OLD DISTRICT JAIL

   

In the 136 years between 1803 and 1939, Charleston's Old District Jail housed some of the city’s most notorious murderers and malefactors, as well as the enslaved and Union prisoners of war. Local tour guides who tout
the Old Jail as the city’s most haunted building make a strong argument for that claim, for thousands have died within these walls.¹

From 2003 to 2020, a local tour company conducted both day and evening ghost tours through the Old Jail, and in return contributed a portion of their ticket sales toward
its stabilization. Though perhaps the ghost of Lavinia Fisher is the most popular specter to roam its halls, others claim to have heard voices and slamming cell doors and felt unexplainable “cold spots” throughout the building.²

Their stories have been chronicled on such television networks and series as the Travel Channel, Food Network, BuzzFeed Unsolved, Ghost Hunters, and Paranormal State.

Contrary to its popular moniker, “The Old City Jail,” this building never actually operated as a municipal prison.³ Rather, it was built to serve as the state’s first officially designated jail. During Charles Town’s colonial era, there was no prison building as we think of them today. As in the case of pirate Stede Bonnet, those who were being held over for trial were most often housed in the residence of the city marshal or other city officials, although by 1711 a “watch house” had been established within the defensive fort that sat atop Half Moon Battery (today the eastern terminus of Broad Street). That building was remodeled and expanded 1767–1769 to become what we know today as the Old Exchange Building. Visitors still enjoy hearing stories about Revolutionary War prisoners, both British and American, housed within its Provost’s Dungeon.

Around that same time, a new watch house was built on the southwest corner of Meeting and Broad streets, but it was mostly used as a headquarters for Charles Town’s city militia, the first paid, professionally trained police force in America. Construction began in 1802 on the earliest part of the building that stands at 21 Magazine Street today. To add to its morbid history, it was built over what had been a public cemetery. The original one-story brick structure was a simple rectangular design with no ornamentation, measuring just 100 by 50 feet.⁴

Accepting its first inmates in early 1803, the jail had
the capacity to hold 130 malefactors, though at times, some historians have estimated, it held more than 500.
This humble original footprint was expanded in 1822 with the addition of a perpendicular four-story wing designed by Robert Mills, a Charlestonian popularly known as America’s first native architect.⁵

Most of Mills’s wing was demolished in 1855, however, when a four-story octagonal wing designed by Charleston architects John H. Seyle and Louis J. Barbot in the
gothic Romanesque Revival style replaced much of it.
At the same time, a dramatic arched doorway flanked by two crenellated towers was added to the facade, giving the building the grim, imposing aesthetic still evident today. This threatening appearance was not designed by accident. The dark, intimidating appearance of the District Jail was meant to strike fear into the heart of anyone, particularly the enslaved, who might be contemplating rebellion or other disobedience. 

Along with its Romanesque Revival architectural features, a two-story ventilation tower was added atop the four-story rear wing. (At the risk of understatement, crowded prison cells can get deathly hot during Charleston’s
subtropical summers.) Still, the barred windows did not provide enough air to keep out the heat, nor the cold in winter. Although in his 1826 Statistics of South Carolina, Robert Mills noted that the recently renovated jail had “very roomy and comfortable accommodations” and that “[v]ery good health is enjoyed by the prisoners,”⁶ the reality is that throughout its existence, the building has served as a mecca for all kinds of vermin, disease-carrying mosquitoes and rats included. This should hardly be surprising, as part of the public square’s plat was infill from a small creek.

Also during most of its time actively serving as a prison, it had no running water. Straw or wood chips served as both bedding and toilet areas. Filth was unavoidable. Though far more deaths here were actually attributable to the heat, overcrowded conditions, meager nutrition, and rampant disease that defined life—and death—in the Old District Jail, the prison’s most famous tales involve inmate violence and executions, many of which were staged in the jail yard. Whippings, beatings, inmate fights, and sexual assaults were all common occurrences.

The Old Jail housed prisoners from murderers to petty thieves, debtors to prostitutes, and prisoners of war. For much of that history, prisoners were housed according to their social status, gender, and the nature of their crimes. The first floor housed a somewhat better class of
“gentlemen” prisoners, as well as the jailer’s family, all of whom worked to support the jail’s functions. The warden’s wife generally served as the facility’s cook, nurse, and matron for female prisoners, along with assistance from their children.

