Twenty-One Magazine

Old Charleston Jail
Location	21 Magazine Street, Charleston, South Carolina
Coordinates	32°46′42″N 79°56′13″W
Governing body	U.S. National Park Service
Location of the Old Charleston Jail in South Carolina

Twenty-One Magazine event venue

Twenty-One Magazine, formerly the Old Charleston Jail and once the site of the Charleston Workhouse and Negro Mart, is a structure of historical and architectural significance in Charleston, South Carolina, United States. Operational between 1802 and 1939, the jail held many notable figures, among them Denmark Vesey, Union officers and Colored Troops during the American Civil War, and high-seas pirates. The Old Charleston Jail went through a renovation starting in 2016. It is now a private event venue.

History

The Old Charleston Jail was originally located on a four-acre parcel set aside for public use in 1680, at the time of Charleston's earliest settlement, designated as public land for "institutions serving the poor, the sick, and the dispossessed" including hospitals, burial grounds, and jails.

Operating as the Charleston County Jail from 1802 until 1939, it housed Charleston's most infamous criminals, and U.S. Army and Navy prisoners of war during the Civil War. When the Jail was constructed in 1802 it consisted of four stories, topped with a two-story octagonal tower. Charleston architects Barbot & Seyle were responsible for 1855 alterations to the building, including a rear octagonal wing, expansions to the main building and the Romanesque Revival details. This octagonal wing replaced a fireproof wing with individual cells, designed by Robert Mills in 1822, five years earlier than his notable Fireproof Building. The 1886 earthquake badly damaged the tower and top story of the main building, and these were subsequently removed.

The Old Jail housed a great variety of inmates. John and Lavinia Fisher, and other members of their gang, convicted of highway robbery in the Charleston Neck region were imprisoned here in 1819 to 1820. Some of the last 19th-century high-seas pirates were jailed here in 1822 while they awaited hanging. The Jail was active after the discovery of Denmark Vesey's planned slave revolt. Although the main trials were held elsewhere, four white men convicted of supporting the 1822 plot were imprisoned here. Tradition holds that Vesey spent his last days in the tower before being hanged, although no extant document indicates this. William Moultrie, General during the American Revolution and later Governor of South Carolina, allegedly spent a short time in debtor's prison at the Jail.

Slave trader Alonzo J. White advertised the sale of Holly and her nine children for auction at the Work House Negro Mart on Magazine-street on January 20, 1841

The workhouse was colloquially known as "the sugar house." The Charleston Ordinance for the Regulation of Negroes passed in 1806 outlines the role of the workhouse and workhouse superintendent in maintaining the slavery system in the city. According to historians, the workhouse and adjacent yard was used for the "corporal punishment of enslaved people...If enslaved people were thought to have overstepped their boundaries, they would be brought here (as the wry euphemistic phrase went) 'for a bit of sugar.'" According to Robert Mills in Statistics of South Carolina (1826), the public land surrounding the jail also hosted the 125-bed Lunatic Asylum, and "the work house, adjoining the jail is appropriated entirely to the confinement and punishment of slaves. These were formerly compelled only occasionally to work; no means then existing of employing them regularly and effectually. The last year the City Council ordered the erection of a tread-mill; this has proved a valuable appendage to the prison, and will supercede every other species of punishment there." According to an 1838 slave narrative by a fugitive who made it to New England, "I have heard a great deal said about hell, and wicked places, but I don't think there is any worse hell than that sugar house."

In 1840, mayor H. L. Pickney proposed that a slave mart be added to the jail-workhouse complex and that slave sellers pay a fee of 25¢ for each person sold at the mart. The jail was the site of the 1849 Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion, led by Nicholas Kelly, an action that resulted from the actions of slave trader John M. Gilchrist. According to the Anti-Slavery Bugle in 1857, the jail and workhouse were notorious as a site of sadistic torture and were often visited by slave traders seeking new product for sale.

During the Civil War, Confederate and Federal prisoners of war were incarcerated here. Most notably were numerous African American soldiers from the 54th Massachusetts Regiment captured after their assault on Fort Wagner in July 1863. A U.S. Army officer captured after the Battle of Missionary Ridge wrote in 1891, "I thought Hospital No. 10 at Richmond the most wretched and hope-destroying place I had ever been in, and it certainly was up to that time, but it was as a palace to a morgue compared with the workhouse in Charleston. The hospital ward must have been the filthiest, most stifling and malodorous apartment in the building, for it would tax the imagination of Dante himself to conceive of anything worse."

Charleston Jail and Workhouse as pictured in Harper's Weekly in February 1865; the accompanying text stated that "In last August the jail and yard were occupied by six hundred army and navy officers, who were placed under the fire of our batteries on Morris Island. They were occupied at the same time by felons, murderers, lewd women, deserters from both armies, United States colored soldiers, and Southern slaves, most of whom were permitted to walk at will among the officers."

The workhouse building was demolished following the 1886 Charleston earthquake. In February 1888 while it was being "taken down" there was a construction accident that seriously injured two workers.

It is one of more than 1400 historically significant buildings within the Charleston Old and Historic District. In 1965, the city zoning board approved its use as a museum and gift store.

Memorial

In 2022, City of Charleston installed a plaque commemorating the history of the Charleston Workhouse. The memorial acknowledges that the city profited from the abuses perpetrated inside: "For a price, city employees whipped enslaved people up to 40 times per week." The building is also acknowledged as a site of slave resistance, as embodied by rebel leaders Vesey and Kelly.

Notable inmates

• Civil War POWs
• Denmark Vesey, accused of planning a slave revolt, executed in 1822.
• High-seas pirates
• Jacque Alexander Tardy held from 1825–27 for attempt to steal a pilot boat.

Renovation

In 2016, Landmark Enterprises purchased the Old Charleston Jail and transformed it into an event venue now known as Twenty-One Magazine. The renovation reportedly cost $15 million and includes office space for lease.

Twenty-One Magazine

Tours

Travel Tours of the Old Charleston Jail have been available since 2003, and the Jail has become popular with tourists as well as on television. It has been featured in a variety of television shows including Travel Channel and Food Network.

See also

• Exchange and Provost
• Old Slave Mart
• Slave markets and slave jails in the United States
• The Cage (Richmond, Virginia)
• Waterfront Park (Charleston)

External links

Media related to Old Charleston Jail at Wikimedia Commons