It’s all in the details as the saying goes – and with historic houses, once details are gone, they are often gone for good. And details are why I am stripping paint here at the Chancognie House in the midst of a heat wave. The wooden siding on the Chancognie House was made with a…
I have seen East Battery deserted in advance of a hurricane, but I have never seen it this quiet on such a beautiful day. Before a hurricane, most of the houses here would be boarded up with shutters closed, bracing for the weather ahead, so this was an unusual opportunity to take pictures of the…
Charleston enacted a stay at home order at midnight March 25 and a statewide order took effect April 7 at 5pm until further notice. For the past two weeks, I have been walking around downtown, taking pictures during my travels while carefully avoiding other pedestrians. At first, it felt similar to how the city feels…
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…
