The Public Life of Charleston’s Market Hall

The temple-like structure standing at the intersection of Market and Meeting Streets in Charleston, with its yellow-wash walls and massive white columns is a familiar sight to many residents and visitors. Now 180 years old, the life story of this public venue known as “Market Hall” has been dominated by the long presence of a Confederate museum that does not reflect the original purpose of the building or its varied uses. During its first sixty years, Charleston’s Market Hall was an architectural gem that once hosted a surprisingly diverse series of events and audiences.

Most conversations about Market Hall, whether published in glossy books or delivered by passing tour guides, tend to focus on the building’s architectural features and its relation to adjacent surroundings. The two-story hall casts a long shadow over the City Market in Market Street, where many generations of Charlestonians purchased their daily provisions like vegetables, fruits, and fresh meat in the days before refrigeration and supermarkets. Raised high above the humble market sheds, the massively elegant and classical lines of Market Hall seem oddly out of step with the daily vending of foodstuffs that once dominated the cobbles of North and South Market Streets. To put this building in its proper historical context, therefore, we need to travel back in time to explore the origins and purpose of this misunderstood Market Hall.

The City of Charleston acquired the land now known as Market Street in the spring of 1788, when a group of six families ceded a strip of tidal marshland measuring one hundred feet wide and stretching from Meeting Street to the Cooper River.[1] Shortly after acquiring the site, the city began to create a new, central market for the people of Charleston by improving the highest and driest western portion near Meeting Street. The first structure built was a rectangular shed supported by brick pillars and arches, measuring 26.5 feet wide and 199 feet in length. In the center of this long, one-story structure, the builders raised a second story that formed a large square cupola-like tower overlooking the surrounding market. This elevated space, designated Market Hall, was created for the use of the Commissioners of the Market who held monthly meetings to regulate market business and employed a Clerk of the Market to superintend daily activities below. The hall was sufficiently large to host occasional meetings of other groups, such as a “public meeting of the citizens of Ward No. 3” in January 1815. In 1824, the Market Commissioners allowed the newly-formed Apprentices’ Library Society to house their collection of books temporarily in Market Hall.[2]

The first market shed in Market Street, which opened in 1789, stood slightly more than one hundred feet east of Meeting Street, in the center of the present Market Street. The intervening space between Meeting Street and the market shed initially served as a parking lot for wagons bringing produce from the country to the city. It remained vacant for nearly a half-century of market activity, until the Grand Lodge of Ancient Freemasons of South Carolina asked the City of Charleston in 1835 for permission to erect a Masonic Hall at the site. After two years of negotiations, the city struck a deal with the Freemasons that set an important precedent for all future activity at this site: The City of Charleston would retain ownership of the land on which the Masonic Hall was to be built, but the Grand Lodge would retain all profits generated by renting the hall “for the purposes of holding assemblies balls dinner and supper parties exhibitions or any other thing whatsoever.” In exchange for this privilege, the Grand Lodge made two important concessions. First, “that the lower part of the building under the arches be forever kept open as a market place or applied to such purposes as the said City Council may from time to time and at all times direct.” Second, the Freemasons promised that the Hall to be built above the west end of the market would “be so constructed as to be capable of accommodating large assemblies of the citizens and be open free of charge . . . for the holding of all general meetings of the citizens of the City of Charleston which may be called or ordered by the intendant or presiding officer of the City Council of Charleston and take place during the day time.”[3]

Following the ratification of this agreement in late June, 1837, workers commenced building a two-story Masonic Hall measuring thirty-six feet wide and 129 feet long, according to a design submitted by architect Joseph Hyde. The building was almost finished in late April 1838, when it was consumed by a massive fire that also destroyed the adjacent market sheds and much of the surrounding neighborhood. Per their agreement with the city, the Freemasons had up to five years to rebuild their hall if happened to be destroyed. While builders attempted to salvage bricks from the ruins of the burned-out Masonic Hall, City Council rebuilt several one-story market sheds and began to reconsider and regret its bargain with the Freemasons. The people of Charleston still needed a commodious hall for public gatherings, but the city did not necessarily need to partner with a private organization to satisfy this want. If the city built its own grand hall at the site, it could accommodate several public offices within the building and generate revenue by renting the extra space to private citizens (including the Freemasons) for a variety of events. In August of 1839, seventeen months after the destructive fire, the City of Charleston paid the Grand Lodge of Freemasons $4,500 to surrender its right to rebuild on the lot at the west end of the market. Local architect Edward Brickell White won a design competition held that autumn, and the construction of Charleston’s new Market Hall commenced the following summer. The original plans for Joseph Hyde’s Masonic Hall of 1837 and E. B. White’s Market Hall of 1839 are now lost, but, as they were designed for nearly identical purposes at the same site, we might conclude that the dimensions and proportions of Hyde’s building were probably very similar to those of the present building that was completed in the spring of 1841.[4]

