The Churches of Charleston
Circular Congregational Church
WHILE CHARLESTON’S historical homes and buildings continue to enchant residents and dazzle tourists, the city’s churches merit special attention and study. You can easily gaze at their designs and details for hours at a time and not see everything. Which is why repeat visits for repeated gazing always yield new treasures.
But how is it that so many beautiful, and so many kinds of, churches are so close to each other to begin with?
From the time of Charleston’s founding, an important aspect of the city was its religious diversity. The province of Carolina was created almost immediately after the defeat of dissenters in the English Civil War and the restoration of the Church of England—two freedoms that were guaranteed to attract settlers, and a good explanation as to why Charleston has outstanding early churches of so many denominations. No other city in the United States still has as many of its earliest churches, and ours are worth looking at in terms of the development of architectural styles and the functional requirements of each denomination.
St. Philip’s Church
The Fundamental Constitution of the Lords Proprietors, revised in 1670, stated that since settlers “will unavoidably be of different opinions concerning matters of religion, …it will not be reasonable for us on this account to keep them out…” With this in mind, as few as seven people could form a congregation (as long as they held their services at the same time as the Anglican churches).
The Lords Proprietors had been largely responsible for restoring the head of the Anglican Church to the throne, and Carolina was their principle reward. Many dissenters again were eager to leave England, and Charleston was settled mostly by dissenters, although Anglicans for the most part kept control of its government until the revolution. There were continual conflicts between adherents of various denominations, but they were more political than religious, and each denomination was free to build the kind of church it wished, and to worship in it according to its conscience. Such mutual tolerance attracted French Huguenots, Sephardic Jews, German Protestants, and Irish Catholics, as well as other denominations.
Nearly all of Charleston’s antebellum churches are within two blocks of King Street, yet none are on King Street. The explanation for this unusual situation is that King Street, as the city’s principle commercial street, runs down the middle of the peninsula with neighborhoods to each side. It got its start as a path between the headwaters of tidal creeks that often determined the boundaries between developing neighborhoods.
Huguenot Church
City walls created in 1780 and 1812 spanned some of the narrowest parts of the peninsula between its tidal creeks. There were exceptions, but in general the city initially developed to conform to its natural boundaries. The highest land had the principle roads—King Street and Meeting Street—and the most wagon traffic, and by the middle of the 18th century these streets housed most of the mercantile establishments.
Neighborhoods developed largely in pairs to either side of these two main streets, and each neighborhood built its own church. Charleston became a city with many relatively small churches, and as new neighborhoods developed, new churches were built.
Among the best examples of Charleston’s early church architecture are a Methodist meeting house that looked like a house until a portico was added, the oldest Reform Jewish synagogue in the United States built to resemble a Greek temple, a Catholic cathedral which could form the centerpiece of a medieval town, and an Anglican state church in the Northern Renaissance style which was as much medieval as classical.
Stay tuned as we guide you around and into these exquisite examples of architecture.
(This post introduces a series that we will present about churches on the Charleston peninsula. As with all of our material under the category “Looking at Charleston,” this information comes from unpublished, copyrighted writings of architectural historian, Gene Waddell.)
Copyright Notice: all material in this series is the exclusive property of Gene Waddell. If you want to reuse any of it in any form, you must get permission in writing from chastoday@charlestontoday.net.