Prostitutes and debtors generally were housed on the second floor, while African-American inmates and the most violent criminals, such as murderers and armed robbers, were housed on the upper two floors. 

Hangings at the Charleston District Jail were staged a bit differently than those at most other places. At Charleston’s Old Jail, prisoners stood in the jail yard not on a scaffolding or stage of any sort, but simply on the ground with the noose tied around their neck. The rope ran up through a tall pole on a pulley system, then back down again to the ground, where it was tied to a heavy sack. Next to the sack was a large hole. The sack was then pushed into the hole and the resulting tension would jerk the rope, and its prisoner, up high.

The rationale for using this method was considered a humane one, as the chances of the prisoner’s neck being snapped instantly were more likely this way—a swifter death than strangling over the course of several minutes or, in the case of poorly managed executions, even a while longer. 

In addition to John and Lavinia Fisher, the jail housed a number of other high-profile inmates, perhaps most notably Denmark Vesey. 

Two other early nineteenth-century inmates who gained fame during

their stays at the Old District Jail were Jacque Alexander Tardy and John Gib-
son, the latter a cook who served aboard a passenger ship named the Maria.

Tardy was born in France in 1767. As a young man, he fled with his family

during the French Revolution to Saint-Domingue (Haiti), where his family
acquired some wealth living on a sugar plantation. The Tardys were again

displaced during the Haitian Slave Rebellion of 1791, ending up in Philadel-
phia, where Jacque, now using the name John, learned the tinsmithing trade.

An 1806 advertisement in a Charleston newspaper shows that Tardy
had opened his own tinsmithing shop at 131 Church Street.9

On June 16,
1809, his shop caught fire, destroying not only his house but that of his
neighbors as well. With the $800 insurance settlement he received from the

fire, he moved to Augusta, Georgia, for a new start in the tinsmithing busi-
ness. He later accepted a position in the US Navy aboard the USS Congress

as a captain’s steward. It was not long before he was returned to his home-
port of Norfolk, Virginia, and flogged for stealing from his captain’s cabin

then trying to sell the purloined items to his fellow crewmen. He was also
later suspected, though never convicted, of poisoning his captain, who died
under suspicious circumstances at the age of thirty-five.

In 1814 Tardy accepted an apprenticeship’s position with a Boston den-
tist, who soon fired him for being “more interested in the application of

various medications, than dentistry.”10 He spent the next three years doing
hard labor in Boston’s Charlestown State Prison for a theft conviction.
Upon his release, Tardy hopped aboard the Maria, bound again for

Charleston. Along the route he poisoned the ship’s captain and seven oth-
ers by putting arsenic in their breakfast hash. Claiming to be a doctor, he

prescribed doses of castor oil; of course the crewmen died anyway. He then
accused the ship’s cook, John Gibson, of being responsible for the poisoning.
Upon the Maria’s arrival in Charleston, Gibson was arrested and held at the
District Jail before being tried and hanged for murder on March 4, 1817,
proclaiming his innocence to the end. It is likely that he was both executed
and buried in the potter’s cemetery there on-site.
Following Gibson’s execution, Tardy returned to Philadelphia. Within a
year of his arrival, he was charged and convicted of poisoning several more
people aboard the Regulator, again blaming the ship’s cook. This time the

story did not fly, as the cook’s good reputation was well known by his cap-
tain and others. Tardy was convicted of the crime and spent another seven

years at hard labor in the Philadelphia area.

In addition to John and Lavinia Fisher, the jail housed a number of
other high-profile inmates, perhaps most notably Denmark Vesey and the

men who were accused and executed along with him on July 2, 1822, fol-
lowing their conviction of plotting a slave rebellion.7

Because city officials
were concerned a riot might ensue at the men’s execution, they were quietly
taken from the District Jail between 6:00 and 8:00 a.m. and driven at least
two miles out of town for their hangings. By the end of August, another
131 slaves and free blacks had also been arrested for their connections to
the conspiracy and incarcerated in the District Jail.8

Thirty of them were
released without a trial, and two died while in custody before they could
be tried. Of the 101 blacks who were tried, 23 were acquitted and 3 were
found not guilty but sent to the Sugar House to be whipped anyway. Vesey’s
daughter Sandy and thirty-six others were found guilty and sent to Cuba to
be sold there. One, the Reverend Morris Brown, pastor of the AME Church,
was allowed to go to Philadelphia, with the understanding that he could be
arrested if he ever returned to South Carolina. His church was razed. The
remaining thirty-five black prisoners were found guilty and hanged. Four
white men who were convicted of being involved in the plot were found
guilty, but not executed.
One of the numerous consequences of the purported Slave Rebellion
of 1822 was a new state law that required any black sailor, free or enslaved,
to remain on his ship while in port. City leaders were concerned that black
sailors would bring in news of other slave rebellions around the Atlantic or

