Cathedral of St. John and St. Finbar

The Cathedral of St. John the Baptist and St. Finbar stood near Friend and Broad streets, at the southern reach of the burnt district. It had been completed in 1854, with a tower and spire rising two hundred feet, and it was thought to be fireproof. It was not.

The fire broke out on the evening of 11 December 1861 at the foot of Hasell Street near East Bay — the Mercury put it at Russell & Co.'s sash and blind factory, though others thought it was already burning in Cameron & Co.'s machine shops across the street. Driven by a hard northeast wind, it cut a diagonal swath southwest across the whole peninsula and did not stop until it reached the Ashley River below Tradd Street. It burned some 540 acres and more than a thousand buildings in a single night.

The cathedral burned with the rectory beside it and the library of Bishop Patrick Lynch — some seventeen thousand volumes, one of the largest private collections in the South. The interior was gutted; the main walls stood, which is what you are looking at here.

Reconstruction was begun in 1890 and finished in 1907. The building on the site today is that one. The spire the original design had carried was not rebuilt until 2010.

The dedication is worth a line, since the book gives the saints and moves on. John the Baptist was the Judean preacher who baptized Jesus and was beheaded at the order of Herod Antipas. Finbar was a sixth-century Irish bishop, the patron saint of Cork — a reminder of who had built and filled this church. Charleston's Catholic population in 1861 was substantially Irish, and the diocese Lynch led ran from the Savannah River to the North Carolina line.