We have taken full use of
having a car for a week. Having travelled many hundreds of miles to Norfolk and the Smoky
Mountains, taking in the flat coastal
route through North Carolina, the rolling
hills of Virginia, pretty homesteads of West Virginia, and rather hick areas of one corner of Tennessee, we also wanted to see the Charleston
area of South Carolina.
However, as we would be sailing past much of Georgia
(harbours are some distance up
estuaries), we felt that a trip to Savannah
was in order too!
Charleston
and Savannah
see themselves as sister cities, with comparable periods of development,
fortunes made from the slave trade and rice and cotton plantations and a rich
history of privateers and pirates. (They both seem to have a lot of
ghosts too, but I have a suspicion that the number have grown as the tourist
industry has developed.) Charleston
is nicknamed by some as the Holy
City with its more than
160 places of worship. Resisting the British during the Revolutionary War
they even painted church steeples black to blend in with the night sky.
An earthquake in 1886, nearly destroyed Charleston town and 100 years later
(1989) Hurricane Hugo damaged more than three-quarters of the homes in the
city’s historic district and, as with Savannah, fire damage seems to have
been a constant hazard. Despite
all the onslaughts both cities have retained much of the genteelness and
elegance of the past, largely thanks to energetic preservation societies. Some
of the traditional ‘single’ houses have winged stairs to their
imposing front doors, or an elaborate wrought-iron gate shielding a well-tended
garden of palms, ferns and climbing fig. Their hallmark is that the house is
only one room wide and it has a side veranda. This sitting-out area is on
two storeys, running the length of the house and offers a convivial place to
enjoy the shade and cooling breeze. Both cities are blessed with many trees,
shielding them from the fierce heat of the summer, but to me a symbol of these
southern towns is the live (evergreen) oaks with their shroud of Spanish moss
draped from almost every bough.
In contrast to the
picturesque ‘downtown’ areas, there was a lot of evidence of
poverty and economic depression, with derelict buildings, poor housing and
large wasteland areas where industry and businesses had faltered. South Carolina’s
State motto is “While I Breathe, I Hope”, but it would be good if
some of these folk could stop hoping and have more prosperity. Yet, once
again, we had a warm welcome: I was addressed as ‘doll’ and
‘Miss Caroline’ and we often heard ‘What can I get
y’all’ even when there’s just two of us.