Category: Charleston

Charleston III: Fortified

Reading this week:

  • The French Mind by Peter Watson

If the previous day was all about the agricultural history of Charleston, free or otherwise, this day was going to be all about coastal fortifications. The real big destination of the day was Fort Sumter, but that was only part of the day of course, and so the first thing we did was arrive at Fort Moultrie pretty much the moment it opened. We had wanted to take a bit of a look at Sullivan’s Island, and also of course Fort Moultrie and Fort Sumter represented an interlocking system of coastal defenses, so how can you really understand one without understanding the other?

Display at the Fort Moultrie Visitor’s Center discussing the ties between Sierra Leone and Sullivan’s Island via the slave trade.

At Fort Moultrie first we briefly checked out the visitor’s center where I was most interested to find a display on Bunce Island. Then it was across the street to the fort itself. It was a fairly quick wander around, though what I liked best about the fort is that you still got shipping traffic coming in. From the perspective of the fort you can watch as these gigantic container ships slide on by. The shipping back in the day would have been a bit smaller, but it really drives home the strategic location of the fort and how you could use it to fire cannons at ships. One of the most exciting parts of the fort is the World War II command center they still have buried deep in the heart of it. You go down through these blast door sorta things and they have the command center laid out like it would have been, wild-looking coffee machines and all. This is where the duty officers would have plotted out firing cannons at those ships I mentioned.

Potential target driving by.
Love a giant chart.

From there we zoomed off back to downtown Charleston to the Fort Sumter Visitors’ Center, where the ferry departs from. There were a lot of people visiting Fort Sumter that day! Presumably because it was such a nice day and also a holiday. We had a lovely ride over to the fort, with the guide explaining some aspects of the harbor along the way. Once at Fort Sumter we of course once again wandered around, admiring Fort Moultrie now from afar. The wind was pretty blustery which made it chilly, but still right in the middle of the harbor on a sunny day makes for stunning views.

Now, you see, although this was my super amazing wife’s first time at Fort Sumter, I had been before back when I lived in Charleston, so nothing here was too surprising. The first time around I was flabbergasted to find a WWI-era fort right in the middle of the Civil War perimeter, but this time around I was a little more stunned thinking about how the gigantic cannons that had been installed in the post-bellum reconstruction were somehow still muzzle-loaders. It’s like the pinnacle of an outdated technology, like steam-powered cars. What else stunned me then but still now is that Citadel cadets fired the first shots of the Civil War on Fort Sumter, and yet somehow that institution still exists. Here they are talking about it on a page titled, of all things “The War Between the States”! We should have buried the Citadel in the pages of history.

Overlooking the parade ground.
The sandbar built up to the west of the fort’s artificial island.
A waterside view of the fort; before being bombarded so heavily during the war it was much taller.

Anyways that’s my anti-bigotry bigotry for the day. You don’t get too terribly long on the fort due to ferry schedules, and eventually we loaded up back on the ferry and head on back to Charleston. At the snack bar on the ferry my super amazing wife got a Charleston Chew, which felt appropriate. Our next goal was to tie up some loose ends before investigating any other tourism we could do before heading to the airport. The first loose end was lunch, and we went to the Charleston Crab House specifically because they had She-crab soup on the menu, a Charlestonian delicacy I had somehow never tried. It was pretty good, I can confirm. This also put us in a good spot to finally pick up a sweetgrass basket for my super amazing wife right there at the market house. She got a shallow, medium-sized example set apart by its gorgeous twisted rim.

Basket in hand, we had to choose what to do with our few remaining hours in Charleston, and we decided to go to the Nathaniel Russel House. The goal here was to go on a house tour, and this fit the bill. It was really nice! You’ll accept my regrets again for not being able to delve too deeply into the history of slavery on the site, though the museum is indeed thinking through this and improving their exhibits. Currently archeology and restoration are going on in the portion of the house where the enslaved persons lived and worked, and it is yielding some interesting results.

The staircase, from the bottom looking up (clearly).

The rest of the house was really pretty as well. Its main claim to fame is the three-story floating spiral staircase, which is indeed impressive. The guided tour is also very forward about when discussing the life of the Russels, making sure you are aware that life was made possible via enslaved labor. He bought and sold enslaved people and it was enslaved people that did all the work. Not to be glib, but in addition to his experience in those horrors, Russel also had phenomenal taste in crown molding, chaise lounges, and other accoutrements. Or the curators do, anyway. There was only actually one chair that was original to the house, sitting in the office off the entryway. Outside the house the gardens are done up as well in a traditional style, and walking through them was a pleasant way to wrap up our time in Charleston. From here it was back to the airport and back to DC, but I suspect we’ll make it back again sometime in the next decade or so.

The formal dining room.
The significant thing here is that the tea urn has its own table, which being unnecessary meant you were rich.
I mean seriously what great molding.
Apparently at the time this was a somewhat older model of molding, which meant Russel had been waiting years and years to install it.

