A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston / Edition 1 available in Paperback, eBook
A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0807855995
- ISBN-13:
- 9780807855997
- Pub. Date:
- 04/11/2005
- Publisher:
- The University of North Carolina Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0807855995
- ISBN-13:
- 9780807855997
- Pub. Date:
- 04/11/2005
- Publisher:
- The University of North Carolina Press
A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston / Edition 1
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780807855997 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The University of North Carolina Press |
| Publication date: | 04/11/2005 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.67(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A Golden Haze of Memory
The Making of Historic CharlestonBy Stephanie E. Yuhl
The University of North Carolina Press
Copyright © 2005 The University of North Carolina PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8078-2936-6
Chapter One
A Golden Haze of Memory and Association The Creation of a Historic Charleston LandscapeCharleston is not the Island of Manhattan. -Society for the Preservation of Old Dwellings, 1920
A white woman, dressed in flowing robes and armed with a large spear, sits guarding the harbor and buildings of a bustling, eighteenth-century port city. A ribbon declaring in Latin the motto "She guards her buildings, custom and laws" scrolls over the figure's defiant head. This, the official seal of Charleston, South Carolina, since its incorporation in 1783, illustrates the value Charlestonians have invested in their architectural treasures, placing them on the same level as their "customs and laws."
In 1920, a group of elite white Charleston women wrapped themselves in the mantle of this allegorical spirit and asserted their role as guardians of the city's endangered historical landscape. Through the founding of the Society for the Preservation of Old Dwellings (SPOD), they launched a preservation movement shaped by a highly selective historical memory that is best described as personal, romantic, and heroic. Unlike their contemporaries at Greenfield Village, Michigan, or Williamsburg, Virginia, Charleston preservationists did not invent a historic landscape from scratch or from a small handful of buildings; rather, they worked with the city's existing structural resources. The significance of a building depended on the extent to which it functioned for preservationists as a concrete reminder of traditional cultural customs and values that were synonymous, in their hearts and minds, with Charleston. SPOD activists bestowed "sacred relic" status on the grand eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century residences of the former planter class and ignored or advocated the "clean up" of more modest, usually black-occupied structures. In these preservation choices, SPOD members projected their interpretation of the past, and their claim to contemporary racial and class authority, onto the three-dimensional fabric of the city.
As the 1920s progressed and historic preservation became more fashionable and potentially profitable, Charleston's movement altered accordingly. Professional male architects and city officials assumed the movement's reigns from its early female volunteer founders. Whereas SPOD had been the engine of advocacy in the 1920s, the all-male, mayor-appointed Board of Architectural Review (BAR) arbitrated most preservation decisions by the early 1930s. Likewise, preservationists expanded their vision from saving individual homes to zoning an entire historic district in 1931. And yet while the power to regulate Charleston's cityscape shifted hands, the elite spirit that defined the city's historic spaces and public memory remained constant.
"Largely a Women's Organization": The Society for the Preservation of Old Dwellings
On Wednesday afternoon, 21 April 1920, a group of thirty-two white Charleston residents gathered in the front parlors of 20 South Battery, the home of Nell and Ernest H. Pringle Jr. They congregated at the request of Miss Susan Pringle Frost, a local realtor and a friend, and in some cases, relative, of those gathered. Between sips of tea and mouthfuls of mocha cake, the group listened enraptured to Frost's impassioned pleas that they organize themselves into a group to safeguard the city's architectural jewels. Although approaching fifty years of age, the stout and stern Frost presented a formidable figure that April afternoon. The suffragist and seasoned businesswoman knew how to motivate a crowd. Drawing upon concerns regarding the proposed commercial development of neighboring Citadel Square, Frost described in vivid detail the imminent destruction of the Joseph Manigault House at the corner of Meeting Street and Ashmeade Place for the construction of automobile garages on the site. Designed by Charleston banker and architect Gabriel Manigault for his rice planter brother Joseph, and built in 1802-3, the mansion featured elaborate ornamentation and a sweeping staircase; it was an outstanding local example of Adam-style architecture. The potential loss of this Charleston monument-especially at the hands of a car garage-was too much for the assembly to imagine. Frost further appealed to her listeners' racial and class anxieties by underscoring the "imminent danger of further deterioration on account of the class of tenants now occupying it." To prevent such a tragedy, they created an association that became known as the Society for the Preservation of Old Dwellings.
