Charleston Historic District

Charleston's Historic District is one of the largest and most intact historic neighborhoods in America — a living museum of colonial and antebellum architecture in one of the nation's oldest cities. Founded in 1670, Charleston preserves pastel row houses, columned piazzas, wrought-iron gates, cobblestone streets, and the church steeples that earned it the nickname 'the Holy City.' Birthplace of the nation's first historic-preservation laws and the place where the Civil War began, it is a singular window into the history of the American South.

Charleston was founded in 1670 as Charles Town, named for King Charles II of England, and quickly grew into one of colonial America's wealthiest and most important ports. Its prosperity was built on rice and indigo plantations and on the labor of enslaved Africans, and the city became the largest slave-trading port in North America — a history central to understanding both its grandeur and its tragedy.

By the 18th and 19th centuries Charleston's peninsula filled with elegant architecture: the distinctive 'single houses' turned sideways to catch the sea breeze, the mansions of the Battery along the waterfront, and dozens of churches whose steeples gave the city its 'Holy City' nickname. In April 1861 the Civil War began just offshore, when Confederate guns bombarded the Union-held Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

Charleston endured war, a devastating earthquake in 1886, and repeated hurricanes, yet much of its historic fabric survived. In 1931 the city took a pioneering step, adopting the first historic-district zoning ordinance and Board of Architectural Review in the United States to protect its old buildings. That early preservation ethic saved the district, which was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960 and remains one of the most visited historic areas in the country.