This was a quick wander I did around Charleston, on my way to and from a business meeting. As it was a business meeting, I didn't really have enough spare carrying space for my digital SLR so I took my trusty superzoom compact. It wasn't a long wander because I had to head back to Lexington for another meeting later in the day. I spared a couple of hours though.
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| Old-style prison transport |
In the good old days, prisoners were piled into these iron caged wagons together with a slop bucket and taken en masse from the courthouse to the jail or vice versa. Needless to say, the wagons were horse-drawn. When you look at modern prison transport, very little has changed. The bad guys still need to be shackled and they still need to be held in iron cages.
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| The old prison |
This is, I believe, Charleston's old prison. This is pretty much where I found the old prison wagon. There is another in much better condition parked outside Lexington prison. One day I should go and photograph it.
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| Mystery prison structure |
I'm really not quite sure what this mystery structure in the prison is for. I rather suspect something like an open-air bath-house or perhaps something to work under in the hot sun.
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| Powder magazine |
This is Charleston's famous Powder Magazine. It would have been one of several originally. The walls are 2 feet thick and the roof is designed such that if the gunpowder accidentally ignited then the roof would blow off, disintegrating into small pieces as it did. The blast would thus be channeled upwards and away from nearby structures. It was a very early safety design. It's a tribute to the builder's skills that it still stands today.
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| Powder Magazine |
In this second picture of the powder magazine, the thickness of the walls can be seen very easily. Originally, I'm sure the doorway would have been a lot narrower and there might even have been a blast wall just outside it.
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| The Slave Market |
This is Charleston's famous slave market. This immediately conjures up Romanesque images of slaves in shackles being inspected and bid over by fat merchants. The actual truth is far different from that. This is where the slaves of the plantation owners would sit on benches, selling the plantation's products to the general public.
And so, after a brief wander, during which I discovered that the market had been ruined by some modernization, I headed back to Lexington. When I first saw the market, it was all open air - the sides of the building were open to the air and traders sat as did the slaves, at benches and sold their wares off tables. Now the sides have been enclosed and air-conditioning has been installed. Essentially it has changed from slave market to a mini-Walmart. So totally not worth visiting now. All the character I once knew has been driven out of the place. As far as I'm concerned, they might as well demolish it and build a real Walmart in its place. At the risk of being political, Walmart employs minimum wage staff and as minimum wage staff can barely subsist on their wages, this seems to be the modern face of slavery.
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