As SPOD's leader, Susan Frost became the most public face and voice of preservation in 1920s Charleston. Frost was a complex women who embodied both the traditional and the innovative, and her relationship to modernity is not easily categorized. She was a female business pioneer who broke the gender barrier for stenographers in the U.S. Federal District Court in Charleston, where she worked for sixteen years, supporting herself and her unmarried sisters. In 1909, she became a professional real estate agent. Frost was very active in local women's club work; for example, she was the founder and president of the Charleston Equal Suffrage League, which advocated the National Women's Party's radical stance for an equal rights amendment. At the same time, Susan Frost boasted an impeccably patrician Low Country lineage and identified strongly with the mores and manners of the past, regarding unwarranted change with a wary eye. As a result, she often sought compromise, which occasionally resulted in supporting contradictory stances. Take, for example, Frost's attitude toward cars. On the one hand, she consistently lamented the changes that the automobile wrought on Charleston's landscape, such as widened streets, demolished old homes, and unsightly filling stations. On the other hand, Frost was one of the first white women in Charleston to drive a car, which she used for showing properties to potential clients. While in some instances a threat, automobiles could also be a preservation ally, Frost pointed out, as they "now make all sections in close proximity, so that the old distinctions of up town and down town should have no part when it comes to the preservation of the best in architecture."
Frost echoed the sentiment expressed by fellow Charlestonians Alice Ravenel Huger Smith and Daniel Elliott Huger Smith in their germinal 1917 publication, The Dwelling Houses of Charleston. "New and strange ideas, which, however suitable to places that have developed them, would be in Charleston merely imitation, and would perhaps destroy those very things that make the place so interesting," the Smiths wrote. "It is not what is new, however, but what is incongruous that should be avoided." A practical visionary, the savvy Frost did not want to alienate potential allies among business and government interests in the city. Indeed, SPOD's second official meeting was held at the Charleston Chamber of Commerce. Thus, Frost articulated an ideal of preservation that embraced commercial, generational, and aesthetic concerns: preservation became "of vital and far-reaching importance to Charleston, possibly not in a commercial sense as some count 'commercial,' but certainly in a very broad sense 'commercial.'" From the beginning, then, SPOD characterized its safeguarding of the past as a complement to rather than an adversary of commercial progress.
With Frost at the helm, SPOD members hoped that their organization would become a kind of consulting firm for the business community, able to "influence commercial interests to select for their business places localities in which old charm is not sacrificed." SPOD envisioned preservation as a way to resuscitate the local economy by transforming dilapidated structures into "income-producing" properties, such as hotels, apartments, and even retail spaces. On a smaller scale, from early on SPOD advocated charging tourists admission to gain access to Charleston's historic properties in order to offset preservation costs. Frost also pointed to her own real estate career and the modest living she had earned from restored properties as an illustration of preservation's economic potential.
SPOD was neither the first nor the only group of individuals who organized to rehabilitate the physical remnants of a remembered past. Its membership drew on a long tradition of organizing both in and outside of the South, such as the Mount Vernon Ladies Society, the Ladies Hermitage Association (Tennessee), the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA), and the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA). SPOD, however, differed from its organizational ancestors. Unlike the more reactionary APVA, for example, Charleston preservationists did not act as a last defense against change. They did not promote a wholesale return to the culture of the Old South. Instead, they worked within a modern mentality, attempting to organize certain areas of the city as historic and representative of a revered past while allowing other spaces to develop along commercial lines. Charleston's preservationists balanced fears of unregulated development on the peninsula with reverence for tradition and a pragmatic approach to the modern age.
As with the automobile, preservationists sought to control the types of commercial endeavor allowed in their city, not to thwart them altogether or to return blindfolded to a past "golden age." Despite occasional rhetoric to the contrary, preservationists' behavior revealed that they were not waging a romantic war with modernity. Rather, they accepted and participated in the modernizing environment even as they struggled to ensure a prominent place for traditional values within it. Frost presented SPOD's position to the public in a 1928 letter to the editor of a local newspaper: "I want to bring out the fact that members of our Society are not opposed to progress, that we would like to see industries, smoke stacks, and everything that would advance Charleston commercially, come once more to Charleston; but we want them properly located, and not at the expense of the beauty and charm of Charleston's distinctiveness, which annually brings so many visitors to its doors." Engaged in a delicate balancing act between past and present, preservationists tried to turn old buildings into bridges that spanned the generations and helped the Old South adapt to the New.
