![]() Nowadays Charleston is known for its strong tourism industry in 2016 Travel + Leisure Magazine ranked it as the best city in the world. Also, to learn about Charleston's Civil War history, you can visit the Confederate Museum at Market Hall. Built in 1859, this was the last slave auction facility in South Carolina, which is now turned into a museum. One of the places to learn about the city’s torrid past is the Old Slave Mart. In 2018, the city formally apologized for its role in the American Slave trade, condemning it as inhumane. The war had shattered the city's prosperity, but the freed African-American population had surged afterwards. Slavery was again an important factor in the city's role during the Revolutionary War.Ĭharleston also played a major part in the Civil War, as a pivotal city where both the Union and Confederate Armies vied for power. The locals pioneered large-scale slave trade of the 18th century, seeing almost half of all slaves imported to the United States arrive through Charleston. The city's significance in American history is tied to its role as a key slave trading port. Founded in 1670 as Charles Town, honoring King Charles II of England, this was the first comprehensively planned town in America. Wilson, who turned the site into a museum of African American history, arts and crafts.A popular tourist destination and a major port city in South Carolina, Charleston is fit to impress anyone with its Southern charm, friendliness, and rich history. In 1938, the property was purchased by Miriam B. When sales were held in the shed, enslaved people stood on auction tables, three feet high and ten feet long, placed lengthwise so enslavers could pass by them during the auction. The building was used for this purpose only a short time before the defeat of the South in the Civil War led to the end of slavery.Īround 1878, the Slave Mart was renovated into a two-story tenement dwelling. ![]() Oakes, purchased the property in 1859 and applied for a permit to insert brick trusses for the roof of the shed into the adjacent Fire Hall. Before the construction of the shed, sales were held in the tenement building or in the yard.Īnother auction master, Z.B. Ryan's Mart, now the Old Slave Mart, occupied the land between Chalmers and Queen Street, and contained three additional buildings-a four-story brick tenement building with offices and "barracoon" (slave jail in Portuguese) where enslaved people were held before sales, a kitchen and a morgue. One of these belonged to Thomas Ryan, an alderman and former sheriff. An 1856 city ordinance prohibited this practice of public sales, resulting in a number of sales rooms, yards, or marts along Chalmers, State and Queen Streets. Customarily in Charleston, enslaved men, women, and children were sold on the north side of the Exchange Building (then the Custom House). The interior was one large room with a 20-foot ceiling, while the front facade was more impressive with its high arch, octagonal pillars and a large iron gate.ĭuring the antebellum period, Charleston served as a center of commercial activity for the South's plantation economy, which depended heavily upon the forced labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants. When it was first constructed in 1859, the open ended building was referred to as a shed, and used the walls of the German Fire Hall to its west to support the roof timbers. Once part of a complex of buildings, the Slave Mart building is the only structure to remain. ![]() The Old Slave Mart, located on one of Charleston's few remaining cobblestone streets, is the only known extant building used as a slave auction gallery in South Carolina.
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