Charleston City Police and Tax Records: Additional Resources

This contemporary analysis examines changes in criminality at the end of the 19th century.

A contemporary summary of South Carolina's late 19th century tax code.

Includes reports from various departments and offices including treasury, assessor, sheriff, corporation counsel, streets, health, tidal drain keeper, charities, police, pleasure grounds, public buildings, port, education, public schools, mortuary, Charleston Orphan House, hospitals, City Alms House, Old Folks Home, fire, city surveyor, city electrician, freight bureau, sewerage, public markets, convicts, planting of shade trees, city engineer, freight and transportation, Market Hall, meters, park commissioners, municipal playground commissioners, Marion Square, chain gang commission, building inspector, water, plumbing, finance, audit and control, city planning and zoning, municipal airport, housing authority. Also includes the reports of the mayors, acts of assembly, and ordinances of city council.

For this book the author has compiled all the names and other pertinent genealogical information that can be found in the Charleston city directories of 1803, 1806, 1807, 1809, and 1813. The names in each of the five directories are arranged in alphabetical order, obviating the need for an index to the volume as a whole. Typically, the directory entries furnish the name of the Charleston resident, his address, and, in the majority of cases, his occupation. The five directories combined furnish the names and addresses of 15,000 Charlestonian.

This guide provides a finding aid to City of Charleston records held by the South Carolina Department of Archives & History. These includes 19th century tax assessor, tax collector, and police commission records, among others.

This LibGuide features links to South Carolina state ordinances and statutes, including during the period covered by these records.

Series consists of the name of the taxpayer, address, sex, age, amount to be paid, and reason for non-payment (overage, insane, sick, etc.). This series consists of a broken run of original books for ca. 1811, 1821-1823, 1826-1827, 1832-1846, 1848-1851, ca. 1852, 1855, and 1857 and microfilm of the book for 1860.

As part of the Confederate States' attempts to establish government bureaucracy, this pamphlet outlines tax collection procedure for the proposed new nation.

Lists of taxpayer rolls, including taxes paid by free people of color (1859-60) and people of Native American descent (1860).

The Charleston Library Society has a collection of city ordinances covering several decades, including the period covered by this collection.

From the point of view of a 19th century Boston police officer, this memoir provides context for urban policing during the period covered by these records.

This is a contemporary description of the use of police stations as a sort of homeless shelter, and the types of people that tend to use this service.

The author examines the correlation between poverty and crime in the late 19th century and recommends resolving the problems through prevention, reformation, and extinction. He offers the idea of prohibiting marriage between criminal and "defective" people as an antidote to the problems of poverty and criminality, saying, "Society must take cognizance of the reproduction of the race and correct the tendencies to degradation, as a measure of self-preservation. It is idle and foolish to waste energy, sympathy, and money in the hopeless effort to cure and restrain what should never have been permitted to exist. Physical degeneration must be corrected to promote regeneration."

This collection comprises both the records of the City of Charleston City Court and those of the City of Charleston Police Court. The City Court records include Delinquent Tax Files, Violations of Liquor Ordinance, Violations of Sunday Liquor Ordinance, Violations of License Ordinances, Violations of Measures Ordinance, Jury Summons, Miscellaneous City Court Papers, City Court of Charleston Minute Docket No. 2 & 3, List of Judgments in the City Court, Judge's Docket City Court No. 1, File Book, City Court, City Court Judgment Record, and City Court Journal. The records of the Police Court contain Individual Case Files, Appeals, Correspondence, and Miscellaneous Files. The collection also includes one Cash Charge Book whose provenance is unclear.

This collection consists of the extant records of the Commissioners of the Sinking Fund for the City of Charleston for the years 1829–1931. Bound volumes include: Sinking Fund Ledger (1855–1924), Sinking Fund Cash Books (1855–1908, 1909–1931), Forfeited Lands Memo: For Insurance (ca. 1882), Forfeited Lands Cash Book (1881–1907), Forfeited Lands Ledgers (ca.1882, n.d.), and Sewerage Sinking Fund Cash Book (1910–1928). Loose materials include: Administrative documents (1869–1913), Stocks and Bonds (1829–1889), and Forfeited Lands documents (1870–1897, bulk 1881–1882).

