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Charleston's Houses In The Eighteenth Century

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Introduction

Charleston is a city ripe with extraordinary historic architecture, especially its houses. Some of the most interesting rooms found within these houses are those that comprise the social spaces, especially their drawing rooms and parlors. Many of these rooms were the backdrop in which Charlestonians displayed not only their hospitality and gentility of manner, but also many of their most prized objects. Some were the spaces in which wealthy Charlestonians, many of whom saw themselves as American gentry and long-fashioned their social rituals after the English example, entertained not only others but themselves. Records show their penchant for genteel pastimes, pastimes that were chiefly carried out in these spaces, such …show more content…

It was and is most often the events that pertained to social interactions that were considered more significant than others. When performed indoors, in the eighteenth century, Carson explains, the settings where daily activities such as the taking of meals, tea taking, and entertaining company occurred were often differentiated in part by either architectural embellishments or specialized furnishings. “People with genteel sensibilities had a keen eye for such place-markers.” Sometimes use of a particular room is determined through investigative field work. However, as Dr. Carson points out, “those clues are rare.” The routines of daily living that helped shape domestic interiors, and in houses in particular, variations of habit and behavior differ widely putting “field-worker’s powers of observation to the test when investigating historic dwellings.” Sometimes, he expounds, special equipment or built-in furniture in the form of ovens, buffets or valance hooks used for suspending bed curtains gives investigators clear indication as to the activities that took place there. Those clues are few and far between. More often these completely empty architectural spaces contain very few clues as to their original function. Most rooms had to be furnished before they could perform their intended tasks. Some of the most fascinating evidence for the types of furnishings and goods that once filled these rooms are found in surviving probate inventories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Probate inventories can give us specific information about individual goods individual rooms contained. In Charleston an abundance of historic probate records survive, and can be found peppered throughout the city in various collections and archives. Frustratingly however, even in the case of many of the surviving room-by-room probate inventories, rooms designations are listed only vaguely,

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