A Weekend in Charleston
Charleston, South Carolina, carries its history in every cobblestone and column. Founded in 1670, the Holy City — named for its proliferation of church steeples — blends antebellum architecture, Lowcountry cuisine, and a complicated past into one of America's most compelling weekend destinations. The food scene alone, anchored by decades of chefs interpreting Gullah-Geechee traditions, justifies the trip.
Saturday morning, walk the Battery along the seawall at the southern tip of the peninsula, where mansions face Charleston Harbor and Fort Sumter sits on the horizon. Turn north onto Rainbow Row, the iconic stretch of thirteen pastel Georgian row houses on East Bay Street. Continue into the French Quarter, which predates New Orleans's version, and stop at the City Market, operating since 1804, where Gullah sweetgrass basket weavers practice an art form brought from West Africa.
Lunch at Rodney Scott's BBQ on King Street is essential. Scott, a James Beard Award winner, cooks whole hogs over hardwood coals for twelve hours in a style rooted in the Hemingway, South Carolina, tradition his family has maintained for generations. The pulled pork sandwich with vinegar-pepper sauce, a side of collard greens, and sweet tea is a masterclass in Lowcountry barbecue.
Spend the afternoon at the Nathaniel Russell House, a Federal-style mansion from 1808 with a free-flying spiral staircase, or the Aiken-Rhett House, preserved rather than restored, which retains its original slave quarters and offers an unvarnished view of the domestic economy of enslavement. Both properties are managed by Historic Charleston Foundation — visiting them together provides necessary context for understanding the city's beauty and its burden.
Saturday dinner at FIG on Meeting Street, chef Mike Lata's farm-to-table institution, features Lowcountry ingredients — local shrimp, Sea Island red peas, Carolina Gold rice — prepared with French technique. Alternatively, The Ordinary, Lata's seafood hall in a former bank building, serves oysters and whole fish in one of the city's most handsome dining rooms. Reservations are essential; check https://www.eatatfig.com for availability.
Sunday, drive twenty minutes to Middleton Place, a former rice plantation whose landscaped gardens — designed in 1741 — are the oldest in America. The property includes a working stableyards and a museum interpreting the lives of the enslaved people who built and maintained the estate. Then loop to Angel Oak on Johns Island, a live oak estimated at four hundred to five hundred years old, whose canopy spans seventeen thousand square feet.
Charleston's power lies in its refusal to simplify its own story. The same city that produced exquisite ironwork, revolutionary cuisine, and some of America's finest residential architecture also operated one of the largest slave trading ports in North America. A good weekend here engages with both realities, and leaves with an appreciation for the hands — acknowledged and unacknowledged — that built what you see.
