MYSTERY PHOTO: Orange archway

We bet just about anybody who lives in South Carolina, as well as many visitors, have seen this curious orange archway.  But where is it?  Send to editor@charlestoncurrents.com.  And don’t forget to include your name and the town in which you live.

Our previous Mystery Photo

Our Oct. 30 photo, “Where is this door?” was easy for many veterans of the Mystery Photo.  It showed a slightly retouched photo of the door of the Hibernian Hall on Meeting Street in Charleston.  A key clue: the harp gate.

Congrats to these readers who identified the door: Chris Brooks of Mount Pleasant; Jim McMahan, Susan Highfield and Stephen Yetman, all of Charleston; Charles Boyd of Hanahan; Charlie Morrison of Mashpee, Mass.; Jay Altman of Columbia; George Graf of Palmyra, Va.; Don Clark of Hartsville; Allan Peel of San Antonio, Texas; and Marnie Huger of Richmond, Va.

Graf shared some research: “Hibernian Hall was originally built as a meeting place for the Hibernian Society, an Irish benevolent organization founded in 1801 which had a healthy membership in the port town of Charleston in the early to mid-1800s. The building itself was constructed in 1840, and held an architectural distinction as one of the first semi-public buildings to be built in the southern city in the pure Greek style of architecture.

“The modest Greek-style columned structure holds a distinctive role in both Charleston and American’s legacy as the meeting place for a faction of the 1860’s national Democratic Convention, and ever since, this once marginally notable structure has risen to fame as one of the most important meeting venues in the South.”

• 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.