Caribbean, contributing to local tensions that continued to build through-
out the first half of the nineteenth century. Black sailors who came ashore

and were captured, regardless of whether any wrongdoing was involved,
were incarcerated in the Old Jail and released only if “redeemed” by their
captain for a fee. If the captain did not pay the fine for the return of his
sailors by the time their ship had sailed, leaving them behind, they would be
sold into slavery.
Two other early nineteenth-century inmates who gained fame during

their stays at the Old District Jail were Jacque Alexander Tardy and John Gib-
son, the latter a cook who served aboard a passenger ship named the Maria.

Tardy was born in France in 1767. As a young man, he fled with his family 

Upon his release, he headed back to Charleston, where he began adver-
tising his services as a dentist. On November 18, 1825, Tardy attempted

to steal a harbor pilot’s boat named the Cora from its dock along the city’s
waterfront, enlisting the aid of two of its crewmen. All three were caught
red-handed in the process. In an unsuccessful attempt to escape, Tardy fired
several shots at his captors. He awaited his trial in the Charleston District
Jail and, on March 3, 1826, was convicted of conspiracy to steal the boat.
He was sentenced to two years in the same prison where poor John Gibson
had been held and executed eight years earlier.
After his release from Charleston’s District Jail, Tardy continued a life of
crime, theft, and murder. Two years later, he committed suicide by slitting
his own throat as the authorities, this time back in Norfolk, were once again
closing in on him for again trying to steal a boat. On August 1, 1827, Dr.
Brereton of the Washington Phrenological Society requested, and was given,
Tardy’s skull for study.

The number of prisoners held at Castle Pinckney quickly outgrew the
island’s facilities, and they were transferred to the District Jail in September
1861. Hundreds of soldiers, both Union POWs and Confederate deserters,
would pass through the Old Jail’s arched doorway over the next four years.

Even the jail yard was packed with as many tents as possible to house every-
one, yet even then the facility was packed beyond capacity and prisoners had

to take turns sleeping. Some days rations came down to just a handful of
crackers. Still, nearly everyone in Charleston was starving during the worst
parts of its siege—prisoners, guards, and populace alike.
Everything in Charleston changed on December 11, 1861, when the
largest fire in the city’s history swept from the northeast corner of East Bay
and Hasell Streets down and across the peninsula to the western terminus
of Tradd Street and the Ashley River. As the conflagration, flowing with the
strong winds that roared through the city that night, took a northwesterly
turn near Meeting and Broad Streets, it looked as if the jail lay right in its
path.
Nearly all of the prisoners were hurried upstairs and packed into one of
the largest cells on the fourth floor as their Confederate guards left their posts
to assist the city’s firefighters in battling the flames.12 Panicked, inmates who
could squeezed through a small window opening and dropped to the ground
below, many sustaining injuries in the fall. Once on the ground, however,
those who jumped did not scatter to escape but stayed together and waited
in an orderly fashion amid the chaos that surrounded them.
Thanks to the providence of the shifting winds, the jail did not catch fire
that evening, as did nearly one-third of the city’s commercial and residential
structures, though it did come frighteningly close. The next morning, as the
smoke and dust began to clear, the Confederate guards returned to the jail,
appreciative of finding their Union captives just outside the jail awaiting
their return. Afterward, they returned to Castle Pinckney for several weeks
while the District Jail guards helped clean up and secure the city once again
after the disastrous fire. By January all POWs were again moved back to the
District Jail, which continued to serve as a POW camp until the city fell to
Union troops in February 1865.

Never was the District Jail more crowded than during the American
Civil War. Charleston’s first Union prisoners were held at Castle Pinckney,
a small island set between Charleston’s docks along the Cooper River and
Mount Pleasant, which had been repurposed as a POW camp soon after

the war’s first shots were fired just downriver at Fort Sumter. Its first cap-
tives arrived in September 1861—men who, according to a Richmond,

Virginia, newspaper, included prisoners “who had evinced the most inso-
lent and insubordinate disposition.”11 Nevertheless, life at Castle Pinckney

never yielded the horror stories of other camps, such as the Washington Race

Course described earlier. Because Castle Pinckney was a small island, prison-
ers were allowed to wander freely during the day, returning to their cells at

night. Contemporary photographs suggest that prisoners and their captors
even shared a sense of humor and civility toward one another. 

