Tuesday 10th December 2019
We joined the other guests in the dining room for breakfast at this 170 yr old Charleston residence. We are staying in the carriage house. It’s 2 levels with the sitting room downstairs and the dining room and 2 bedrooms upstairs built over the original carriage garage. The first use for this wing of the house was for carriage parking and servants quarters. The main part of the house has a formal sitting room, dining room, kitchen, butler’s pantry and bedrooms over 4 levels. The very wide porch extends down the side of the house and is used throughout summer and sometimes in winter for the traditional 6pm Charleston social hour.
Carmel and I took ourselves off to explore the Nathanial Russell House in Meeting Street. It was purchased by the Charleston Preservation Society and although it no longer houses any original pieces Russell’s furniture, considerable research has enabled the society to display the rooms as they would have been when Mr Russell built the house in 1808. One amazing feature is the spiral free-standing cantilevered staircase that extends from the ground floor to the 3rd floor.
It was an exciting day as Sean and Sara joined us in Charleston after several days in Atlanta and Savannah, Georgia. We strolled through the markets and shared a Muffuletta for lunch – to translate that – a GIANT sandwich that can feed 4 people. The 5 of us could not eat it all.
We took a Charleston Harbour cruise and heard the story of Fort Sumter an Island in the Harbour. Charleston’s appetite for revolution continued in the mid 1800’s as the city blazed a path to secession to safeguard slavery. The Confederacy fired on the US garrison of Fort Sumter on 12/4/1861 which saw the start of the Civil War. We also cruised by Patriots Point the home of a navel museum with USS Yorktown an aircraft carrier build in 1943 and the Arthur Ravenel Jr bridge the longest cable-stayed bridge in North America and is 4kms long. It has been built to withstand 500 kph winds, Category 5 hurricanes and 7.4 magnitude earthquakes – it is some bridge.
The rest of the afternoon we walked the old quarter before meeting up for Charleston social hour in the sitting room. We wandered downtown to The Mills House for dinner.
