Below: Facade of Old Slave Mart Museum. Photo from the City of Charleston.
This field school session started off with a visit to the Old Slave Mart Museum, located at 6 Chalmers Street. This museum has been around since 1938, but has only recently been purchased by the city. The link to the museum from the city's website is found here: 
http://www.charlestoncity.info/dept/content.aspx?nid=1469.
http://www.charlestoncity.info/dept/content.aspx?nid=1469.Once called Ryan's Mart, this location was central to Charleston's slave trade from 1856 to 1863. The original port of sale was on Queen's Street and the main building was a jail where many enslaved men and women were bought and held for new owners. Nichole Green, a former cultural anthropologist, now heads the city-owned museum as curator. Ms. Green gave us a very informative introduction and tour of the space starting with how the current museum space came to be.
The structure was made by enclosing an alleyway with a roof. The two walls were once the exterior walls of the adjoining buildings. Slave sales were once common all over Charleston, but due to complaints of residents, slave sales were confined to Ryan's Mart. Most white Charlestonians were not complaining out of dissapproval over the slave trade, they simply thought that the large gathering of sellers and slaves were unsightly and gave cause for criticism from northern abolitionists.
In the 1870s, the roof was raised to present elevation and a second floor was added. It was made into a tenement building in 1937. Then owned by Charlestonian Marion Wilson, she opened it as the Old Slave Mart Museum and it stayed open until 1987, when it was bought by the City of Charleston. In 2007, the museum was re-opened with a more focused and modern interpretation of the slave trade in Charleston. The Old Slave Mart Museum of today deals with the changing voice of interpretation within slavery and tackles the misconceptions of public memory towards the building and the slave trade.
The exhibits focus on the antebellum slave trade was like and give different perspectives of traders, buyers, and slaves. Stories of the transAtlantic and domestic slave trade is addressed.
Issues in exhibit space arise when wall use is needed, as they try to not damage the former exterior walls of adjacent buildings. Public interaction also becomes challenging with many African Americans, uninformed whites, and racist groups who are not aware or challenge the validity and truth of the information exhibited.
The structure was made by enclosing an alleyway with a roof. The two walls were once the exterior walls of the adjoining buildings. Slave sales were once common all over Charleston, but due to complaints of residents, slave sales were confined to Ryan's Mart. Most white Charlestonians were not complaining out of dissapproval over the slave trade, they simply thought that the large gathering of sellers and slaves were unsightly and gave cause for criticism from northern abolitionists.
In the 1870s, the roof was raised to present elevation and a second floor was added. It was made into a tenement building in 1937. Then owned by Charlestonian Marion Wilson, she opened it as the Old Slave Mart Museum and it stayed open until 1987, when it was bought by the City of Charleston. In 2007, the museum was re-opened with a more focused and modern interpretation of the slave trade in Charleston. The Old Slave Mart Museum of today deals with the changing voice of interpretation within slavery and tackles the misconceptions of public memory towards the building and the slave trade.
The exhibits focus on the antebellum slave trade was like and give different perspectives of traders, buyers, and slaves. Stories of the transAtlantic and domestic slave trade is addressed.
Issues in exhibit space arise when wall use is needed, as they try to not damage the former exterior walls of adjacent buildings. Public interaction also becomes challenging with many African Americans, uninformed whites, and racist groups who are not aware or challenge the validity and truth of the information exhibited.
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The next stop was a walk up Meeting Street to the Historic Charleston Foundation's Aiken-Rhett House. This strikingly yellow house is located off of Meeting at the corner of Judith and Elizabeth Streets. The house sits on a large lot and contains original stables and urban slave quarters in the back. The house was built in the Federal style in 1818. There were renovations during the 1830s and 1850s. The house remains largely as it has since 1858 with the exceptions of some 20th century wiring and small renovations. The Aiken-Rhett House escaped bombadment damage during the Civil War because of its location in the northern part of Charleston, but was later looted by Union troops. A more in depth history can be found at this link: http://www.historiccharleston.org/experience/arh/. Brandy Culp, Curator with Historic Charleston Foundation, met with us for an introduction to the house. The class then went on a self-guided tour aided by an audio recording. The weather was bad and a downpour prevented me from taking acceptable photos of the outbuildings, but I will hopefully return to document those buildings. Flash photography was not allowed within the house and some rooms were too dark to bother with a photo. Needless to say, I do not have many photographs of the interior of the house. And for another reason--I was simply to fascinated by the house's interior to be bothered to take photos.
Plaster work was deteriorating, there was no furniture, wall paper was falling off the walls, and it was beautiful. The preservation plan for this house is one of conservation. There are beautiful areas where the age does not show much, but then there are rooms that echo the past lives and times long gone. The delicately handpainted red and silver wall paper that now show rust and brown are imprints of a grander age for the Aiken-Rhett Houses's white residents. It is the quieter parts of the house that keep you grounded to the reality of so many different lives living, working, and literally slaving away within the Aiken-Rhett compound. The slaves that resided and toiled here can be felt along the back staircases and in the outbuildings.The kitichen outbuilding was my favorite part of my visit. Not ever as grand and in slightly worse condition than the main house, the kitchen building is far more compelling. Most of the enslaved men and women lived over the kitchen building. From one room to the next, up a dark stairwell, and through the dark plaster rooms of the living quarters on the second floor--this experience was moving. To see where slaves in an urban setting dwelled is a sober moment for anyone I would hope. It is my recommendation that these outbuildings be considered as important as the main house in conservation because there simply are not very many historic structural resources related to urban African-American slavery.
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I have few comments on the International African American Museum. For more information, go to: http://www.rhodesdahl.com/documents/RhodesDahl%20-%20IAAM%20RFQ%20-%20Final.pdf.
I do not think that the committee has given realistic thought to the viability of their endeavor. Architecturally, the submitted designs were unfitting and too full of the architect's vision to be monetarily and characteristically acceptable.
Historically, I beieve that the committee does not recognize the lack of history prevalent in what they propose. I believe that this project looks good under the belt of several politicians and has now become a politically oriented project. Charleston has the Avery Institute, which is a wonderful research and repository of African-American history. The International African American Museum committee needs to reconsider its goals and what they truly want to convey.
