Charleston's Powder Magazine: City's oldest building will spark interest in history
The Powder Magazine museum director thinks visitors will enjoy their visit to South Carolina’s oldest building, but they won’t have a blast.
Explosions are discouraged in a building built in 1713 and designed to hold gunpowder for cannons.
“It was a common location for gunpowder,” says Powder Magazine museum director Allan Stello. The powder fueled cannons that helped the city “defend from Spanish, French, pirates, native Americans – anybody the English didn’t like.”
The building’s bricks were made from clay mined from local plantations. The walls are three feet thick and the ceiling thin, supported by Roman groin arches, Stello explained, so that if the cache of gunpowder was ignited it would implode.
A couple of tons of sand in the attic was designed to absorb any accidental explosion, and the “sand has been there for 300 years,” Stello said.
Owned by National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of South Carolina, the Powder Magazine museum has been in operation since 1902, says Stello.
The museum features Revolutionary war artifacts, some dug up on site, on loan from the Charleston Museum. A recent exhibit is the piece of grapeshot that killed Casimir Pulaski, a Polish-born Revolutionary war hero who died from injuries suffered in the Battle of Savannah.
The Powder Magazine is a National Historic Landmark, and, except for some plaster wash, has been restored to its original appearance. Used as a powder magazine from 1713-1770 and again briefly during the Revolutionary War, the structure had a variety of uses during its first two centuries. It was a stable, a wine cellar and a print shop before becoming a museum.
Today, the Powder Magazine is “an educational historic site” whose owners are “dedicated to revering and revealing the colonial history of Charleston, our state and our nation by furthering an appreciation of our national heritage through historic preservation, patriotic service and educational projects.”
Posted by Diane Loupe
