Charleston

The Civil War began in Charleston harbor at half past four in the morning on 12 April 1861, when batteries around the harbor opened on Fort Sumter. The fort surrendered after thirty-four hours with nobody killed in the bombardment — the only death came afterward, during the surrender salute, when a gun burst.

Sumter was then held by the Confederacy for nearly four years and shelled continuously by Union guns. Photographs from 1865 show it reduced from a three-tier masonry fort to a low mound of rubble and sandbags. It is one of the most photographed structures of the war and the images are genuinely shocking in sequence.

The city itself was shelled too, from Morris Island, for nearly two years. The lower peninsula was abandoned. Photographs from the end of the war show a district of ruined houses that a great many people at the time read as judgment.

Then, on 31 August 1886, an earthquake estimated around magnitude seven struck near Charleston — the most damaging earthquake ever recorded in the eastern United States. It killed roughly sixty people and damaged most of the buildings in the city. It was felt in Boston and Chicago.

The photographs of the aftermath are the reason so much survives today: the repairs used long iron rods driven through the buildings and bolted at each end with earthquake bolts, which are the round and cross-shaped plates visible on hundreds of Charleston facades. Almost every one dates from that year.

Rainbow Row on East Bay Street was a run of merchants' houses with the shops below and living quarters above. The colors are a twentieth-century restoration; the photographs from the 1890s show them in poor repair and largely unpainted.

The Battery faces the harbor with the antebellum houses behind it, and it is where most of the city's tourist photography was made from the 1880s onward.

The City the River Made and Kept Threatening to Take