White’s design employed the then-fashionable Greek-Revival vocabulary of architecture (technically Roman Revival) to evoke the form of an ancient temple. The result was a majestic building that is still widely regarded as one of the most architecturally-significant public buildings in the City of Charleston. A series of arched openings on the ground floor facilitate pedestrian traffic beneath the main hall and provide shelter for a number of market vendors. Symmetrical stairways on the north and south lead visitors from Meeting Street up to a broad portico along the hall’s west façade that is supported by four large Roman Doric columns. Crossing the portico and passing under the tall central doorway, visitors step into a lobby flanked by a pair of small square offices. Straight ahead the space opens into the grand rectangular hall, measuring thirty-one feet wide and fifty-four feet deep, illuminated by nine massive windows, all under an ornate plaster ceiling raised twenty-two feet above the wooden floor.[5]

During the first sixty years of its existence, Market Hall served a variety of functions for the citizens of Charleston. As a municipal building, the hall provided ample space for the monthly board meetings of the Commissioners of the Market and daily offices for the Chief Clerk and assistant clerks of the market. Other city departments, including the Commissioners of Public Buildings and the Board of Fire Masters, met here for several decades. Market Hall also served as the customary polling place for the registered voters of Charleston’s Ward No. 3, from September 1841 through November 1961.[6]

But the grand hall within the two-story market building, containing nearly 1,700 square feet of uninterrupted floor space, was far larger than the city needed for purely administrative purposes. Illuminated by generously-sized windows and gas chandeliers suspended from the high, resonant ceiling, the commodious hall was also designed to host large civic gatherings and elegant entertainments attended by the free citizens of antebellum Charleston. Some of the events held at Market hall during its early decades were probably privately organized by city officials and their circles of friends, but newspaper notices from the 1850s and beyond provide a valuable record of other interesting activities at the site.

In the autumn of 1851, for example, the Charleston Total Abstinence Society commenced a series of weekly temperance lectures at Market Hall.[7] In the spring of 1852, Professor Louis Agassiz used the hall for a series of semi-weekly public lectures on geology. In the spring of 1854, the hall served as the headquarters for a week-long “Commercial Convention” attended by hundreds of businessmen from other Southern states. The dormant Horticultural Society of South Carolina rebloomed at Market Hall during a series of meetings in early 1858, and the gentlemen’s Coryphœan Society used it as a rehearsal space while preparing for a series of public concerts that same spring. The Fireman’s Charitable Association held meetings at Market Hall in the spring of 1860, and South Carolina delegates to the Democratic National Convention that April used Market Hall as their base of operations.[8]

During the early stages of the American Civil War, the activities at Market Hall evolved in step with the free inhabitants of Charleston. The Calhoun Guards, for example, drilled and held regular meetings here during the first half of 1861. Local cavalry officers attended “sword exercise” within the hall to learn proper technique from professional swordmen. Recruitment meetings at Market Hall sought to raise young men “for immediate active service,” while over-age men in reserve companies gathered at the same location to plan their defensive strategies. In the wake of the destructive fire that devastated Charleston in December 1861, the burned-out Phoenix Fire Engine Company transferred its regular meetings to Market Hall for the duration of the war.[9]

The first blush of enthusiasm for the war soon faded, and the events of 1862 testify to the realization of a more sobering reality. Charleston’s Market Hall became the headquarters for the local “Soldiers’ Board of Relief,” which gathered the necessities of life for distribution to the families of distant soldiers. Prominent businessmen organized a “Free Market of Charleston” at Market Hall, where they received applications from hungry families and used their commercial contacts to bring increasingly-scarce food into the city. When the mayor advised all non-combatants to evacuate the City of Charleston in July 1863, the municipal government established an office in Market Hall to distribute “Refugee Tickets” that would help them find passage further inland. South Carolina’s governor then ordered non-combatants out of the city one month later; citizens who were “unable to provide shelter and food for themselves out of the city” were advised to call at Market Hall and apply to the “Commissioners for [the] Removal of Non-Combatants of Charleston.”[10]

