On The Record

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.

Folklore Forecasting

We've begun the year with a blast of arctic air, after a tee-shirt mild holiday season, so we got to wondering about what's ahead weather-wise according to some of the forecasting folklore peculiar to the Lowcountry.

There's the "twelve days of January" for starters, related to the Lowcountry's agricultural history and the farmer's need to time preparations for the spring growing season. The first twelve days of January are said to predict the weather for the rest of the year, with the weather on each of the twelve days indicating what to expect meteorologically for each of the year's months. By this reckoning, we can expect below average temperatures for most of 2025.

Miniature Meteorologist?

Lowcountry natives have always held that the temperature during warmer months can be determined from the chirping of crickets, and this folk belief actually has a scientific basis, formulated by one Amos Dolbear in 1897. Warmer temperatures make it easier for crickets to rub their wings together to produce the chirps, and Dolbear discovered that counting the number of chirps over fifteen seconds, and than adding 40, will produce a rough estimate of the outdoor temperature. We'll have to wait until late spring to test this one out, when crickets begin their annual concert.

Sailor's Warning - Dawn on North Beach

"Red sky at night, sailors delight; red sky at morning, sailors take warning" isn't peculiar to the Lowcountry but this, too, has a factual basis for coastal communities. Weather systems generally move from west to east, following the jet stream, so if clouds bank up to the east but a clear red sunset is to the west, drier and clear weather can be expected the next day; if the eastern sky is red at sunrise, but with clouds arriving from the west, rain may be on the way. So those spectacular sunsets over the marshes we love to see actually can be harbingers of good weather.

You can test another folk belief at the coming spring equinox on March 20th. The spring and fall equinoxes are said to be the only time of the year when you can balance an egg on its end. The (faulty) reasoning is that since the sun is directly over the equator at each equinox, the earth's gravity is in balance. This isn't true, of course, at least as far as balancing an egg is concerned. But give it a go on March 20th and see what happens.

Whale Tales

Our beaches may seem relatively quiet this winter season, but there's quite a lot of activity further out in deeper water as majestic North Atlantic right whales migrate south along the east coast to feed in warmer waters, and for females to calve and tend their newborns. But for these endangered animals, trouble awaits from entanglement with trawler nets and collisions with commercial fishery and shipping traffic. Fewer than 360 right whales remain, according to the NOAA's fisheries division, including fewer than 70 breeding females.

Right whales are baleen whales, feeding on plankton filtered from the water. They're easily identified by their notched tails and by the white patches known as callosities on their heads. They travel over a thousand miles each year from summer feeding grounds off the Canadian coast to winter grounds off the coasts of North and South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. They're long-lived, with an average life span of 70 years, although centenarians have been reported.

Once plentiful, right whales were hunted to near-extinction by the turn of the twentieth century, prized for the spermaceti filling the cavities of their enormous heads and for the oil held within their 50-foot-long bodies. Because they floated on the surface after being killed, whalers considered them the "right" whales for the ease of harvesting and the bounty each victim provided. As the number of right whales dwindled, other species were hunted until international conventions against commercial slaughter were imposed; and while populations of right whales stabilized, the species has never returned to sustainable levels.

This female died off the Virginia coast from an encounter with shipping traffic

Mortality remains a threat to the right whales' survival, since the gestation period of a full year and the birth of only one calf means each loss of a mother or calf, or both, keeps the species hovering on the edge. Imposed speed limits in sensitive areas on freighters and commercial fishing boats have been effective, but advocates say stronger federal regulations to monitor and prevent such deaths are needed; and while the NOAA works to develop such regulations, resistance in Congress and from the shipping and fishing industries remains stiff. You can learn more about the NOAA's efforts to preserve these annual visitors to our coasts here.