At approximately 9:50 p.m. the evening of August 31, 1886, Charles-
tonians’ world once again was forever changed when the largest earthquake

to ever hit the East Coast struck, its epicenter near Middleton Place plan-
tation, about ten miles northwest of downtown. Virtually every building

in the Charleston area was damaged in what historians now estimate must
have registered between a 7.2 and a 7.4 rating on today’s Richter scale. The
District Jail lost, permanently, its entire fourth floor and ventilation tower,
fallen into rubble. Much of the twenty-foot wall that had enclosed the Civil

War prison camp also toppled and was later replaced by a lower, more mod-
est wall. As noted earlier, the adjoining Sugar House, which by that time

had been converted to a public hospital, was demolished as a result of the
earthquake’s damage.
Yet despite the damage, three floors of Charleston’s Old District Jail still
stood and continued to house prisoners for the next five decades. In 1911
Daniel Duncan, convicted of murder, was the last inmate to be executed by
the jail yard’s unusual hanging mechanism.
As other more modern prisons opened up around the state during the
early twentieth century, to say the now-antiquated jail’s structure continued
to deteriorate after the earthquake is to simply state the obvious. In the
1930s the city began seeking a location on which to create new low-income
public housing, and as they did, their sights turned to the old public square.

Bricks that lay abandoned after the earthquake’s destruction of the jail’s ven-
tilation tower, fourth floor, and surrounding wall were gathered up and used

in the construction of the new housing project just beyond the jail’s north-
ern and western perimeters along Magazine and Franklin Streets. Plans were

made to create a new playground out of the old jail yard, where so many
executions had taken place, paupers been buried, and starving prisoners of
war packed together—though that plan (dare we say fortunately?) was never
fully realized.
The jail was decommissioned and its last inmates exited the building on
September 13, 1939. It sat empty, unused, and deteriorating over the next

sixty-one years under the ownership of the Housing Authority of Charles-
ton. Attempts to create an on-site museum were unsuccessful in the late

1960s and early 1970s. Though well intentioned, in hindsight, many of the

incorrectly made repairs to shore up the building’s structure after the earth-
quake did more harm than good.

It wasn’t until 2000 that the future began to look brighter for the Old
District Jail, when it was purchased through a complex land swap with the
city by the American College of the Building Arts. The origins of this unique

college began during the 1990s, following the city’s devastation by Hurri-
cane Hugo on September 21/22, 1989. In the Category 4 storm’s aftermath,

many owners and stewards of Charleston’s historic civic buildings and res-
idences were surprised to discover that they could not find highly skilled

craftspeople in the traditional building trades—such as plaster, stone carv-
ing, wood and blacksmithing—to repair and restore their properties. Many

had to look as far as Europe to find and hire qualified craftspeople with the
traditional skills needed to repair their historic properties.

Created to resolve this educational gap in America, the American Col-
lege of the Building Arts (ACBA) seemed the perfect fit as the next tenants

and stewards of the badly deteriorating jail, seeing it as a living classroom
for the skills they were learning. Among their restoration efforts was the
construction of steel towers inside the building’s main cellblocks, the oldest
portion of the building still in existence. The towers were then bolted to the
surrounding walls to slow the deterioration of the structure’s masonry.
ACBA spent the next seventeen years stabilizing the jail’s structural
integrity. As its student enrollment increased, however, the young school
began to outgrow the jail’s footprint. Heating, cooling, and technology were
also problems for the campus, as the jail’s feet-thick masonry walls were
hardly conducive to speedy internet connections, hard-wiring, re-piping,
etc. In 2016 ACBA moved to its new campus in the city’s rehabilitated Old

Trolley Barn, c. 1897, on upper Meeting Street, and a new commercial ven-
ture began exploring ways to rehabilitate the Old District Jail into office

space, preserving as much of its original historic fabric as possible. It remains
to be seen how many of the building’s new occupants will feel comfortable

working late into the evening hours when necessary. Until then, the Charles-
ton District Jail remains the largest unrestored property in the city’s historic

district.

Footnotes and Sources for More Information