The end of the war in 1865 paved the way for a return to normalcy at Market Hall. When Federal authorities permitted City Council to resume control of most municipal functions that October, the Market Commissioners, market clerks, Commissioners of Public Buildings, and the Board of Fire Masters immediately resumed their regular activities within the building. To continue a war-time habit into the future, City Council resolved in 1866 to allow all volunteer fire companies without offices to use Market Hall for their regular meetings. In 1869, the Charleston County Agricultural Society began holding meetings at the hall, followed soon after by the older Horticultural Society.[11]

The real golden age of public events at Market Hall blossomed in the years following the Civil War, thanks to an important shift in local demographics. Charleston’s urban population swelled in the late 1860s as thousands of formerly-enslaved people sought to begin new lives in the city. The ravages of war had damaged most of the city’s larger buildings, however, and public gathering places were in high demand. Once the then-progressive Republican Party took control of Charleston’s City Council in 1869 (see Episode No. 179), public buildings like Market Hall began to host events that were open to a much broader spectrum of the city’s inhabitants. For the first time the city’s history, many of these public events were organized and attended by the formerly-enslaved people and free persons of color who then formed the majority of the local population.

In post-Civil War Charleston, Market Hall emerged as the one of the most active, and probably the most racially-diverse meeting place in the city. The Charleston newspapers of the 1870s, for example, contain many hundreds of notices for events taking place at Market Hall. Most of these events were publicized in advance to draw a large audience, but some, as in the antebellum years, were more private affairs that were noted in the local press only after they had passed. Like the pre-war events, the majority catered to the business and political interests of adult men. One finds scores of notices for Republican clubs, Democratic Clubs, friends of Cuba, friends of Ireland, friends of immigrants in general, and numerous gatherings promoting a variety of new commercial ventures. Appealing to the large class of working men both Black and White, the newspapers report the meetings of labor organizations such the Charleston Mechanics Society, the Stevedores’ Protective Union, the Journeymen Mechanics’ Union, the Cigarmakers’ Union, and others.

A more remarkable testament to the new realities of post-war Charleston is the advent of sophisticated cultural events at Market Hall organized by members of the city’s Black community. In January 1874, for example, one newspaper reported that the “Terpsichorean Club, composed of the colored elite of the city, gave a ball at Market Hall on Thursday evening.” Three months later, the congregation of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church—probably the same crowd that presented the earlier dancing club—hosted a two-day “promenade concert” at the hall that was described as “pleasant in all respects, and was well attended.” The music was provided by one of several Black musical ensembles that enlivened Charleston cultural scene in the late nineteenth century. St. Mark’s Episcopal Church held a number of musical events at Market Hall during the 1870s, but they were not alone. The general AME Church held at least one “Sunday School Festival” in 1877, and Fourth Baptist Church staged a promenade concert at the city-owned venue several years before the arrival of Rev. Daniel Jenkins.[12]

Several of the city’s African-American volunteer fire companies gained permission to hold regular meetings at Market Hall in 1875, and all of the Black firemen gathered here that spring to plan a grand “Firemen’s Tournament” on Carolina Day, June 28th. In addition, Black militia groups, including the Randolph Riflemen and the Zouave Cadets, as well as Black political groups like “The Tammany Ring,” held fancy concerts and masquerade balls in Market Hall during the twilight days of Reconstruction.[13]

Following the decline of progressive Republican politics in 1877 and the rise of conservative Democratic government (see Episode No. 177), the number and diversity of cultural activities at Market Hall declined. The reasons behind this change might not be purely political, however. The decline of African-American events at Market Hall in the late 1870s and early 1880s might also reflect the post-war maturation of the city’s Black community. Some of the new social clubs and congregations formed in the late 1860s eventually built their own churches and meeting rooms, and perhaps had less reason to frequent the public Market Hall as life in post-Reconstruction Charleston grew increasingly segregated.

