99 Fun Facts About Charleston

Which late-night host grew up on James Island in Charleston, the youngest of 11 children?

Stephen Colbert has said he decided as a boy to lose his Southern speech because television used it as shorthand for dim characters, so he copied the delivery of news anchors instead.

Charleston takes its name from which English king, on the throne when it was founded in 1670?

Charles II had granted Carolina to eight loyal supporters in 1663, soon after regaining his throne; their settlers founded Charles Towne in 1670 and moved it to the present peninsula in 1680.

The first battle of the American Civil War was fought at which harbour stronghold?

Fort Sumter: Confederate batteries under P. G. T. Beauregard opened fire at 4:30 a.m. on 12 April 1861, and Major Robert Anderson, outgunned and nearly out of supplies, surrendered the next day.

Which Confederate vessel became the first submarine to sink a warship, off Charleston in 1864?

The H. L. Hunley sank the USS Housatonic on 17 February 1864, then went down with all eight crew. Raised in 2000, she is kept at a conservation center in North Charleston.

Which adventure novelist funded the dive team that found Charleston's lost Confederate submarine in 1995?

Clive Cussler turned NUMA, the fictional agency of his novels, into a real one paid for by his royalties; its divers found the wreck under silt off Charleston, and it was raised in 2000.

Which East Bay Street block did Dorothy Legge start painting pink in 1931?

Rainbow Row: neighbours copied Legge's pastel paint along a block that had fallen into disrepair after the Civil War, and the spread of colours gave the row its name.

Church steeples that dominate Charleston's low skyline are popularly linked to which city nickname?

The Holy City is usually explained by the steeples and by the colony's early religious tolerance, but the phrase itself was coined only in the 20th century.

What creole language and culture developed among enslaved Africans' descendants on the Sea Islands?

Gullah grew out of the rice plantations: planters paid more for captives from West Africa's Rice Coast who knew the crop, and the islands' isolation helped their descendants keep African speech and customs.

Which Charleston speciality is finished with a splash of dry sherry as it is served?

She-crab soup is named for the orange roe of the female crab; it is thought to descend from Scottish partan bree, and local legend has a mayor's butler adding the roe to dress it up for President Taft.

Which composer founded Charleston's late-spring arts festival in 1977 as a US twin of one he ran in Italy?

Gian Carlo Menotti founded Spoleto Festival USA in 1977 as an American counterpart to his Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, choosing Charleston for its wealth of churches and theatres.

Which novelist's cadet years inspired The Lords of Discipline?

Pat Conroy graduated from Charleston's military academy in 1967; his thinly veiled novel opened a rift with the school that lasted until it gave him an honorary degree in 2000.

Who was the first woman admitted to the Corps of Cadets at Charleston's military academy in 1995?

Shannon Faulkner won a court fight of more than two years to join the all-male corps, then left within a week; Nancy Mace became its first female graduate in 1999.

Which Charleston school, founded in 1770, did the city take over in 1837 and run with public funds?

College of Charleston: it had shut down in 1836 amid quarrels between trustees, faculty and students, until the mayor stepped in and it reopened as one of the nation's earliest city-funded colleges.

The Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge, opened in 2005 over the Cooper River, links Charleston with which town?

Mount Pleasant: the 2005 bridge replaced two older Cooper River spans, and its towers are flanked by man-made rock islands meant to ground a stray ship before it can hit them.

Which category 4 hurricane came ashore just north of Charleston in September 1989?

Hugo made landfall at Sullivan's Island around midnight on 21–22 September 1989, and its storm surge wrecked the beach towns there and on neighbouring Isle of Palms.

In a Charleston single house, what does the door facing the street actually open onto?

The piazza: the street door is only a screen between the sidewalk and the long side porch, and the true front door stands halfway along it, on the long side of the house.

Charleston's City Market is famous for baskets hand-coiled from which native grass?

Sweetgrass baskets descend from the wide 'fanner' trays that enslaved Africans coiled to winnow rice; makers turned to sweetgrass around 1900, as work baskets gave way to show baskets for sale.

Which giant live oak on Johns Island, centuries old, shades an area of about 17,000 square feet?

Angel Oak is named for the Angel family, who once owned the land, though local folklore tells of spirits appearing as angels around it; the City of Charleston now keeps it as a public park.

Mother Emanuel, the Charleston congregation attacked in 2015, holds what distinction?

Oldest AME church in the South: its first building was destroyed after the 1822 Vesey plot, and when the congregation rebuilt after the Civil War the architect was Denmark Vesey's own son.