The collection consists of a one-volume register covering the years 1868–85 (with gaps). The register contains information on each inmate who occupied the institution: their date of admission, name, age, birthplace, last residence, how long in Charleston, occupation, discharge date, and remarks. Although arranged chronologically, the volume lacks entries for the years 1876–80. Of particular interest is the number of women admitted to the institution, as well as the significant number of children, some as young as 9 years old, with an occupation frequently listed as “vagrant.” The early years of the register, 1868–69, reflect a predominantly AfricanAmerican population. Here can be found a number of former slaves, many listed as “field hands,” recently arrived from the plantations in the countryside surrounding urban Charleston. After April 1870, however, the records rarely denote race, but careful examination indicates this pattern continued.

This collection contains the only surviving historic records of the Charleston Police Department from 1855 to 1991. The records consist of Annual Reports (1910–1989), Arrest Records and Morning Reports (1855–1894), Clippings and Ephemera (1910–1981), Cash book, Receipts, and Disbursement Book of the Commissioners of the Police Relief and Pension Fund (1903–1923), Contracts, Bonds, and Buildings Specifications relating to construction of the new Police Department (1887–1907), Financial Records, General (1871–1923), Historic Files (1856–1991), Miscellaneous (1864–1959), Official History Police Department of Charleston, S.C. (1925), Payroll Book (with Vouchers) (1889–1924), Payroll Vouchers (1905), Rules and Regulations Governing the Police of Charleston (1856–1890).

This collection from the Charleston City Board of Health consists of reports, financial records, and contract between the years 1857–1944.

This collection consists of Minutes of the Board of Fire Masters (1848–1910), Summary of Expenditures (1883–1923), Bills for Materials and Supplies (1881–1914), Fireman’s Pension, Disabled, and Superannuated Fund (later changed to Fireman’s Insurance and Inspection Fund) (1905–1963), Pay Roll of City Apparatus (1855–1869), Return Books (1851–1869), Rules and Regulations Governing the Fire Department of Charleston, S. C. (1895), Company House Journals (1911–1979), loose materials (1860–1960) and microfilm (1848–1964).

This collection consists of Tax Executions Sent to the City Sheriff (1889–1923), Abutment Tax Executions Sent to the Sheriff (1913-1923), Tax Executions for 1870, Annual Reports of the City Sheriff, and Lists of Delinquent City Taxes.

Official government report detailing criminal statistics of the late 19th century.

Analysis of incarcerated people in the 1880 census, including prisoners and disabled individuals.

Information contained in the records of this series includes the name of taxpayer, address, sex, age, amount paid, and reason for not paying (over age, insane, sick, etc.). No display constant

The twenty-nine books that are filmed here list the names of free blacks who resided in Charleston between approximately 1811 and 1860.

As the title suggests, this government report lists property confiscated due to nonpayment of taxes.

A technicolor history of the first civil rights movement and its collapse into black and white. In The Accident of Color, Daniel Brook journeys to nineteenth-century New Orleans and Charleston and introduces us to cosmopolitan residents who elude the racial categories the rest of America takes for granted. Before the Civil War, these free, openly mixed-race urbanites enjoyed some rights of citizenship and the privileges of wealth and social status. But after Emancipation, as former slaves move to assert their rights, the black-white binary that rules the rest of the nation begins to intrude. During Reconstruction, a movement arises as mixed-race elites make common cause with the formerly enslaved and allies at the fringes of whiteness in a bid to achieve political and social equality for all. In some areas, this coalition proved remarkably successful. Activists peacefully integrated the streetcars of Charleston and New Orleans for decades and, for a time, even the New Orleans public schools and the University of South Carolina were educating students of all backgrounds side by side. Tragically, the achievements of this movement were ultimately swept away by a violent political backlash and expunged from the history books, culminating in the Jim Crow laws that would legalize segregation for a half century and usher in the binary racial regime that rules us to this day. The Accident of Color revisits a crucial inflection point in American history. By returning to the birth of our nation's singularly narrow racial system, which was forged in the crucible of opposition to civil rights, Brook illuminates the origins of the racial lies we live by.

Provides a detailed history of the various buildings and locations that served the city police forces in it's numerous iterations.

Presents information on the history of the Charleston Neck, focusing on the African American population; examines in detail land use on the East side; interviews neighborhood residents; supplements existing architectural survey information.

