The harvest is in at the Chancognie House and I thank you for following the trials and tribulations of cultivating peaches here in downtown Charleston. I received quite a few questions about the peach tree, so I thought that I would provide a short history – like many things here at the Chancognie House, my…
Thank you to the Post and Courier for the fantastic feature on Chancognie Coffee! You can read the full article here – more about this project coming soon!
For most of my time here at the Chancognie House, work has focused on restoration – bringing various parts of the house, such as the second-floor piazza archways, pictured below, back to their original appearance. Recently, as you may have noticed from my posts on Instagram and Facebook, I embarked on a renovation project here…
Like most early American cities, Charleston has a long history of fires both small and large. Wooden buildings in close proximity to each other along with fire-building for cooking and warmth were all too often a combustible combination. The fire of April 27-28, 1838 burned over 500 properties and stopped just down the street from…
Finding the perfect holiday gift for everybody on your list can be a challenge. To help with this endeavor, I complied this holiday gift guide – best of all, these gifts support the preservation and research work being done by three of my favorite organizations here in Charleston, SC: Drayton Hall, The Charleston Museum and…
Before Martha Zierden and the team from the Charleston Museum started the archaeological dig here, a previous owner told me that privy diggers had been on the property. The owner from whom she purchased the property in the late 1970s told her that the privy had been “dug” at some point. I later met the…
This is the first post in an occasional series where will I dig deeper into the history of an artifact found here at the Chancognie House. I will start with the Hoyt’s Nickel Cologne bottle pictured above. Eli Waite Hoyt was born in Alexandria, NY in 1838 and moved with his parents to Lowell, MA…
Meet Molly. While this may seem like a slightly gratuitous opportunity to do a post about my adorable dog, it is intended as a reminder that throughout its 200 plus year history, the Chancognie House has first and foremost, been a home. I think that life here might sometimes seem like massive restoration and research…
For those of you who follow me on Instagram or Facebook, you have likely seen posts that I have done from the archaeological dig here on the property. We have found and continue to find a lot of fascinating artifacts, but what you may not know is that the impetus for the dig was not…
When I took up residence at the Chancognie House, I must admit that I did not know much about it other than what was on the historical marker on the wall – Simon Jude Chancognie House, c. 1816. Only half of that turns out to be correct, but more about that later. In my search…