Denmark Vesey, who planned an 1822 uprising in Charleston, had bought his freedom with what?

Lottery winnings: Vesey won $1,500 in a Charleston lottery in 1799 and paid $600 of it for his freedom, but he was never able to buy his wife Beck and their children out of slavery.

Which pirate blockaded Charleston in May 1718, leaving only when given a chest of medicine?

Blackbeard held Charleston's harbour for about a week in May 1718, seizing ships and hostages until Governor Johnson handed over a chest of medicines. His sometime partner Stede Bonnet was hanged in Charleston that December.

Sullivan's Island, where many enslaved Africans first landed, is often likened to which arrival point?

Ellis Island: an estimated 40% of enslaved Africans brought to North America came in through Charleston, many held first in quarantine 'pest houses' on Sullivan's Island.

Which tree's spongy logs absorbed British cannonballs at Fort Sullivan in June 1776?

Palmetto logs, soft and spongy, soaked up British cannonballs on 28 June 1776. The fort was renamed for its commander, William Moultrie, and the palmetto went on to the state flag and seal.

Which Seminole leader died as a prisoner at Fort Moultrie in 1838 and is buried at its gate?

Osceola, seized under a flag of truce in Florida in 1837, died at Fort Moultrie on 30 January 1838; the Army buried him at the fort's front gate.

Benjamin Lincoln, who surrendered Charleston in 1780, was later chosen to accept the British surrender at which battle?

Yorktown: losing Charleston and its army was among the worst American defeats of the war; when Cornwallis sent a deputy with his sword, Washington had him hand it to his own deputy, Lincoln.

Which disaster on 31 August 1886 left many old Charleston houses braced with iron bolts?

Earthquake: the shock of about magnitude 7, felt as far away as Boston and Cuba, badly damaged the city's brick buildings; owners ran iron rods through the walls rather than pull them down.

A Charleston institution founded in 1773 is widely regarded as America's first what?

Museum: the Charleston Museum began as an offshoot of the Charleston Library Society, gathering specimens of local natural history, yet it did not open to the public for another half-century.

Which Charleston theatre, rebuilt in the 1930s inside the old Planter's Hotel, revives the name of a 1736 colonial playhouse?

Dock Street Theatre: the original opened in 1736 with The Recruiting Officer, and when New Deal crews rebuilt it inside the derelict hotel, the same comedy was staged for the 1937 reopening.

Charleston's Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim is the American birthplace of which movement?

Reform Judaism in America began here in 1824: when the trustees rejected members' petition for prayers in English, they broke away as the Reformed Society of Israelites, whose ideas the congregation later took up.

Which 1925 novel, later an opera, is set on Charleston's fictional 'Catfish Row'?

Porgy: DuBose Heyward's novel became a play and then an opera; he and George Gershwin spent the summer of 1934 at Folly Beach, near Charleston, working on Porgy and Bess.

Which hymn did President Obama sing during his 2015 eulogy for Reverend Clementa Pinckney in Charleston?

Amazing Grace: Obama first recited its words, then sang the opening stanza at the funeral of Pinckney, the pastor and state senator killed with eight of his congregation nine days earlier.

Which Charleston children's home fielded brass bands that toured abroad and marched in presidential inaugural parades?

Jenkins Orphanage: its young brass bands toured to raise money for the home, and several players, among them trumpeters Jabbo Smith and Cat Anderson, went on to jazz careers.

Which 1771 Charleston building held patriot prisoners in its Provost Dungeon during the Revolution?

The Old Exchange, completed in 1771, held leading citizens in its cellar during the British occupation of 1780–82; the state's convention ratified the US Constitution there in 1788.

Which Declaration signer's home was the Ashley River plantation with the butterfly lakes?

Arthur Middleton, a Declaration signer, was born at Middleton Place on the Ashley River; his father Henry, president of the First Continental Congress, gained the estate by marriage in 1741 and began its famous gardens.

The Charleston Tea Garden, on Wadmalaw Island, is owned by which tea company?

Bigelow bought the Wadmalaw Island farm at auction in 2003; Lipton had planted it in 1963 as a research station, fearing that unrest abroad might cut off its tea imports.

What is a joggling board, a fixture of Charleston porches?

A springy plank you bounce on: legend says the first was built in the early 1800s for a plantation owner's sister, who took its gentle bounce as exercise.

Charleston's growing technology sector has earned the city what nickname?

