MYSTERY PHOTO: This mystery should be pretty easy

Here’s a mystery that should be pretty easy for anyone who has lived in or visited Charleston.  So how about identifying it AND giving us one fun fact about this place.  Send your guess to editor@charlestoncurrents.com. And don’t forget to include your name and the town in which you live.

Our previous Mystery Photo

Our May 20 mystery, “Narrow, tall building,” seemed to stump many readers, based on the fewer-than-normal responses we got.  It shows a chapel in Bethany Cemetery, a Lutheran site near Charleston’s Magnolia Cemetery.  The chapel now apparently is used as office space, while a former receiving tomb is a storage space, we hear.

Congratulations to Paul Wieters and Stephen Yetman, both of Charleston; George Graf of Palmyra, Va.; Evan D. Cook of James Island; Chris Brooks of Mount Pleasant; and Marnie Huger of Richmond, Va.  Congratulations, all!  This was a tough one.

Also thanks to Graf for this detail about the cemetery:  “According to Adventures in Cemetery Hopping, St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church opened Bethany Cemetery in 1856 after its first cemetery (Hampstedt Cemetery) on Reid Street was filled after several yellow fever outbreaks devastated Charleston’s immigrant German population. In the 1930s, the property Hampstedt Cemetery was located on was sold at auction and divided into lots when assessments for a street paving project weren’t paid.

“Lo and behold, the Charleston Housing Authority discovered human remains on the property in 1981 whilst preparing to build on it. How they didn’t know seems a bit farfetched but nevertheless, close to 500 of those graves were moved to Bethany Cemetery in 2009.  What was a chapel at one time is now the cemetery office. It is not in the best condition, nor is the receiving tomb beside it. The receiving tomb is now used as a maintenance building to store equipment, it appears. These are mostly found in the North because snow/ice would freeze the ground, causing delays in burial. South Carolina doesn’t have that problem. But my guess is that like Atlanta’s Westview, sometimes they had long stretches of rain and burials had to be delayed due to muddy conditions. They had to store the bodies somewhere.”

• Send us a mystery:  If you have a photo that you believe will stump readers, send it along (but make sure to tell us what it is because it may stump us too!)   Send it along to  editor@charlestoncurrents.com.