The Burnt District · Book p. 112
The Fire-scarred Mills House
A hotel that survived the fire, and then took Federal shells through the back of it.
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The Mills House came through the Great Fire of December 1861 when almost nothing around it did, and then spent the next eighteen months being shot at.
Federal batteries on Morris Island opened on the city at half past one in the morning on 22 August 1863. The Mills House stood well within range. Sergeant Augustine Smythe, writing home through the bombardment, saw shells fall around the hotel on 20 November 1863, and three weeks later told his sister Sarah that one had struck the back of the building and wrecked three of its rooms.
That is what the scarring in this photograph is. It is worth separating the two disasters, because the burnt district around this hotel is fire damage from 1861 and the marks on the hotel itself are shellfire from 1863 — two different catastrophes, three years apart, in one frame.
The hotel had opened in 1853, built by the grain merchant Otis Mills to designs by the architect John Earl: five storeys, eighty feet of frontage on Meeting Street and three hundred on Queen, with running water and steam heat when neither could be assumed. The brickwork was finished in a mastic cement scored and tinted to imitate brownstone, and the cast-iron balconies came from Philadelphia.
The building in this photograph no longer exists. The original Mills House was demolished in 1968; the hotel standing on the corner today opened in 1970 and reproduces the old facade one storey taller. That makes Barnard's plates the primary record of what actually stood there.
The caption as printed in the book
During the Federal bombardment the Mills House encountered occasional shelling. On Nov. 20, 1863, Augustine Smythe saw some fall around the hotel. Then, three weeks later, he wrote his sister Sarah that a shell had hit the back of the hotel, wrecking three of its rooms. Then, on June 9, 1864, he wrote his mother: About 8 P.M. a shell fell in Meeting just above the Mills House & burst. As it exploded a piece of fire was thrown a great height in the air & all around the spot were large splotches of fire. Fortunately, it was in the Street & in the Burnt District, so there was nothing to burn. The Mills House Hotel, unoccupied during the bombardment, reopened in December 1865 and for decades remained a prestigious lodging-place. President Theodore Roosevelt stayed here in 1902 while attending a trade exposition in Charleston. Later known as the St. John Hotel, the original building was demolished in 1968 and rebuilt as a new seven-story, 217-room hotel. In the past several decades, it has passed through various ownerships and is today known as the Mills House Wyndham Grand Hotel.
Also at Mills House
