SC -- Charleston -- West Point Gardens (Battery Park) and nearby homes:
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Description of Pictures: Also included here is St Michael's Episcopal Church which has the graves of two signers of the US Constitution -- John Rutledge and Charles Cotesworth Pinkley. (I arrived on a Sunday and the church is closed to visitors on that day so I didn't get to go in; the AAA book raved about the interior of it.)
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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
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BATT_030824_013.JPG: My AAA book said there was a monument to the defenders of Fort Sumter. Being a northerner, I naturally presumed it was a monument to the Union troops that defended the island at the beginning of the war. Nope. It's a memorial to the Confederate guys. Silly me!
BATT_030824_017.JPG: At the corner of East Battery and South Battery streets is the Louis Desaussure House.
BATT_030824_022.JPG: The AAA walking tour write-up says of this house: "The hot pink house at 5 E Battery St was built in 1847 by John Ravenel... After being hit by the 1886 earthquake, it was rebuilt by a later owner, who added Victorian Italianate features popular at the time. The house remained in the hands of the Ravenel family until 1953."
BATT_030824_036.JPG: The marker on this says: "Capstan of USS Maine, destroyed in Havana Harbor by external explosion at 9:40pm February 15th 1898 with the loss of 266 lives." This is of course the incident that officially sparked the Spanish-American War. We're still not sure what caused the explosion and it's still unknown whether the Spanish had anything at all to do with it but it justified some of our land stealing desires.
BATT_030824_042.JPG: This monument is to the defenders of Fort Moultrie, not during the Civil War but during the American Revolution. On June 28, 1776, that fort's cannons had dissuaded a British force from landing and seizing Charleston. They came back later and seized it but the initial defense created legends and heroes.
BATT_030824_075.JPG: The marker says: William Bull's House c 1720. These lots as shown on the "Grand Modell of Charles Town" were granted in 1696 to Stephen Bull of Ashley Hall and Sutton. This house, one of the oldest in the city, was built circa 1720 by his son, William Bull, later Lt Governor of South Carolina. Subsequent owners added the piazzas to the south and west wing and altered the interiors, but the exterior remains virtually unchanged. From these steps, Gov Robert Y Hayne dissuaded a group of nullificationists from proceeding to the battery where they intended to seize a ship and declare war on the Union."
BATT_030824_084.JPG: In the back is a statue of James Francis Byrnes (1879-1972). The marker says "Charlestonian by birth, this great statesman served his country as Congressman (1911-25), Senator (1931-41), Supreme Court justice (1941-43), head of WWII Office of Economic Development (1942-43), director of War Mobilization where he was generally regarded as special assistant to the President (1943-45), Secretary of State (1945-47), and finally Governor of South Carolina (1951-55)."
BATT_030824_087.JPG: Charleston County Courthouse
BATT_030824_092.JPG: City Hall, said to be the oldest in the country
BATT_030824_100.JPG: Grave of John Rutledge (1739-1800), lawyer and statesman, Governor of South Carolina, Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. He is one of two signers of the US Constitution buried in the St Michael's graveyard.
BATT_030824_104.JPG: Grave of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney (1746-1825), lawyer, legislator, Major General US Army, Minister to France (appointed in 1796, it was during the French revolution and they actually refused to receive him for a year; after that, during the ensuing XYZ affair, refusing to pay a bribe suggested by a French agent to facilitate negotiations, he was said to have replied "No! No! Not a sixpence!"), and Presidential candidate for the Federalists (VP candidate in 1800, Presidential candidate in 1804 and 1808; he was defeated in all cases).
Description of Subject Matter: White Point Gardens is so named because of all the white oyster shells which covered the area in the city's early days. It has a monument which the AAA book described as "a monument to the defenders of Fort Moultrie and Fort Sumter." Being a northerner, I naturally presumed this meant that it was a monument to the Union defenders of those forts but no such luck. Walking up the middle of the park, you're on Meeting Street which has very expensive houses originally owned by the movers and shakers of Charleston.
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
Directly Related Pages: Other pages with content (SC -- Charleston -- West Point Gardens (Battery Park) and nearby homes) directly related to this one:
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2004_SC_Charleston_Battery: SC -- Charleston -- West Point Gardens (Battery Park) and nearby homes (65 photos from 2004)
1998_SC_Charleston_Battery: SC -- Charleston -- West Point Gardens (Battery Park) and nearby homes (38 photos from 1998)
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2003 photos: Equipment this year: I decided my Epson digital camera wasn't quite enough for what I wanted. Since I already had Compact Flash chips for it, I had to find another camera which used CF chips. That brought me to buy the Fujifilm S602 Zoom in March 2003. A great digital camera, I used it exclusively for an entire year.
Trips this year: Three-week trip this year out west, mostly in Utah.
Number of photos taken this year: 68,000.
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