Powers (history, College of Charleston) details black social-class stratification and social mobility in this revisionist work drawing on census data, manuscript collections, and newspaper accounts. He delineates social and economic contours of the black population in Charleston, SC, a historical seaport center for the slave trade. Topics include l

In 1860, when four million African Americans were enslaved, a quarter-million others, including William Ellison, were "free people of color." But Ellison was remarkable. Born a slave, his experience spans the history of the South from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. In a day when most Americans, black and white, worked the soil, barely scraping together a living, Ellison was a cotton-gin maker-a master craftsman. When nearly all free blacks were destitute, Ellison was wealthy and well-established. He owned a large plantation and more slaves than all but the richest white planters. While Ellison was exceptional in many respects, the story of his life sheds light on the collective experience of African Americans in the antebellum South to whom he remained bound by race. His family history emphasizes the fine line separating freedom from slavery.

Centered on a series of dramatic murders in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Richmond, Virginia, The Body in the Reservoir uses these gripping stories of crime to explore the evolution of sensationalism in southern culture. In Richmond, as across the nation, the embrace of modernity was accompanied by the prodigious growth of mass culture and its accelerating interest in lurid stories of crime and bloodshed. But while others have emphasized the importance of the penny press and yellow journalism on the shifting nature of the media and cultural responses to violence, Michael Trotti reveals a more gradual and nuanced story of change. In addition, Richmond's racial makeup (one-third to one-half of the population was African American) allows Trotti to challenge assumptions about how black and white media reported the sensational; the surprising discrepancies offer insight into just how differently these two communities experienced American justice. An engaging look at the connections between culture and violence, this book gets to the heart--or perhaps the shadowy underbelly--of the sensational as the South became modern.

Charleston’s Free Persons of Color occupied a precarious position, living as they did in a city long a bastion of African American slavery. Caught between a slave majority on one side and a white minority of slave owners on the other, they had to navigate between these disparate worlds, in neither of which they truly belonged. They had some rights and privileges: free people of color could own property, including slaves. They sometimes purchased family and friends to protect those who could not be freed; sometimes, however, free blacks bought and sold human beings as their white neighbors did. Free men and women of a certain age had to pay taxes, but they could not testify in a court of law against a white person. As time passed and the Civil War drew near, laws restricting their freedom and movement became more stringent and many were forced to flee.

The members of this group never comprised more than two per cent of the state’s black population. Of the 1,801 free blacks present in South Carolina in 1790, 950 men, women and children lived in the Charleston District; the local population of free blacks reached a peak of 3,861 in 1850. In 1860, while only three percent of the state’s enslaved population lived here, 33% of South Carolina’s free blacks did. In urban areas, the free persons of color were often laborers, skilled artisans, carpenters, masons, and the like, with women, generally the larger percentage of the free population, often working in domestic trades and with their needles. Though small in number, they nevertheless indelibly stamped the city, creating a culture that can be traced in various locations.

Charleston, South Carolina, is one of the most storied cities of the American South. Well known for its historic buildings and landscape, its thriving maritime culture, and its role in the beginning of the American Civil War, many consider it the birthplace of historic preservation. In Charleston, Martha Zierden and Elizabeth Reitz-whose archaeological fieldwork in the city spans more than three decades-reveal a vibrant, densely packed city, where people, animals, and colonial activity carried on in close proximity. Examining animal bones and the ruins of taverns, markets, townhouses, and smaller homes, the authors consider the residential, commercial, and public life of the city and the dynamics of production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services that linked it with rural neighbors and global markets. From early attempts at settlement and cattle ranching to the Denmark Vesey insurrection and efforts to improve the city's drinking water, Zierden and Reitz explore the evolution of the urban environment, the intricacies of provisioning such a unique city, and the urban foodways and cuisine that continue to inspire Charleston's culinary scene even today.

From the days of "bucket brigades" and private volunteer companies--such as the Phoenix, the Axemen and the Eagle--Charleston has seen more than its fair share of conflagrations. A carelessly overturned candle could ignite a blaze that would consume hundreds of Charleston's closely built wooden structures within just a few hours, leaving large swaths of the city in ruins. Join Charleston native and local historian Danny Crooks as he relates the story of Charleston's many historic fires and firefighting efforts, starting as early as 1698 and continuing through the horrors of the Great Fire of 1861 and the establishment of the Charleston Fire Department in the 1880s.

This article provides a thorough description of incarceration and punishment in the 19th century, particularly related to enslaved people.