'Silicon Harbor' is the nickname for Charleston's tech scene, home to companies such as Blackbaud and Benefitfocus. Boeing's 787 assembly plant and a busy container port anchor the wider economy.

Which enslaved harbour pilot seized the Confederate steamer Planter in Charleston in 1862 and sailed it to freedom?

Robert Smalls took the ship out before dawn while its white officers were ashore, steered past the harbour defences and handed it to the Union blockade; he later sat in Congress.

Charleston was the largest colonial city south of which other city?

Philadelphia: Charleston ranked fourth among colonial cities behind Philadelphia, New York and Boston. Rice and indigo made it the wealthiest city in the colonies; about half its 11,000 residents in 1770 were enslaved.

Which Charleston promenade at the peninsula's tip is lined with antebellum mansions?

The Battery ends at White Point Garden, where the Ashley and Cooper rivers meet, Civil War cannon stand on display, and a pirate captain and his crew were hanged in 1718.

Which 1989 film climaxes with the 54th Massachusetts storming Fort Wagner, guarding the approach to Charleston Harbor?

Glory follows a Black Union regiment to its July 1863 assault on the fort on Morris Island, where its young colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, was killed leading the charge.

Which Charleston church, finished in 1761, is the city's oldest surviving church building?

St. Michael's, built from 1751 to 1761 at Broad and Meeting streets, is Charleston's oldest surviving church building; its English bells were carried off by the British in 1782 and later returned.

Which industry, launched by wells in the early 1800s, first made Charleston, West Virginia rich?

Salt: brine pumped from wells along the Kanawha River was boiled down in furnaces, and drilling for it also struck oil and natural gas.

Charleston's early town plan followed the 'Grand Model' that which philosopher helped draft for Carolina's proprietors?

John Locke, secretary to Lord Ashley Cooper, helped draft the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina in 1669 and the Grand Model that went with them, though the Constitutions were never ratified or fully put into effect.

Many of Charleston's founding settlers in 1670 came from which Caribbean island?

Barbados: its planters carried their slave-worked plantation system to the new settlement, a tie so close that early Carolina has been called a 'colony of a colony'.

Which city did Charleston overtake during the 2010s to become its state's most populous?

Columbia, the state capital, had itself first passed Charleston at the 1950 census, 86,914 to 70,174; the 2020 count put the port city back on top.

On 9 January 1861, cadets from which Charleston school fired on the supply ship Star of the West?

The Citadel's cadets, manning guns on Morris Island, forced the steamer to turn back with its 200 reinforcements and supplies for the Union garrison, three months before the war's first battle.

Which Charleston-born singer fronted Hootie & the Blowfish before turning to country music?

Darius Rucker was a university freshman when guitarist Mark Bryan overheard him singing in the dorm showers; the duo they formed grew into the band.

What did the colony's Security Act of 1739, born of fear of slave revolts, require of white men?

Carry guns to church: Sunday worship left plantations unguarded, and the Stono Rebellion broke out near Charleston on a Sunday in September 1739, weeks before the rule took effect.

Which Gone with the Wind character is a Charleston black sheep who was expelled from West Point?

Rhett Butler is introduced as a visitor from Charleston whom no family with a reputation in the city will receive.

Which Christmas plant is named after a Charleston-born diplomat who sent samples home from Mexico?

Poinsettia honours Joel Roberts Poinsett, the first United States minister to Mexico and an avid amateur botanist, who came across the plant near Taxco.

Which late-night television host grew up on Charleston's James Island as the youngest of eleven children?

Stephen Colbert was born in Washington, D.C., but was raised in Charleston, where his mother later ran a bed and breakfast from a downtown carriage house.

Which Ghostbusters star became a part-owner of the Charleston RiverDogs minor-league baseball team?

Bill Murray took his stake through the Goldklang Group, which has also owned the Hudson Valley Renegades and the Brockton Rox.

Which Charleston-born singer fronted Hootie & the Blowfish before topping the country charts solo?

Darius Rucker took a single to number one on Hot Country Songs in 2008, the first Black artist to do so since Charley Pride in 1983.

Which 2004 Nicholas Sparks film used Boone Hall Plantation near Charleston as Allie's summer house?

The Notebook kept its production offices at Charleston's old naval shipyard, and Ryan Gosling moved to the city beforehand to prepare for his part.

Which Charleston restaurant favourite began as a breakfast eaten while the local catch peaked around November?

Shrimp and grits appeared in a 1931 Charleston cookbook under the name shrimp and hominy, with credit for the dish given to Black cooks.

