South Carolina

Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church represents a long history of African American worship and resistance in the heart of the Charleston peninsula. The congregation traces its existence to 1791, when freed and enslaved Blacks in Charleston formed a church called the Free African Society. The members of the church aligned themselves with the Methodists. Then known as the Hampstead Church, the congregation found themselves in a dispute with the larger Methodist organization over the white church leaders’ choice to erect a new building over an African burying ground.

Since its construction in 1859, Walker Hall, the main building of the South Carolina School for the Deaf and Blind, has served as the centerpiece of the school’s 160-acre campus. As the school's only remaining nineteenth-century building, Walker Hall reflects the development and expansion of education for the deaf and blind in South Carolina over a period of 150 years. The building is still in use today as the primary building for the school.

Langley-Bath-Clearwater (LBC) School, originally built as a combined junior-senior high school and now the LBC Middle School, is the most architecturally distinguished postwar modernist school in South Carolina. Located on a 55-acre site in a low-density neighborhood, Langley-Bath-Clearwater School is just off the main road linking Aiken, South Carolina, to Augusta, Georgia.

In 1819 the South Carolina legislature noted a need for a fireproof public records building in both Columbia and Charleston. Three years later, in 1822, the City of Charleston hired Robert Mills, then Superintendent of Public Buildings and State Architect for South Carolina, to design the Charleston County Records Office. Construction lasted beyond Mills’s tenure as State Architect; however, he was contracted to continue to oversee the project in collaboration with John Spindle.

The Carnegie Library in downtown Anderson was one of thirteen public libraries built in South Carolina between 1905 and 1920 using funds provided by the Carnegie Foundation. The Anderson Library Association had organized a subscription library in 1900 but required larger quarters within a few years. The Carnegie Foundation accorded Anderson the relatively generous amount of $18,700 toward the construction of its proposed library building.

Deering Milliken, known since 1976 as Milliken and Company, is one of America’s oldest textile manufacturers. The company grew from the nineteenth-century enterprises of Maine native Seth Milliken, who entered the southern textile business in 1884 with an investment in the Pacolet Manufacturing Company of Spartanburg, South Carolina.

The Sewee Shell Ring is the northernmost known member of a group of more or less doughnut-shaped, prehistoric middens occurring along the Atlantic Coast from Florida to South Carolina. It is one of South Carolina’s few well-preserved, visible, and publicly accessible traces of aboriginal occupation of its territory prior to European colonization. Most of the evidence of that occupation is known only from excavation. About twenty such rings have been identified on South Carolina’s coastal plain, all located along tidal creeks.

The U.S. Naval Hospital in Beaufort is South Carolina’s preeminent surviving example of the mid-twentieth-century tendency to combine modernist design principles with Beaux-Arts layout and massing. It is also notable as the last major work of architect Paul Philippe Cret. Drawings preserved at the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, which include elevations and perspectives dated September 25, 1945, show the design substantially as it was executed.

The Circular Congregational Church, which fronts on one of the main thoroughfares of historic Charleston, is the finest surviving example of Romanesque Revival architecture in South Carolina, where instances of the style were never numerous. It is an imposing structure that stands on the site of three earlier buildings belonging to the same congregation. The present church derives its name from the third building on the site, built in 1806 by Robert Mills. The design specified a circular auditorium, possibly based on James Gibbs’s unused project for St. Martin-in-the-Fields, London.

Thomas Heyward, one of four South Carolinians to sign the Declaration of Independence, acquired this property just north of Tradd Street from his father, rice planter Daniel Heyward, in 1770. After razing an older dwelling on the site, Heyward began construction of a three-story brick residence the following year. He retained the prior residence’s kitchen and stable outbuildings that frame a courtyard at the rear of the new structure. Brick jack arches over the windows are the only exterior ornamentation of the central hall, double-pile house.