A First Month's Firsts

courtesy Post and Courier

Charleston can claim quite a few firsts in its three-hundred years as the anchor of the Lowcountry, and this month marks two of them - the founding of the Museum of Charleston as "America's First Museum", and The Post & Courier, the South's oldest daily newspaper (shown above after the 1886 earthquake).

Thompson Hall, the Museum's home in 1910

The Museum claims the older heritage, tracing its roots to January of 1773, when the 19 men who had established the Charleston Library Society thirty years earlier voted to expand their collection of books and manuscripts imported from Britain to focus on the natural history of the Carolinas. Despite the lack of a permanent home and a disastrous 1778 fire, the museum eventually found its first home in 1852 in the College of Charleston's Randolph Hall. By then, renowned naturalist Louis Agassiz visited the city and declared the Museum's collections to be among the best in the country. Surviving the destruction of the Civil War (much of the collection was moved to the Midlands), the Museum was officially incorporated in 1915 and marked another first when, in 1920, it named Laura Bragg as the country's first woman to lead a publicly supported museum. Many of the items from the Museum's early years can be seen today at the Museum's permanent home since 1980, on Meeting Street.

The Museum's peripatetic history was recorded by an upstart newspaper, The Charleston Courier, which published its first edition in January of 1803 under the leadership of editor Aaron Willington, a newspaperman who had moved to the city from Massachusetts. Determined to make The Charleston Courier the newspaper of record for the city, Willington was known to row out to ships arriving in Charleston Harbor from all over the world to scoop the latest international news, and was the first to hire a translator to comb Spanish language newspapers from the Caribbean. Just after the Civil War, Willington's newspaper merged with The Charleston Daily News to become The News and Courier. It continued under that name until 1991, when it merged with the city's only other paper, The Evening Post, to become The Post and Courier, now South Carolina's largest newspaper.

The Turn Of The Year

It's the season of reflection and and anticipation as we look back over the past year and look forward to the new one on the horizon. Our fall trips wrapped up earlier this month, and thanks to your support SINHG members enjoyed everything from kayaking, learning about Charleston's pub culture and making indigo dye to walking our woods and wetlands and cruising the Intracoastal waterway. Our spring 2024 trips are waiting in the wings while we pause to welcome in the New Year.

A dish of good fortune

If you've lived in the South and especially in the Lowcountry for any length of time, collard greens, black-eyed peas and Hoppin' John are surely on your New Year menu. These traditional foods are believed to help ensure a prosperous year - collard greens being the color of money, black-eyed peas standing in for coins, and the spicy, field vegetable-and rice-based Hoppin' John predicting a successful growing season. The origin of the dish's name is still much debated. Some think it's from the nickname given to a popular African-American man in Charleston with a faulty leg who first served the dish; or maybe it's because children, in anticipation of eating such a sumptuous meal, would hop around the dinner table in excitement. All that's known for sure is that the first use of the name in print was in landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted's 1861 travelogue, "A Journey In The Seaboard Slave States", in which he claimed he'd been served Hoppin' John by the aristocratic Sarah Rutledge during a visit to Charleston.

Watch Night and freedom

Two years after Olmsted's visit, the Emancipation Proclamation freeing enslaved Blacks took effect on January 1, 1863, giving rise to another New Year tradition observed in the Gullah Geechee community - Watch Night. On "Freedom's Eve", December 31st, Watch Night services take place in the community's churches throughout the Lowcountry, with sacred music, Bible readings, reconciliation of disputes and public resolutions for the coming year. A reading of the Proclamation follows, as church elders serving as Watchmen keep an eye on the clock and sing the last hymn of the outgoing year as midnight approaches and the entire congregation kneels in prayer. On New Year's Day, Charleston's parade is also known as the Emancipation Day parade, the nation's longest continuously held such parade.

"The anticipation of the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation still fills me with a great sense of pride and dignity every year," declared one churchgoer who attended her first Lowcountry Watch Night when she was just eleven years old. "It's a time of putting our best foot forward."

Let There Be Light

It's no accident that the so much of our holiday-making right now concerns light - Christmas tree lights, Yule candles, firelight, starlight - for this is the turning point we know as the winter solstice, when light conquers darkness, days begin to lengthen and nights grow shorter, at least for us in the northern hemisphere. (The solstice was at 10:27pm on December 21st.) Our ancestors may not have known that the earth's north pole had begun tilting back toward the sun, but the prospect of returning light and warmth was a great cause for celebration. Even today, crowds gather at Stonehenge for the arrival of the solstice sun.

For some cultures, the solstice heralded the banishment of sun-averse demons and monsters, and not only in northern populations, whose mythology is full of hairy demons who flee back to underground caves as the days grow longer. Further south, in Greece, the kallikantzaros were angry demons who emerged during winter darkness to wreak havoc if not appeased with food left out for them. Most famously, the agricultural goddess Demeter mourned the loss of her daughter Persephone, captured by the underworld's Hades, causing winter's bleakness before Hades agreed to release Persephone for six months of each year, when light returned and crops could be sown.

La Befana takes to the Italian night skies

Solstice celebrations often involved gift-giving. The ancient Roman Saturnalia, in honor of their god of agriculture, took place over seven days in mid-December, when work was suspended, lavish feasting took place, homes were decorated with evergreens, and gifts were exchanged. And today, Italian children look out for La Befana, a witch-like fairy who takes to the late winter night skies on her broomstick, leaving candies and presents to reward the children for being good. Scandinavian children keep an eye out for the Tomte, a diminutive elfish figure who guards a farm's livestock and might turn ornery if he feels the animals are being mistreated. To stay on his good side, a bowl of porridge is left out for him on winter nights.

Today, we infuse our own holiday with light in both a physical and a spiritual sense and look forward, as our ancestors did, to the return of warmer, brighter times.

Happy holidays from all of us at SINHG!