Walk
Charleston
The Guidebook
Walk Charleston is a walking tour guidebook designed to engage, entertain and inform visitors to Charleston, South Carolina as they explore the city's historic district.
Purchase the Book
The book contains a guided tour along the waterfront, an historical timeline, historical photographs, a photo-based scavenger hunt, and information on seasonal flora. Buy 2 and get 6 free Charleston postcards. To purchase copies contact chasbookwalk@gmail.com.
Our Blog
"It's about time for South Carolina to rejoin the Union."
The finer details of Charleston's long history have filled many a book, so why this blog? There are gems to be found in those many books, gems that have been cut and polished for reading here. Humorous, sad, frightening, or little known, these tales will, I hope, prove interesting to all who love Charleston. We'll begin with the story behind 59 Meeting Street and its "dependency," which later became a separate house, 61 Meeting Street. It is a story that takes us from a time when slavery was the norm to the contentious era of the civil rights movement.
Dubose Heyward (1885-1940)
Born in Charleston to dispossessed aristocrats from the upstate, fatherless at the age of three, afflicted with polio, and without a college education, Heyward founded the Poetry Society of South Carolina, and wrote the novel Porgy, the first novel written by a white southerner to offer a realistic portrayal of black southerners. In partnership with George and Ira Gershwin and the assistance of his wife, a playwright, he transormed his novel into the opera Porgy and Bess, which is still performed today, most recently in New York City, and in Charleston at the Spoleto Arts Festival.
No. 20 South Battery
One of the grandest houses on South Battery, this three-story house, with two piazzas overlooking White Point Gardens, was built in 1843. It has been occupied by a cotton merchant, a Confederate officer who made a fortune in New York City after the war, a banker known for living large and ending his days in a sanatorium in Baltimore, and, in the 20th century, two spinster sisters, who founded the Society for the Preservation of Old Dwellings, and converted the outbuildings at the rear into a "motorcourt" in the 1920s. It is currently the home of one of Charleston's most famous ghosts, the "headless soldier."