Charleston II: The Tea

Camellias

My super amazing wife first learned about the Charleston Tea Garden when she was in China. China is a great place to learn about tea, but an inconvenient place to learn you hadn’t even needed to change continents to see it farmed. Visiting the Tea Garden was going to be the centerpiece of our whole trip to Charleston, and that being the case, we felt no need to rush into it. She had waited nearly a decade after all, so what was a few more hours? (what was going on here is we had bought tickets for a guided tour early in the afternoon and so had some time to kill)

To get properly fortified for a garden tour and properly in the southern mood, we opened up the day by having true Charlestonian food, namely a flight of fancy grits AND biscuits & gravy AND additional breakfast entrees to boot. We were not skimping on the food. Then, with that (barely) under our belts, we took advantage of the proximity and drove on over to the Charles Pickney Historic Site. The visitor center was closed for the winter, but visiting still justified a national park stamp, even if it had to be collected the next day.

The moody Charles Pickney site.

The Charles Pickney site was very nice, as long as I’m dwelling on it. It is a very small site, really now just a large field nestled in between some housing developments built on the former plantation grounds. The house is still there but we only peered in through the windows. Instead we explored the short nature trail off into a little stretch of hammock forest they have on the edge of the site. Also near the house they have some camellias which were very pretty, and as you wandered from forest to flower to fields, all only dimly lit under a cloudy sky, the whole thing was very moody. This box was checked, and so soon we departed, but if we’re ever in Charleston again in the summer I’d like to try to go back. Given the dearth of remaining historical buildings or anything, it seems like from the site’s website that they’ve really tried to make up for that with a lot of deep research into the lives of the inhabitants of the plantation, enslaved and free, which we didn’t get to see.

View from near the Sweetgrass Pavilion; I always like the cranes off in the distance, like hulking dinosaurs.

From there, finally, we then proceeded over the peninsula of Charleston (making another attempt at basket shopping by stopping at the unfortunately-closed-at-that-time (though maybe they don’t even sell sweetgrass baskets?) but scenically-located Sweetgrass Pavilion in Mt. Pleasant) and deep into coastal forest all the way down Wadmalaw Island to finally make it to the Charleston Tea Garden. What a place! I mean nothing too crazy it is perhaps about what you would expect, i.e. sizeable fields cleared from forest and now populated with low bushes. But they have a very nice visitor center with an expansive gift shop. There is unlimited tea, both hot and cold and sweet and unsweet you can enjoy during your shopping experience. Through doors in the back you enter the video-guided tour of their processing facility, with the video restarting every 15 minutes or so. The plant was not processing at this moment (it was the tail end of winter, so no harvests had occurred lately), but the plant tracked with what I had seen at the last tea facility I visited.

It used to be the Charleston Tea Plantation, but the realized how gauche that was.

Soon the appointed time for our tour of the tea garden itself came around, and we all piled aboard the bus to take a cruise around the fields. The tour was good, and our guide focused on tea puns. The history of tea growing in South Carolina is fitful, with attempts starting as early as 1799. Congress subsidized another run at it in the 1880s, and tea plants were cultivated but eventually left to go feral. Even more decades later in 1963, cuttings from that now native cultivar were used to found the Tea Garden. Although the Garden is owned by Bigelow tea, all the tea grown on site and only the tea grown on site is sold under the Charleston Tea Garden brand.

It lobs dry but devastating insults.

Also during the tour they showed us the green house where they begin the new plants. My main takeaway is that getting a tea plant to successfully sprout is actually quite involved, so now I feel much better about my couple fitful attempts. Eventually we pulled back around to the star of the show, their custom tea harvester, which cruises down the fields and chops the tops of the bushes off and vacuums them up for later processing at the plant. Apparently they’ve finally bought a fancy new one from overseas as well, but that was locked up in the garage, too precious to stay in the weather. And yeah that was the Tea Garden! My super amazing wife had achieved a dream and was very satisfied. Back at the gift shop we loaded down on tea and accoutrements, and then piled into the car for our final major site of the day.

The harvester! Really just a sort of lifted lawnmower.

That site was Magnolia Plantation & Gardens. It was very late in the day by the time we arrived, so we didn’t have a whole lot of time to actually explore. Plus it was now raining fairly steadily. What this meant is for the second time at a plantation in one day I did not really have an opportunity to think too much about what it meant and how that history of slavery was presented and so I’m sorry to not address that. But with the fading afternoon light and rain, what the place was for us is crushingly aesthetic. We had the gardens nearly to ourselves, with their winding paths through cypress swamp dotted with the few sprouting camellias that they are especially known for.

An alligator in the not-mentioned-in-the-text wildlife rescue area at Magnolia; this was not the suspicious one.
A cute lil’ possum in that same rescue area.

