How the Fall of Charleston's Rice Fortune Led to America's First Historic District: Charleston

This documentary explains how the collapse of Charleston's rice fortune helped leave the city's old houses standing, and how a fight over one of them, the Joseph Manigault House, led to America's first historic district law in October 1931. Charleston's colonial and antebellum wealth came from rice grown on Lowcountry plantations by enslaved people, and from the slave trade itself: roughly 40 percent of the enslaved Africans brought to what became the United States arrived through Charleston. After the Civil War, emancipation, competition, hurricanes and the 1886 earthquake left the old lower city short of money to rebuild. In 1920 a car company bought the Manigault House for a dealership; Susan Pringle Frost and her new Society for the Preservation of Old Dwellings bought it instead. Within three years its garden was a Standard Oil filling station. What's covered in this video: • 1920: the Charleston Motor Company, Susan Pringle Frost and the Society for the Preservation of Old Dwellings. • Rice exports, the enslaved people who made the fortune, and Gadsden's Wharf. • Joseph Manigault's 1788 inheritance and the house his brother Gabriel designed in 1803. • Frost's birthplace, the Miles Brewton House, built for a merchant and slave trader. • The 1861 fire, the 587-day siege, and the collapse of Carolina rice by 1919. • The 1886 earthquake, the earthquake bolts, and "too poor to paint, too proud to whitewash." • Porgy and Cabbage Row, oil companies, collectors, and the Stuart House rooms sent to Minneapolis. • The Heyward-Washington House bakery and the Charleston Museum's 1929 rescue. • The Manigault garden sold to Standard Oil and the gate temple used as a restroom. • The October 1931 Old and Historic District, the Board of Architectural Review, and its limits until 1966. • The 1933 auction, Henrietta Pollitzer Hartford, and the garden's return in 1936. • Rainbow Row, Hurricane Hugo, the Historic Charleston Foundation, and the displacement of Black residents from Ansonborough. Common questions answered: What was America's first historic district? Charleston's Old and Historic District, created by a city zoning ordinance in October 1931. Why was the Joseph Manigault House almost lost? A car company bought it in 1920 for a dealership, and its garden later became a filling station. Who did preservation leave out? The Historic Charleston Foundation's Ansonborough project displaced predominantly lower-income Black residents.