Located in the West Ashley area of Charleston, Byrnes Downs is a charming community designed and developed by the V-Housing Corporation in the 1940s. The Long Construction Company built this successful war-housing project of 360 houses that became the lifelong homes for many families. Early settlers who had made homes on the Charleston peninsula traveled west to develop the suburban neighborhoods of St. Andrews Parish: Byrnes Downs, Albemarle Point, the Crescent, Moreland, Old Windermere, South Windermere, Wappoo Heights, and Westwood.
In 1670, the English ship Carolina brought colonists to the west bank of the Ashley River. These settlers and their descendants built a flourishing plantation life in what became St. Andrew's Parish. The Civil War devastated the plantation society, and the glory years of St. Andrew's Parish waned until 1889, when construction of a new toll bridge improved access to West Ashley. A suburban boom that began in the 1920s expanded and revitalized the community. Many of the original families who built homes, churches, schools, and businesses still live in the community today--a testament to the continued vitality and livability of St. Andrew's Parish, West Ashley.
The tranquility of the magnificently restored Saint Andrews Parish Church, surrounded by stately oaks and ancient gravestones, belies a tumultuous past. If its walls could talk, they would tell a story as old as the human condition. Founded in the forest of a new colony, this simple Anglican church served planters and their slaves during the heyday of rice and indigo. Before the Civil War, ministry shifted to the slaves, and afterward to freed men and women. Following years of decline and neglect, Saint Andrews rose like the phoenix. The history of the oldest surviving church south of Virginia and the only remaining colonial cruciform church in South Carolina is one of wealth and poverty, acclaim and anonymity, slavery and freedom, war and peace, quarrelling and cooperation, failure and achievement. It is the story of a church that has refused to die, against all odds.
A lively chronicle of the South's most renowned city from the founding of colonial Charles Town through the present day A Short History of Charleston—a lively chronicle of the South's most renowned and charming city—has been hailed by critics, historians, and especially Charlestonians as authoritative, witty, and entertaining. Beginning with the founding of colonial Charles Town and ending three hundred and fifty years later in the present day, Robert Rosen's fast-paced narrative takes the reader on a journey through the city's complicated history as a port to English settlers, a bloodstained battlefield, and a picturesque vacation mecca. Packed with anecdotes and enlivened by passages from diaries and letters, A Short History of Charleston recounts in vivid detail the port city's development from an outpost of the British Empire to a bustling, modern city. This revised and expanded edition includes a new final chapter on the decades since Joseph Riley was first elected mayor in 1975 through its rapid development in geographic size, population, and cultural importance. Rosen contemplates both the city's triumphs and its challenges, allowing readers to consider how Charleston's past has shaped its present and will continue to shape its future.
For over thirty years, besides making music, David Byrne has focused his unique genius upon forms as diverse as the archaeology of music as we know it, architectural photography and the uses of PowerPoint. Now he presents his most personal work to date, a collection of drawings exploring the form of the tree diagram. Arboretum is an eclectic blend of science, automatic writing, self-analysis and satire. A journey through irrational logic - the application of scientific rigour and form to irrational premises, proceeding from careful nonsense to unexpected sense. The tree diagram is a form that might reveal more about yourself than you dreamed possible.