The Rock Hill Herald contained an ad on June 8, 1916 – “announcing that the College of Charleston begins it’s 132 year on Sept. 29th. South Carolina’s oldest college offers a four year course for B.A. and B.S. degrees and a two year pre-medical course. There is a free tuition scholarship assigned to each county in the state. Harrison Randolph is President.”
City Directories and History: COLLEGE OF CHARLESTON (66 GEORGE STREET) Constructed circa 1820-56; additions 1930, 1975; William Strickland, Edward B. White, George E. Walker, principal architects
“The colony set aside free school lands by 1712, but this area was unused for this purpose until the chartering of the College of Charleston, when ten acres of school-designated land and the barracks were given to the college. During the Revolution the site had been the location of barracks for William Moultrie’s 2nd South Carolina Regiment. When Robert Smith’s family petitioned for repayment of loans he had made to the college in its early years, three-fourths of the college’s original lands were sold. After the Reverend Jasper Adams, a graduate of Brown University, became principal of the college in 1824, he described the place as a “mass of ill looking and inconvenient buildings.” Through efforts of the trustees, a new center building was begun in 1828. The central portion of the present main structure was designed by William Strickland of Philadelphia, a student of Benjamin Latrobe, one of the architects of the U.S. Capitol. Strickland probably learned of the College of Charleston from one of its former trustees, Langdon Cheves, who served as president of the Second Bank of the United States. Strickland was the architect for the bank building as well as for Cheves’s Philadelphia residence.
In 1850 Edward Brickell White, Charleston’s leading Greek Revival architect, designed wings and a third portico for the main building. Ionic capitals, ordered for the structure from Elbridge Boyden of Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850, corresponded to those ordered by White for the Corinthian portico on the High School of Charleston at 55 Society Street. Much of the building was used to house the paleontology and natural history museum collection now in The Charleston Museum, and scientific interest led to the construction of a small observatory on the roof, which is still visible. The wrought-iron fence erected around the college by Christopher Werner incorporates spears and axes.
The college building today, with its weathered stucco barely tinted due to numerous washing and paintings, has a six-columned fluted Ionic portico with a central clock in the temple of the pediment. It stands on an arcaded base approached by sweeping wrought-iron staircases. The wings designed by White feature curvilinear gables supported by Ionic pilasters. In 1854 George E. Walker, a Charleston architect-builder, drew the plans for the library building of the College of Charleston. The library was undertaken by William F. Patterson and completed by 1856. This building, which represents the transition between the Greek Revival and the Italianate styles, includes an engaged portico supported by Tuscan pilasters and two-story arched Italianate style windows with corner quoining. The structure includes a main room surrounded by a gallery, and a great central plaster ceiling medallion. The main college building was expanded first in 1930, using a design by Albert Simons and Samuel Lapham, and again in 1975 by the successor firm to Simons and Lapham, when a new portico was added on the north side facing the newly created college mall.”
Information from: The Buildings of Charleston – J.H. Poston – Author, for the Historic Charleston Foundation, 1997
Other sources of interest: Charleston Tax Payers of Charleston, SC in 1860-61 and the Dwelling Houses of Charleston by Alice R.H. Smith – 1917 The HCF may also have additional data at: Past Perfect and further research can be uncovered at: Charleston 1861 Census Schedule or The Charleston City Guide of 1872
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