Charleston Currents

FOCUS: Toward a more truthful — and useful — Charleston history

By Charlie Smith, Special to Charleston Currents | When the Charleston County Planning Commission’s subcommittee on historic preservation announced last year that consultants had been hired to conduct the 2016 update of the Historic Resources Survey, I was initially very excited that we would finally be addressing some of our past failures to protect important historic sites and buildings throughout Charleston County.

Realizing that we did not have endless funds with which to work, we began to narrow the scope to a task that was feasible given our limited resources. I was initially not happy at all with the 1940-1975 time frame chosen for the limited study.

Charleston has a deeply-rooted complicity at every level in the atrocious politics of skin color …

by Andy Brack · 09/05/2016 · 1 comment · Focus, Good news

HISTORY: Ever wonder why it’s called Ashley PHOSPHATE Road?

S.C. Encyclopedia | The South Carolina phosphate mining industry began after the Civil War and dominated world production in the 1880s. Mining began in late 1867 on plantations near Charleston after the gentlemen-scientists Francis S. Holmes and St. Julien Ravenel and the chemists N. A. Pratt and C. U. Shepard discovered that local “stinking stones” contained unusually high amounts of bone phosphate of lime (BPL).