Book Description

Excerpt from The Dwelling Houses of Charleston, South Carolina In this volume the authors have endeavored to tell the story of the older dwelling houses of Charleston and the families inhabiting them. It has not been their object to list or to describe these dwelling houses after the manner of a guide-book, but to show how the fashions of its architecture, though imported and constantly modified by new ideas brought chiefly from England, have yet maintained local characteristics, resulting in quite a distinctive style which has steadily persisted and been developed. This development lies spread before us in the Charleston streets, where the houses of successive periods stand side by side, so little altered that the stranger is rather struck by the atmosphere and interest of the place as a whole than by the beauty or quaintness of a few outstanding edifices. In trying to convey this impression we have naturally had to select out of the many available examples houses which, by their marked type, show best this thread of architectural growth, and we have treated of the families which constructed or dwelt in these houses. It is manifestly impossible to treat, even in a volume of this size, of every historic relic, but this necessary restraint has been harder because each public or private building has a history of its own, and about no place in this country has a greater mass of historical tradition collected. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.