Which fruit, a symbol of hospitality, shapes the famous fountain in Charleston's Waterfront Park?

Pineapple Fountain sits in the middle of the park's grassy lawn, right in front of the City Gallery.

Which 1989 film follows the 54th Massachusetts regiment to its assault on Fort Wagner, outside Charleston?

Glory closes with an epilogue noting that Fort Wagner was never captured, yet the regiment's courage led the Union Army to accept thousands of Black men for combat.

Which World War II aircraft carrier, nicknamed the Fighting Lady, is a museum ship on Charleston Harbor?

USS Yorktown served as the prime recovery ship for Apollo 8 in December 1968 before becoming a museum ship at Patriots Point in 1975.

A 1739 shipment of equipment to Charleston is among the earliest evidence of which sport in America?

Golf gear was sent to a William Wallace in 1739, and Charleston had founded a golf club of its own by 1787.

The Best Friend of Charleston, which made its first run on Christmas Day 1830, was what kind of machine?

A steam locomotive built for regular passenger service, the Best Friend also became the first in the country to suffer a boiler explosion, in June 1831.

Which planned city, founded inland in 1786, replaced Charleston as the capital of its state?

Columbia was laid out because the state's leaders wanted a more centrally located capital than Charleston once independence was won.

Charleston sits in which coastal region, known for its tidal marshes and sea islands?

Lowcountry plantations once grew rich on crops that flourished in the hot subtropical climate, and the region is known for its historic cities.

Which author, once a soldier stationed near Charleston, set his treasure tale The Gold-Bug on Sullivan's Island?

Edgar Allan Poe served at Fort Moultrie from November 1827 to December 1828 and drew on what he saw of the island to recreate the setting.

Which composer spent the summer of 1934 on Folly Island, near Charleston, working on an opera set in the city?

George Gershwin came at the invitation of DuBose Heyward, the Charleston author whose novel the opera was based on.

In December 1860, a convention sitting in Charleston made its state the first to do what?

The vote to secede from the Union was unanimous, 169 to none, and fighting began in Charleston Harbor less than four months later.

An 1865 parade by freed people at a Charleston racecourse has been called the first observance of which holiday?

Memorial Day gained that claim on 1 May 1865, when a parade of 10,000 people honoured 257 Union soldiers buried at the Washington Race Course.

Which Bravo reality series, first aired in 2014, follows the lives of socialites living in Charleston?

Southern Charm proved popular enough for Bravo to order spin-offs set in Savannah and New Orleans.

Which Netflix teen treasure-hunt drama began filming around Charleston in 2019?

Outer Banks shot its first season from May 2019 at locations that included the Morris Island Lighthouse.

Which Revolutionary War guerrilla, nicknamed the Swamp Fox, is honoured by a square in downtown Charleston?

Francis Marion is remembered at Marion Square, which hosts a farmers market on summer Saturdays and several of the city's big festivals.

Which seaside resort near Charleston staged the 2021 PGA Championship, won by Phil Mickelson at the age of fifty?

Kiawah Island's Ocean Course, the work of Pete and Alice Dye, also staged the 1991 Ryder Cup, a contest dubbed the War by the Shore.

Which novelist drew on his cadet years at Charleston's military academy for The Lords of Discipline?

Pat Conroy had been recruited to the school to play basketball, an experience he returned to in his memoir My Losing Season.

Benne wafers, a classic Charleston cookie, take their name from a West African word for which seed?

Sesame first crossed the Atlantic on ships carrying enslaved Africans, who went on to grow the plants in small gardens of their own.

Which dye plant did teenager Eliza Lucas make her colony's second cash crop on a plantation near Charleston?

Indigo took Eliza Lucas three years of failed attempts from 1739, and by 1775 the colony was producing more than a million pounds of it.

Which epic fantasy series did Charleston native James Rigney write under the pen name Robert Jordan?

The Wheel of Time runs to 14 books and a prequel, and after Jordan died in Charleston in 2007 Brandon Sanderson took over the writing.

Which Boeing airliner has its final assembly building in North Charleston, opened in November 2011?

The 787 Dreamliner is assembled and delivered from a building that covers 1.2 million square feet beside Charleston International Airport.

Which enslaved pilot seized the Confederate ship Planter and sailed it out of Charleston Harbor to freedom?

Robert Smalls went into politics once peace came and was elected to the state legislature and then to the United States House of Representatives.

Which so-called Gentleman Pirate, a wealthy landowner turned outlaw, was hanged at Charleston in December 1718?

