Downtown Charleston's rich history has been drawing us to the Peninsula this month. One walking tour on our SINHG Trip schedule visited sites connected to the devastating 1886 earthquake that struck the Lowcountry on August 31st of that year, and which remains the largest recorded earthquake to ever hit the southeastern coastline of the United States, taking the lives of over 100 Charlestonians. It's estimated that it was at least a magnitude 7 quake, whose tremors were felt as far away as Maine and which caused damage, in today's dollars, of some $150 million.
One of our downtown culinary tours catered to the chocolate lovers among us when we visited the historic State Street dining room for an evening of "Death by Chocolate", a narrated five-course meal during which, while we consumed delicious chocolate-based entrees and desserts, we listened to stories of Charleston's dark and ghostly history,
from the ghosts of the victims of the city's 1854 yellow fever epidemic to a notorious serial killer. Thrills and a sugar rush, all in one package!