Moreover, Frost considered historic preservation an effective vehicle for educating future generations of Charlestonians about their aesthetic inheritance by alerting them to their duty to stop the "desecration" of the city's historical landscape. "Let us keep to the things that have stood the test of centuries," she argued, "[the] beauty and dignity that [have] been handed down by those gone before." Frost spoke of these properties and the imperative to protect them-and the cultural ideals they represented-in nearly sacred terms. To Frost, these buildings were more than mere brick and mortar. They were the visible remnants of an inherited set of values-of continuity, gentility, and order-that she and others like her perceived to be threatened in post-World War I Charleston. In what was also a critique of the ephemeral and homogenizing nature of contemporary culture, Frost contended that jeopardized buildings and neighborhoods, as well as the city's larger historic atmosphere-its cobblestoned roads, live oaks, and streets named after "early and respected citizens"-lent "a certain stability and nobility of character and taste, which a modern age can ill afford to dispense with." Thus, afraid that the destruction of old residences would lead to the alienation of white Charlestonians from their heritage, as well as the "cheapening in the taste of the next generation in home building," Frost used SPOD to inculcate "in the mind of the public ... a veneration" of the city's finer buildings. Frost tirelessly propagandized SPOD's position: "Charleston is not the Island of Manhattan, straining at its natural limitations ...-with us destruction is a cheap affectation-an impatient brushing away of an old order of culture, to ape the new wealth and up-to-dateness of newly grown cities." For Susan Pringle Frost, her people's historical memory was at stake. Without it, she scolded, "We are not worthy of these treasure houses that have been handed down to us, and treasures which will be required of us by her children and her children's children."
Of the thirty-two individuals who responded to Frost's plea and endorsed her agenda on that April afternoon in 1920, twenty-nine were women. Although two men, including artist Alfred Hutty, delivered speeches at the first meeting, the six individuals who donated money for the immediate assumption of the Manigault House deed were women. These white women followed a long tradition of female public voluntary activism in Charleston and the nation. For generations, American women had stepped across the prescriptive boundaries of separate sexual spheres and entered the public domain armed with a conception of domesticity that justified their activism. In order to ensure the integrity of their families and the society in which their children grew to adulthood, the argument went, women's domestic role obliged them to reform what they saw as society's ills. Thus, these predominantly middle- and upper-class white women mobilized for causes ranging from antiprostitution and poverty to temperance, better working conditions for women and children, and female suffrage. As they petitioned, marched, educated, delivered speeches, and wrote constitutions, women gained critical political skills while also remaining true, theoretically at least, to the submissive role required of domestic ideology. In the end, their activism changed the definition of women's public role in American society.
From the Ladies Benevolent Society of the antebellum period to the Progressive Era's Equal Suffrage League of the 1910s, Charleston's elite white women were present in the public sphere. Some of this activist spirit extended to historic preservation. Indeed, some scholars argue that the historic preservation movement in America was born in Charleston in 1853 when Ann Pamela Cunningham issued her call to save George Washington's home in a local city newspaper, resulting in the founding of the Mount Vernon Ladies Society. Female preservation work extended into the twentieth century with the local Colonial Dames' 1901 purchase and restoration of the city's eighteenth-century Old Powder Magazine. Those gathered at Nell Pringle's home in April 1920 continued this tradition of women as the custodians of society's artifacts, identity, and welfare.
In Charleston, the centrality of women's participation in early preservation efforts influenced the kinds of spaces and structures that SPOD preserved, and that, in turn, helped shape the city's public character.
Continues...
Excerpted from A Golden Haze of Memory by Stephanie E. Yuhl Copyright © 2005 by The University of North Carolina Press. Excerpted by permission.
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What People are Saying About This
Help[s] unravel the complicated intentions in the cycles of creation and remembrance that have shaped Charleston across two centuries.—Journal of Architectural Historians
A model memory study that could be duplicated in a region often focused on itself and its illustrious past.—South Carolina Historical Magazine
Provides a real sense of Charleston's relationship with the rest of the nation. . . . Significantly deepens our understanding of how historical memory was both created and deployed in a southern city that provided a model for similar work across the region.—Journal of Southern History
"Anyone interested in historic preservation, cultural tourism, and the interpretation of historic sites will find A Golden Haze of Memory especially useful.—Georgia Historical Quarterly
By explaining how the popular but distorted image of [Charleston's] history was constructed, Yuhl has constructively and eloquently reopened a discussion that previously occurred only in angry shouts and anxious whispers.—Charleston Post and Courier
A Golden Haze of Memory . . . promises to provide an outstanding read for those interested in the creation and presentation of history, in the cultural history of the south, and in the interwar years. Yuhl's detailed and excellent account of the creation of 'Historic Charleston' offers a substantial contribution to the growing field of historical memory.—Southern Historian
For a brief moment, as this elegant and penetrating study reminds us, Charleston boasted a cultural 'renaissance' that literally transformed the city and its place in the American imagination. A Golden Haze of Memory reveals how the preoccupations of some of Charleston's colorful residents became harnessed to one of the nation's most robust campaigns of civic memory. Yuhl underscores the ambiguous legacy of this movement for the city's residents and for a nation that continues to look to Charleston as a symbol of the Old South. With a dazzling mixture of social and cultural history, this book represents a major contribution to our understanding of American arts and society during the 1920s and '30s.—W. Fitzhugh Brundage, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Yuhl's study of the local elite's shaping and uses of history in Charleston between the First and Second World Wars is well conceived, broadly researched, and nicely phrased. A fine book.—David Moltke-Hansen, President and CEO, Historical Society of Pennsylvania