. That one burned to the ground in 1835.

The present church was finished the next year, and the steeple was added between 1848 and 1850. Its National Historic Landmark description singles out the imposing tower, in the Wren-Gibbs tradition, and the three Tuscan porticoes. From 1893 to 1915 it was the rear tower of a pair of range lights that guided ships into Charleston's harbor, with the front light on Fort Sumter. The graveyard holds John C.

Calhoun, the seventh vice president of the United States, along with Charles Pinckney, a signer of the Constitution, and Edward Rutledge, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Today St. Philip's is a parish of the Anglican Diocese of South Carolina.