The city’s White community also grew less reliant on Market Hall during the late 1870s as older, war-damaged venues were repaired and new halls built. Nevertheless, the public space above the market served well when other facilities were lacking. In December 1880, for example, the Carolina Art Association held its first post-war exhibit at Market Hall to raise funds for what would later become the Gibbes Museum of Art. Major renovations at City Hall required the Mayor, Clerk of Council, and City Council meetings to relocate to Market Hall during most of 1882. The city lent the space to the congregation of Trinity Methodist Church during a period of renovations in 1885, and similarly to the Gospel Temperance Union and then Mariners’ Church in the following years.[14]

The earthquake of August 31st, 1886, damaged Market Hall and hundreds of other buildings in Charleston. While the city government applied public funds to repair the building in 1887, many private organizations struggled to finance necessary repairs to their private halls and churches. As in the years immediately after the Civil War, the local newspapers provide evidence of a surge of cultural events held at Market Hall in the late 1880s. Public Christmas festivals to raise money for the poor White community, for example, became a regular occurrence at Market Hall for several years. Such annual events were augmented by occasional charitable soirees like the “Flower Mission” of the King’s Daughters and the “Easter Necktie Festival” of the Ladies’ Orphan Auxiliary.[15]

Charleston’s post-earthquake years also saw the return of events that illuminate the diverse religious traditions of Charleston’s Black community. “The colored Catholic Knights,” for example, held “a very successful ball at Market Hall” in the spring of 1889. Centenary Methodist Church hosted a summertime “strawberry festival” at the venue that same year, followed by a two-day autumn festival organized by the ladies of the congregation. The congregation of Morris Street Baptist Church also held a two-day fair in early 1890 to raise funds for rebuilding their house of worship. St. Peter’s Catholic Church and the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception held a joint two-day bazaar and fair in late 1890, and later that year both St. Peter’s and St. Mark’s Episcopal Church held holiday events at Market Hall.[16]

In contrast to the frequent and varied nature of the events held within Charleston’s Market Hall during the 1870s and 1880s, activity within this public venue declined sharply during the 1890s. The Commissioners of the Market and other municipal boards continued to gather here for regular meetings, and registered voters in the neighborhood still climbed the steps to cast their ballots, but the extant newspapers of that era contain far fewer notices of cultural events at the site. As in the early 1880s, this change might reflect the completion of repairs to various earthquake-damaged buildings and the construction of new venues across the city. On the other hand, the declining vitality of this public space during the 1890s might also reflect the contemporary narrowing of South Carolina’s political sphere under the rule of discriminatory “Jim Crow” legislation and the rise of nostalgia for the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy.

In the years after the conclusion of the American Civil War in 1865, local veterans of the Confederate States Army gathered occasionally in Charleston for both public and private events. The tenth of May became known as “Memorial Day” across the Southern states as survivors of the war gathered to decorate soldiers’ graves on the anniversary of the death of General Stonewall Jackson. In Charleston, as elsewhere in the South, such traditions expanded and became more formal after the organization of the United Confederate Veterans (UCV) in 1889. The subsequent rise of state and local chapters of the UCV led to formation of related groups, such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

The creation of the latter organization in Tennessee in September 1894 inspired local ladies to form a Charleston Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, or UDC, in November of the same year. At their first meeting, held in the armory of the Carolina Rifles on the first of December, the local UDC declared its mission “to preserve the history of the war consequent upon the withdrawal of the South from the Union.” In subsequent months and years, the local chapter of the Daughters worked with similar heritage groups to organize a number of local events to commemorate various Confederate anniversaries. In late April 1896, the UDC figured prominently in a state-wide “Confederate Reunion Week” held in Charleston, during which Market Hall served as the headquarters of General Wade Hampton and the members of “Camp Hampton” from Columbia.[17]

Similar events were held in Charleston in April of 1897 and 1898, the success of which inspired an even grander Reunion Week in May 1899 that drew many thousands of Confederate veterans and sympathizers from across the South. Market Hall served as the headquarters for the South Carolina Division of the United Confederate Veterans during that week-long spectacle, while other venues across the city hosted a wide variety of public gatherings. At the Mills House hotel, for example, visitors could peruse a collection of Civil War relics collected and curated by the Charleston chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The local UDC had established their “chapter room” in the Mills House in late 1896, and opened it to the public as a “Confederate Museum” on December 11th of that year.[18]

Thanks to the success of the Confederate reunion in May 1899, the Charleston chapter of the UDC received many historical items to augment their Confederate Museum at the Mills House. Negotiations to find a new home for the growing collection apparently commenced shortly afterwards, but details of such conversations do not survive. The Charleston News and Courier announced on October 20th, however, that “the headquarters of the Daughters of the Confederacy have been recently moved from the Mills House to the Market Hall.” Two days later, the local press announced that “the Market Hall has been leased by the Daughters of the Confederacy and will hereafter be used by them as a chapter and relic room.” At their fifth anniversary meeting, held at Market Hall on Secession Day (December 20th) 1899, local UDC President Louisa Rebecca McCord Smythe (Mrs. Augustine T. Smythe) proudly described many of the new accessions to the museum’s collection, all of which helped the organization preserve the “sacred memories of the ‘Lost Cause.’”[19]