As we walked around my super amazing wife spotted a wild alligator on the far shore of a little inlet, just chilling. We went up out of sight in an observation tower and came back down to find the alligator gone but then I spotted it in the water, much closer to us. A very suspicious thing for the alligator to do, if you ask me. We took pictures on bridges skirting live oak trees and reflected that the beautiful camellias we were looking at were so closely related to the tea plants we had just seen, and also how the moody Spanish moss dripping everywhere were apparently closely related to pineapples (according to our punny tea tour guide). Eventually though the rain started to really come down, herding us back to our car and then off to a BBQ dinner.

Vast pools to reflect on your moodiness.
Moody bridges to nowhere.
Moody water control features simulating rice growing technology.
Miles of moodiness.
Our suspicious (& moody) alligator friend keeping his eyes above water.
Nothing moodier than a tomb.

Charleston I: Nostalgia

To take advantage of a three-day weekend and escape the cold (this was very early this year), my super amazing wife and I went on down to Charleston! Now, I lived in Charleston for two years for Nuclear Power School and Prototype, with a brief interlude up in Connecticut for Submarine Officer Basic Course (the Google AI search results describe SOBC as “intensive” and lemme tell ya intensive it is not). My super amazing wife wanted to go to Charleston to see a bit more of the South, and also to see the city where I had spent those formative years between the Naval Academy and reporting to the ship. I hadn’t been back to Charleston since I had driven out of there heading to Guam so I was excited to see what my old haunts had been up to.

And so after landing mid-morning and feeling comfort from the cold back home among the palm trees we went to go haunt said haunts. Although our focus for the weekend was going to be downtown and the coast, first thing we did was head the wrong direction up to North Chuck where we drove around my old neighborhood and then got lunch at the sandwich shop nearest to my heart, East Bay Deli. Back when I lived in Charleston I wouldn’t exactly save up to go to East Bay Deli, but I would only allow myself to eat there once a week, and on test days. I would savor that Rueben and rejoice in sweet tea. Luckily, EBD was exactly as I had left it; I sat in the same seat under the same posters to enjoy the same sandwich. Nostalgia and hunger satisfied, we then drove on downtown and spent the rest of the afternoon walking down and up it.

Definitely just one house.

Charleston really is a charming city. When I was living there post-Annapolis, I thought of it mostly as a much bigger DTA (Downtown Annapolis). During our walk we started at the top end of downtown, and popped into what was then my favorite bookstore, Blue Bicycle Books. That was also as I had left it, unfortunately minus a bookstore cat I fondly remember. We also popped into my aspirational clothing store Ben Silver (mostly aspirational, my favorite pair of dress shoes is from there). I was very pleased when my super amazing wife dubbed it “beautiful.”

We continued to make our way toward the Battery, enjoying the architecture more and more as we went along. I really enjoy the Charleston single houses, with their outdoor door between the street and the porch. It just all seems so charming as you ignore the various historical markers explaining the beginning of the Confederacy. Finally reaching the Battery we admired the water as a small seaplane flew overhead. Absolutely no notes on Charleston’s location with a beautiful and protected harbor.

Imagine it in the guest bathroom.

Having walked down King to get to the Battery, we started back up on East Bay Street, and thus I got to show my super amazing wife Rainbow Row. Back in nuke school I had gotten myself a painting of Rainbow Row from the sadly defunct art gallery in the Pink House, and then spent even more (surprisingly, to me at the time) to frame it. As such I rather like it but upon moving in together my super amazing wife’s aesthetic sense quickly decided the best place for it was prominently on display in the little-used guest bathroom located through a closet. We have not had a chance to redecorate since but my hope is that now that she has such a personal connection that maybe my Rainbow Row can wind up someplace less humid.

Anyways we continued to hit the highlights. We admired the Pineapple Fountain and how much it looked like a pineapple. Then we walked all the way through City Market on the lookout for a suitable sweetgrass basket. I have used one for years as a catchall and my super amazing wife wanted her very own. We weren’t too eager to buy one just then as the plan was to get one at the source on the sweetgrass basket highway, but during the weekend we never actually saw anyone in any of the stands despite driving through several times at different moments. I think it was always either the weather or everyone being at Church but we had to go ahead and get one finally in the Market on our last day.

At this point it wasn’t exactly getting late but it was getting later. The big plan was to go to Hyman’s to really round out my list of nostalgic locales (except for the place that never cut us off from bottomless mimosas one Tuesday morning after getting off the midwatch during Prototype). My fondest memory at Hyman’s is one of the servers getting wide-eyed and excited to explain the different traditional bases for shrimp & grits to my friend’s mom. This time around they only had shrimp & grits as an appetizer (reviewing the menu online maybe I just missed it under the entrees) but the crawfish I had as the main were good, though my super amazing wife stepped that up a notch with the shellfish delight. Plus too I ate soundly knowing I sat in the same spot noted Maggie Rogers fan Pharrell Williams had sat.

After a long day of verifying everything was just as I had remembered it, we drove off into the sunset (actually opposite the sunset) across the Ravenel bridge to check into our Mt. Pleasant hotel. We had to prepare to achieve a nearly decade-long dream of my super amazing wife’s the following day.