Architecture

In 1947 Marvin established a private practice in landscape architecture in the town of Walterboro, the county seat of his native Colleton County but far from urbanized areas where most landscape architects tended to congregate.

Constructed for textile mill workers at McBee’s nearby Reedy River Factory (ca. 1825), it seated 155 people—large enough to hold most of his employees and their families, who were, according to tradition, required to attend services.

A craftsman without formal training, McCollough was nevertheless aware of the new ideas that were transforming Episcopal church architecture. “Ecclesiologists,” influenced by the high-church Oxford movement in England, emphasized the relationship between theology and architecture, believing that new churches should mirror fourteenth-century English Gothic design. Recessed chancels, dark interiors, stained glass, pointed arches, battlements, and cross-topped spires replaced Georgian simplicity.

By the 1960s the property had become a monastery that housed the Trappist monks of the Cistercian Order. The monks of Mepkin Abbey began operating an egg farm, which was still functioning in the early twenty-first century, with several buildings on the property associated with that function.

Middleton Place is an Ashley River plantation located on Highway 61 (Ashley River Road) just outside Charleston.

Milburn was one of the New South’s most successful and prolific architects. He worked throughout the Southeast and designed more than 250 major buildings, primarily railroad stations and public, institutional, and commercial structures.

The Brewton House is a masterwork of early American architecture and reflects the sophisticated tastes of Charleston’s merchants on the eve of the Revolution.

Mills defined both his personal and public ambition in an 1808 letter to Jefferson, in which he declared his desire to pursue “the honour and benefit of my country.”

The two-story brick structure is laid in English bond with a molded brick water table. Its overall form has the squat profile typical of early Huguenot-influenced plantation houses in the lowcountry.

Completed in 1808, it was built for Nathaniel Russell (1738–1820), a merchant who arrived in Charleston at the age of twenty-seven and quickly amassed a substantial fortune.

John Niernsee was the principal architect responsible for the design and construction of the South Carolina State House and had a significant influence on architectural practice in the state during the second half of the nineteenth century. His son Frank followed in his father’s footsteps by finishing the interior of the State House and operating a successful architectural practice in Columbia during the 1880s and 1890s.

The hotel, standing twenty-nine feet above sea level, with a ten-story wedding-cake tower flanked by two five-story wings, was South Carolina’s Statue of Liberty.

Granite slabs five feet long, twenty-one inches wide, and eighteen inches deep supported walls of stone and concretelike mortar that ranged from twelve to eighteen inches thick. It was one of the first concrete buildings constructed in the South.

On May 9, 1803, the church was the site of a gathering of ministers and church elders that resulted in the formation of the Associate Reformed Synod of the Carolinas. Today it is revered as the “mother church” of the A.R.P. faith.

Unlike other cotton mills in Columbia that used steam or hydroelectric power, Olympia had its own coal-fired electrical plant that supplied electricity to Olympia and Whaley’s three other mills, as well as the Columbia Street Railway Power Company.

“Road shows” that traveled the country provided dramatic productions, musical comedies, operas, minstrel shows, and other live entertainment. Columbia’s opera house booked Broadway hits and stars such as Sarah Bernhardt, Ethel Barrymore, Lillian Russell, and Nat Goodwin.

Its sleek, vertical form represented the cutting edge of architectural design and added a sense of metropolitan sophistication to the skyline of South Carolina’s capital city.

At the outbreak of war in 1775, Pinckney became a captain in the First South Carolina Continental regiment and was later promoted to major.

Pisé de terre, or “rammed earth,” is an ancient form of building construction.

Plantations distinguished themselves from smaller farms not only by the sheer size of their landholdings and workforce but in other ways as well.