Category: CHARLESTON FACT

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CHARLESTON FACT

Birthplace of golf in America.

Golf in America got its start in 1786 in Charleston with the formation of the South Carolina Golf Club, whose members reportedly played on a bustling rectangle of land that stretched between what we know as Charleston and Beaufain streets and bounded by Rutledge and Barre streets.  The area, called Harleston Green, seemed to disappear from historical records as a golf course around 1800.  But that makes sense:  Around that time, homes started being built in the area.   Interesting tidbit: Some 432 golf balls and 96 clubs arrived in Charleston from England in 1743 as the first known shipment of golf equipment into the colonies.

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CHARLESTON FACT

First public statue.

Charleston County Judicial Center on Broad Street is the home to an 18th-century marble statue of William Pitt (1708-1778), first Earl of Chatham, that is believed to be “the nation’s first public statuary, one of the grandest tributes that survives from this nation’s colonial era,” according to columnist Robert Behre.  The statue, which has moved at least four times through the years, was one of two commissioned to honor Pitt, considered America’s leading parliamentary advocate before the Revolutionary War. Charleston’s Pitt statue was delivered before a companion piece made it to New York.  Interestingly, a British cannonball knocked off the statue’s arm in Charleston.  Later, the statue’s head was separated from the torso, only to be reattached.