Stede Bonnet wrote to the governor begging for clemency, but the judge's sentence stood and he went to the gallows on 10 December.

Which Palladian plantation house near Charleston was the only one on its river to survive two wars intact?

Drayton Hall was kept up by seven generations of one family, though an 1886 earthquake and an 1893 hurricane destroyed its flanking outbuildings.

Which general surrendered Charleston in 1780, then formally accepted a British surrender himself the next year?

Benjamin Lincoln was George Washington's second in command when the British general's sword was handed to him, and he then served as secretary at war under the Confederation Congress.

Which Confederate general's guns opened the Civil War in Charleston Harbor against his old West Point instructor?

P. G. T. Beauregard had been taught at West Point in 1837 by Robert Anderson, the major who went on to surrender the fort to him.

Which Charleston lawyer was, at 26, the youngest delegate to sign the Declaration of Independence?

Edward Rutledge built a successful law practice in Charleston and went on to serve as his state's governor.

Charleston patriot Christopher Gadsden designed a famous yellow flag of the Revolution that shows which animal?

A rattlesnake, coiled above a warning not to tread on it, fills the flag; Gadsden, born in Charleston in 1724, was also a general in the Continental Army.

What was the surname of sisters Sarah and Angelina, who left slaveholding Charleston to lecture against slavery?

Grimké sisters Sarah and Angelina were among the first American-born women to make public speaking tours; Sarah left Charleston for good in 1821.

Charleston has the only independent congregation in the United States of which Protestant refugee group?

Huguenots founded the congregation in the 1680s, and its present Gothic Revival building on Church Street was completed in 1845.

Which Charleston-born architect of the city's Fireproof Building went on to design the Washington Monument?

Robert Mills never saw the obelisk finished: it was not dedicated until 1885, thirty years after his death.

Charleston's Ravenel Bridge, hung from two diamond-shaped towers 575 feet high, is which type of bridge?

Cable-stayed means the deck hangs 186 feet above the river from 128 individual cables anchored directly to the towers.

The Charleston Open, a women's tennis tournament on Daniel Island, is played on which surface?

Green clay courts host the event at a tennis centre whose main stadium seats 10,200; the tournament moved to Daniel Island in 2001.

Which fragrant flower is named after a Scottish physician and naturalist who lived for years in Charleston?

Gardenia honours Alexander Garden, who spent his spare hours in Charleston studying plants and animals and sending specimens to Carl Linnaeus.

Which Charleston-born street artist created the 2008 Barack Obama poster built around the single word Hope?

Shepard Fairey came out of the skateboarding scene and went to school in Charleston before finishing high school at an arts academy in California.

Philip Simmons made more than 500 decorative pieces seen across Charleston during seven decades in which craft?

Blacksmithing in Charleston meant horseshoes and household objects when Simmons started out; he turned the trade to ornamental gates, balconies and window grilles.

Which Charleston outlaw, hanged in 1820, is named in local legend as America's first female serial killer?

Lavinia Fisher did belong to a gang of highwaymen working the roads outside Charleston, but historians doubt that she ever killed anyone.

Charleston's Four Corners of Law has a city hall, a county courthouse, a federal courthouse and what else?

A church stands for ecclesiastical law beside the federal, state and local kinds; Robert Ripley coined the nickname in the 1930s.

Which 1739 revolt, the largest by enslaved people in the colonial South, began 20 miles southwest of Charleston?

The Stono Rebellion began when a literate man called Jemmy gathered about twenty followers near the Stono River; the last survivors were beaten a week later.

Charleston's two main rivers are both named after Anthony Ashley Cooper, a Lord Proprietor who held which earldom?

Shaftesbury was the title of the colony's chief Lord Proprietor, and it was the explorer Robert Sandford who put his name on the Ashley.

Which Charleston-born teacher did Martin Luther King Jr. call the Mother of the Movement?

Septima Clark drew on her years of teaching on Johns Island to build the literacy classes that fed the drive for Black voting rights.

Which mayor led Charleston for forty years, from 1975 to 2016, the longest tenure in the city's history?

Joseph Riley was a Charleston native whose forty years in office were also the longest of any mayor in the state when he retired.

Which Lifetime drama, set at the fictional Fort Marshall, was filmed in North Charleston?

Army Wives ran for seven seasons from 2007 to 2013 and opened with the largest series premiere the channel had seen in its 23 years.

In 1931 Charleston became the first American city to give legal protection to what, inspiring New York's later laws?

A historic district protected by local legislation was a national first, and part of the area later became a National Historic Landmark.