Looking East Along Broad Street

The ruins on the left were the house of Alfred Huger, for decades the postmaster of Charleston. The name is pronounced yu-GEE; a visitor who says "hugger" identifies himself immediately.

Huger is worth more than the aside the book gives him. In July 1835 the steamer Columbia landed at Charleston with mail sacks full of abolitionist tracts addressed to prominent men of the city. Huger set the sacks aside rather than deliver them. That night a group calling itself the Lynch Men broke into the post office and took the mail, and the following evening burned it before a crowd of some two thousand people, along with effigies of Northern abolitionists. Afterward Huger stood guard over the mail himself, with a shotgun — a federal officer defending federal property against his own neighbors, in a city that would fire on the federal government twenty-six years later.

He was in the street when his own house went. The account has him sitting dumbfounded in a chair someone had pulled out of the burning building, watching it go.

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.

In the background stands the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist and St. Finbar, finished seven years before and gutted in the same night. The rectory beside it went too, with Bishop Patrick Lynch's library of about seventeen thousand volumes. Construction of the present cathedral began in 1890 and was completed in 1907.