For black women in antebellum Charleston, freedom was not a static legal category but a fragile and contingent experience. In this deeply researched social history, Amrita Chakrabarti Myers analyzes the ways in which black women in Charleston acquired, defined, and defended their own vision of freedom. Drawing on legislative and judicial materials, probate data, tax lists, church records, family papers, and more, Myers creates detailed portraits of individual women while exploring how black female Charlestonians sought to create a fuller freedom by improving their financial, social, and legal standing. Examining both those who were officially manumitted and those who lived as free persons but lacked official documentation, Myers reveals that free black women filed lawsuits and petitions, acquired property (including slaves), entered into contracts, paid taxes, earned wages, attended schools, and formed familial alliances with wealthy and powerful men, black and white--all in an effort to solidify and expand their freedom. Never fully free, black women had to depend on their skills of negotiation in a society dedicated to upholding both slavery and patriarchy. Forging Freedom examines the many ways in which Charleston's black women crafted a freedom of their own design instead of accepting the limited existence imagined for them by white Southerners.

The personal effects that appear in these true crime reports relate the changing roles of immigrants, racial minorities, and women to popular anxieties and cultural assumptions surrounding crime and victimhood. By examining a sample set of over two hundred articles from a variety of news sources, each of which includes a description of personal possessions carried by someone who came into contact with the law, trends appear that reveal how true crime reporting portrayed different groups of people, and how the things they had with them reflected their involvement with crime and justice. The Gilded Age coincides with an explosion of print media and sensational journalism, which provides some of the only primary sources for something like pocket and bag contents, which are so mundane as to be rarely recorded. This type of evidence provides particularly valuable insight into the lives of illiterate and/or marginalized people whose written records either did not survive or never existed in the first place, but it tends to be underutilized in historical scholarship as a whole due to the priority placed on written documents. These same people who tend to be underrepresented in other types of historical sources also tend to be uniquely portrayed in true crime journalism, as depictions of immigrants, racial minorities, and women generally fell into common patterns of criminality and victimhood that adhered to other societal expectations of their behavior. Studying these depictions alongside descriptions of personal effects provides a unique and untapped insight into how certain objects reflected on the people who owned them and vice versa. While these personal items contribute to historical understanding of how Gilded Age audiences perceived the people described in criminal reports, these articles also show how contemporaries understood the objects themselves as subtextual information about the subject.

"You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war." This famous but apocryphal quote, long attributed to newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, encapsulates fears of the lengths to which news companies would go to exploit visual journalism in the late nineteenth century. From 1870 to 1900, newspapers disrupted conventional reporting methods with sensationalized line drawings. A fierce hunger for profits motivated the shift to emotion-driven, visual content. But the new approach, while popular, often targeted, and further marginalized, vulnerable groups. Amanda Frisken examines the ways sensational images of pivotal cultural events--obscenity litigation, anti-Chinese bloodshed, the Ghost Dance, lynching, and domestic violence--changed the public's consumption of the news. Using intersectional analysis, Frisken explores how these newfound visualizations of events during episodes of social and political controversy enabled newspapers and social activists alike to communicate--or challenge--prevailing understandings of racial, class, and gender identities and cultural power.

A major work of history, "The Great Tax Wars" is the gripping, epic story of six decades of often violent conflict over wealth, power, and fairness that gave America the income tax. It's the story of a tumultuous period of radical change, from Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War through the progressive era under Theodore Roosevelt and ending with Woodrow Wilson and World War I. During these years of upheaval, America was transformed from an agrarian society into a mighty industrial nation as great fortunes were amassed, militant farmers and workers rebelled against concentrations of vast wealth and power, class war was narrowly averted, and America emerged as a global power. Award-winning journalist Steven R. Weisman begins his narrative with the Civil War, when Lincoln imposed the nation's first income tax to pay the Union Army and dampen dangerous resentment against bankers, merchants, and factory owners who profited from the war. Repealed by Congress after the war, the tax was reenacted in 1894 to deal with the nation's worst economic collapse until that time. By reducing the government's heavy reliance on tariffs for revenue, t

This article suggests that members of not only the “new” middle class but also the so-called old middle class contributed to the emergence of modern American society. The author examines the experiences of members of the “old” middle class from midwestern small towns and cities as they sought to situate themselves within six subcultures that were intertwining to form a regional and national middle-class culture—professional culture, corporate culture, politics and the law, boosterism, male subcultures, and gentility. In each, their efforts focused on responding to the erosion of personal networks, a proliferation of choices within an increasingly differentiated and fragmented social and institutional landscape, and an increasingly impersonal society. The author suggests that members of both the old and new middle class contributed to shaping new definitions of self, gender, and identity that helped define a new national middle class.