The Confederate Museum in Charleston’s Market Hall opened to the public in late November 1899 and continued at that site without interruption or competition for the next ninety years.[20] During this long era, the UDC’s collection of Civil War relics continued to grow as other activities within Market Hall declined. Charleston’s City Council abolished the Commissioners of the Market in 1924, along with other relics of colonial-era government, and replaced them with a modern Department of Public Buildings with offices elsewhere.[21] The traditional voting precinct within Market Hall, used by citizens of Ward No. 3 since the building opened in 1841, disappeared after the elections of November 1961. During the centennial of the Civil War, which was proudly commemorated in Charleston during the early 1960s, the Confederate Museum was the sole occupant of the once-vibrant grand hall perched above the city’s historic market. Market Hall was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1973, by which time the Confederate Museum already dominated the history of the prized building.

During the dark, early-morning hours of September 21st, 1989, the violent winds of Hurricane Hugo peeled away the roof of Market Hall and shattered many of the building’s large windows. Large volumes of driving rain soaked the historic collection of memorabilia within the hall, which the local Daughters of the Confederacy evacuated to another site for conservation and storage. These events marked the beginning of what would prove to be a very difficult decade for both Market Hall and the UDC. Hopes of quickly returning the museum to its traditional home were dashed in early 1990, when surveys revealed that the building was in a state of serious structural distress. For the next twelve years, the local UDC held their Confederate Museum in a smaller space within the city and waited patiently for a return from exile.[22]

During the 1990s, the City of Charleston slowly gathered local, state, and federal assistance to document the condition of Market Hall and plan its careful rehabilitation. Work to strip and stabilize the landmark structure finally commenced in October 1996, and the long work of restoration began in the summer of 1998. Around that same time, the lease held by the Daughters of the Confederacy on the space apparently expired. The date of its expiration is unclear, however, because no recorded copy of a formal lease agreement can now be found. According to local lore, which was widely repeated in the newspapers of the 1990s, the UDC held a ninety-nine-year lease on the property that commenced in 1898. If Mayor J. Adger Smyth did draft a written lease of Market Hall to the UDC in 1898 (or, more likely, in late 1899), it seems that the document was not vetted or recorded in the usual legal manner. Nevertheless, the editors of the Charleston Evening Post and Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. expressed their determination to see the Confederate Museum return to its customary place within Market Hall as soon as the necessary repairs were finished.[23]

After numerous delays and setbacks, the City of Charleston staged a gala celebration at Market Hall on June 24th, 2002, to mark the official completion of repairs made necessary by Hurricane Hugo in 1989.[24] The event was not a grand re-opening, however, as the sumptuously-restored hall was still empty. On the day following the gala event, the officers of Charleston Chapter No. 4 of the United Daughters of the Confederacy joined Major Riley to sign a new lease agreement. In exchange for one dollar ($1.00), the city granted the UDC exclusive use of Market Hall for another ninety-nine years.[25] After a thirteen-year hiatus during which the City of Charleston spent $3.6 million repairing its historic Market Hall, the Confederate Museum resumed its place as the building’s sole occupant and reopened to the public on February 14th, 2003.[26]

As a historic structure, the architectural grandeur of Charleston’s Market Hall is a manifestation of the civic aspirations embraced by city leaders of 1839 and made tangible in 1841. Nearly two centuries later, Market Hall is still, as one city official described it, “the most architecturally important and most historic that the city has in its inventory of buildings.”[27] Designed as a public gathering place for free White citizens during the antebellum years, the radical changes wrought by the Civil War transformed Market Hall into a racially diverse but nominally segregated public space. For a brief but remarkable moment, this hall was the unique hub of a social nexus that encompassed a wide swath of the city’s population and a variety of cultural events. The rise of Jim Crow politics and “Lost Cause” nostalgia overshadowed this diversity in the 1890s, however, and established a monolithic presence that has endured for more than 120 years.

My role as a public historian is to uncover and narrate past events and decisions that have shaped the world we inhabit today. My goal in presenting this outline of two centuries of activity at Market Hall is to facilitate a broader understanding of the venue’s deep history for citizens who may recognize that building only as the long-term home of a private museum. Regardless of one’s opinion of the current use of the facility, Market Hall is an important landmark on the city’s historic streetscape that belongs to the people of Charleston.