The image above is in South Carolina and may — or may not — have been a depot. Send your best guess to feedback@statehousereport.com. And don’t forget to include your name and the town in which you live.
Our previous Mystery Photo
Our Dec. 27 image, “This may be a very tough mystery” wasn’t, as it happens, as difficult as we thought. Five alert readers figured out that the photo showed an old-timey receiving tomb, which happened to be at Strawberry Chapel in Berkeley County.
Congratulations to those who knew it what it was: Bill Segars of Hartsville; Carolyn Jones of Columbia; Philip Cromer of Beaufort; George Graf of Palmyra, Va.; and Susan Igel of North Charleston.
Cromer said he knew about the vault thanks to an October tour of the chapel by the S.C. Historical Society. It was the Harleston Family Vault “located in front of the Strawberry Chapel on the upper reaches of the Cooper River in Berkeley County on the former site of the colonial town of Childsbury. The vault was a receiving tomb for the chapel where bodies were stored while plots were being prepared for burial. The interior of the vault has a domed ceiling of brick and a dirt floor. It is partially underground which provided a cool environment to preserve the remains of the deceased.
Segars added, “In the cold Northern climates, frozen ground posed a problem in digging graves. In the South, bodies were typically stored here waiting for family members to travel for the funeral service. Strawberry Chapel, a chapel of ease to St. John’s Parish, was built in the colonial town of Childbury in 1725. The date of this receiving vault is unknown, at least to me.”
Graff noted that “Childsbury was one of the first towns to be laid out by Englishmen arriving in the Carolina colony. It was named after founder James Child, who established a Cooper River ferry and helped design the settlement. Strawberry Ferry operated near the chapel, at the bottom of the bluff and about 100 yards from the modern dock there today on the Cooper River. It went across the river to Bluff Plantation, near Cypress Gardens, where a road would take travelers to the Broad Path (modern-day Highway 52), providing a direct route into Charleston.
“Farmers from Childsbury had a hard time competing with the prosperity of other Lowcountry plantations, and the town did not last. Eventually the settlement’s buildings were absorbed into nearby Strawberry Plantation (from whence the chapel gets its unusual name).”
Thanks all for the great history lesson.
- Send us a mystery: If you have a photo that you believe will stump readers, send it along (but make sure to tell us what it is because it may stump us too!) Send to: feedback@statehousereport.com and mark it as a photo submission. Thanks.
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