From the dawn of the Carolina Colony to the early twentieth century, residents of rural Charleston County enjoyed no police protection beyond their own vigilance. Ancient customs, imported from England and transformed by the institution of slavery, obliged free men to patrol their own neighborhoods on horseback, apprehend lawbreakers, and deliver them to justice. A paid, rural police force gradually emerged in the early 1900s, fostered by the proliferation of automobiles, and eventually led to the creation of the modern Sheriff’s Office in 1991.

At the close of the American Revolution, Charleston, South Carolina, was the wealthiest city in the new nation, with the highest per-capita wealth among whites and the largest number of enslaved residents. Maurie D. McInnis explores the social, political, and material culture of the city to learn how--and at what human cost--Charleston came to be regarded as one of the most refined cities in antebellum America. While other cities embraced a culture of democracy and egalitarianism, wealthy Charlestonians cherished English notions of aristocracy and refinement, defending slavery as a social good and encouraging the growth of southern nationalism. Members of the city's merchant-planter class held tight to the belief that the clothes they wore, the manners they adopted, and the ways they designed house lots and laid out city streets helped secure their place in social hierarchies of class and race. This pursuit of refinement, McInnis demonstrates, was bound up with their determined efforts to control the city's African American majority. She then examines slave dress, mobility, work spaces, and leisure activities to understand how Charleston slaves negotiated their lives among the whites they served. The textures of lives lived in houses, yards, streets, and public spaces come into dramatic focus in this lavishly illustrated portrait of antebellum Charleston. McInnis's innovative history of the city combines the aspirations of its would-be nobility, the labors of the African slaves who built and tended the town, and the ambitions of its architects, painters, writers, and civic promoters.

The poll tax is best known as a tool of disenfranchisement. Before Jim Crow, however, the poll tax served a variety of other fiscal and social purposes. Initially, the poll tax was a mainstay of colonial taxation, especially in the southern colonies. After independence, the fiscal importance of the poll tax waned, but its role as a tool of social control grew. Local government imposed its own poll taxes, contributing to a large cumulative burden. During presidential Reconstruction, state and local governments returned to antebellum tax practices. Poll taxes were supplemented with occupational taxes, often imposing a larger burden on tradesmen than large landowners. With the advent of universal manhood suffrage, new state constitutions limited poll taxes, while directing the revenue raised to education. The end of the congressional Reconstruction brought a gradual increase in poll taxes. Decades later, the poll tax became a prerequisite for voting across the South.

David B. Sachsman and David W. Bulla have gathered a colourful collection of essays exploring sensationalism in nineteenth-century newspaper reporting. The contributors analyse the role of sensationalism and tell the story of both the rise of the penny press in the 1830s and the careers of specific editors and reporters dedicated to this particular journalistic style.Divided into four sections, the first, titled "The Many Faces of Sensationalism," provides an eloquent Defense of yellow journalism, analyses the place of sensational pictures, and provides a detailed examination of the changes in reporting over a twenty-year span. The second part, "Mudslinging, Muckraking, Scandals, and Yellow Journalism," focuses on sensationalism and the American presidency as well as why journalistic muckraking came to fruition in the Progressive Era.The third section, "Murder, Mayhem, Stunts, Hoaxes, and Disasters," features a ground-breaking discussion of the place of religion and death in nineteenth-century newspapers. The final section explains the connection between sensationalism and hatred. This is a must-read book for any historian, journalist, or person interested in American culture.

Charleston is one of the most intriguing of American cities, a unique combination of quaint streets, historic architecture, picturesque gardens, and age-old tradition, embroidered with a vivid cultural, literary, and social history. It is a city of contrasts and controversy as well. To trace a documentary history of Charleston from the postbellum era into the twentieth century is to encounter an ever-shifting but consistently alluring landscape. In this collection, ranging from 1865 to 1947, correspondents, travelers, tourists, and other visitors describe all aspects of the city as they encounter it. Sojourns in Charleston begins after the Civil War, when northern journalists flocked south to report on the ""city of desolation"" and ruin, continues through Reconstruction, and then moves into the era when national magazine writers began to promote the region as a paradise. From there twentieth-century accounts document a wide range of topics, from the living conditions of African Americans to the creation of cultural institutions that supported preservation and tourism. The most recognizable of the writers include author Owen Wister, novelist William Dean Howells, artist Norman Rockwell, Boston poet Amy Lowell, novelist and Zionist leader Ludwig Lewisohn, poet May Sarton, British author Somerset Maugham, and French philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir. Their varied viewpoints help weave a beautiful tapestry of narratives that reveal the fascinating and evocative history that made this great city what it is today.

For more than a century before the Civil War, the State of South Carolina levied an annual “head” or “capitation” tax on all “free persons” of African descent. Those residing in Charleston were required to pay an additional head tax to the city government for more than seventy years. The assessment of these twin taxes varied greatly over the decades, and the paucity of extant records has clouded our understanding of their significance.

The abolition of slavery after the Civil War is a familiar story, as is the civil rights revolution that transformed the nation after World War II. But the century in between remains a mystery: if emancipation sparked 'a new birth of freedom' in Lincoln's America, why was it necessary to march in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s America? Gates uncovers the roots of structural racism in our own time, while showing how African-Americans after slavery combatted it by articulating a vision of a 'New Negro' to force the nation to recognise their humanity and unique contributions to the United States.

This work, together with detailed literature documenting the numerous inequalities on account of race—across class, income, wealth, homeownership, and on--as well as the national history of discriminating through tax, accounts well for these inequities, mostly at the national and federal level.

On August 31, 1886, a massive earthquake centered near Charleston, South Carolina, sent shock waves as far north as Maine, down into Florida, and west to the Mississippi River. When the dust settled, residents of the old port city were devastated by the death and destruction. Upheaval in Charleston is a gripping account of natural disaster and turbulent social change in a city known as the cradle of secession. Weaving together the emotionally charged stories of Confederate veterans and former slaves, Susan Millar Williams and Stephen G. Hoffius portray a South where whites and blacks struggled to determine how they would coexist a generation after the end of the Civil War. This is also the story of Francis Warrington Dawson, a British expatriate drawn to the South by the romance of the Confederacy. As editor of Charleston's News and Courier, Dawson walked a lonely and dangerous path, risking his life and reputation to find common ground between the races. Hailed as a hero in the aftermath of the earthquake, Dawson was denounced by white supremacists and murdered less than three years after the disaster. His killer was acquitted after a sensational trial that unmasked a Charleston underworld of decadence and corruption. Combining careful research with suspenseful storytelling, Upheaval in Charleston offers a vivid portrait of a volatile time and an anguished place.

In this follow-up volume, Mark R. Jones uncovers the seedy and wicked past of Charleston: Prostitutes, Politics and Prohibition. The city of Charleston, South Carolina, with its matchless Southern charm, has sparkled gem-like on the Carolina coast for more than three hundred years. The Holy City, as it is known, has been a cherished home to generations and an inviting destination for visitors from all over the world, who come to tour its celebrated historic sites and to bask in both the warm sun and the famous Southern hospitality. But below the gleaming surface of Charleston, there has always been a darker side--a second history that has been hidden and denied by those who retell the city's story, and by those who have lived it. Charleston has played host to a wide variety of unsavory characters, and has seen scores of sordid deeds played out on its cobbled streets, beneath flickering gaslights. Wicked Charleston, Volume 2: Prostitutes, Politics and Prohibition is a captivating companion to Mark Jones's hugely popular Wicked Charleston. In this new book, Jones reveals more of the city's seedy history--from drinking and prostitution to murder and crooked politics--offering a rarely seen glimpse of a sinister side of Charleston's past.

Wicked Charleston: The Dark Side of the Holy City, by local resident and tour guide Mark R. Jones, explores the dark alleys and seedy characters not often associated with the Charleston of today. A beautiful Southern city distinguished by its opulent homes, towering church steeples and hospitality, Charleston, South Carolina, has long been associated with the genteel side of Southern living. However, beyond the outward appearances that most people associate with Charleston, there is another side that most visitors and residents would dare not believe is part of the very fabric from which the city's history was woven. From the sexual escapades of an original Lord Proprietor and the comings and goings of the most notorious pirates, to secret brothels and nightclubs, Jones leads the reader back to a time when "drinking, eating and whoring with more than fifty wenches" was perhaps more common in the Holy City than one may imagine.