Henry Laurens House, c. 1763 320 East Bay Street

This essay is adapted from Lost Charleston.

A different version focusing on Henry Laurens' cremation can be found in the Do You Know Your Lowcountry column in the Post and Courier, Sept. 30, 2024.

We visit the site of the Henry Laurens House on our Amazingly Historic Parking Lots tour.



Merchant Henry Laurens made his fortune exporting rice, indigo, naval stores and deerskins, while importing wine, rum, sugar and slaves. Along with his business partners, he became the largest importer of enslaved West Africans in North America, making him one of the wealthiest men in the colonies. 

Like every young white man in Charleston, Laurens aspired to the elite planter class, eventually acquiring four plantations in South Carolina and two in Georgia, more than 20,000 acres total. In addition he built a grand town house with a magnificent garden at the southeast intersection of East Bay and Laurens streets. In her 1921 book Historic Houses of South Carolina (available for free download), author Harriett Kershaw Leiding notes the house featured “colonial carvings, marble mantels, set-in book cases, thick walls, secret doors and, on the upper floor, a wonderful ballroom.” 

As colonial rebellion grew, Laurens initially hoped for a peaceful solution that would avoid a break with England. Perhaps because of his initial equivocation, an angry mob gathered at his house on Oct. 23 to protest the hated Stamp Act of 1765, a tax that required the purchase of stamps for documents ranging from newspapers to court records, mortgages, and playing cards.

During the evening of partisan passion, drinking, and riots, rumors spread that Laurens was hiding the stamps at his house. Though he prevented protesters from entering his residence, where his wife was recuperating from a serious illness, the mob thoroughly ransacked the property’s dependent buildings.

Though they found no stamps, they did find enough wine to keep the protest a rowdy one as they moved on to search the residence of the colony’s Chief Justice.

When it became apparent that was unlikely to happen, however, Laurens threw his support behind the Patriot cause, succeeding John Hancock as President of the Continental Congress.

On a mission to secure funding for the war from the Dutch in 1780, Laurens was captured at sea by the British, becoming the only American ever to be imprisoned in the fabled Tower of London. He was later released in a prisoner exchange for Gen. Charles (Lord) Cornwallis and, along with Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and John Jay, helped develop the Treaty of Paris, the truce that ended the Revolution with Britain.

Laurens returned to Charleston a broken man after the war and the death of his beloved son John in its final days. He spent his remaining years in relative solitude at his Mepkin Plantation.

In 1914, the grand house at 320 East Bay Street was torn down to accommodate a railroad spur that was abandoned before it was ever finished. Today it is a parking lot for a submarine sandwich shop.



The Henry Laurens House at 320 East Bay Street. (Photo credit: The Charleston Museum, c. 1914.)

The house as seen from its East Bay Street perspective. (Photo credit: Photographer N.A. Chamberlain, c. 1914. From the collections of The Charleston Museum.)

Sources and for more information:

"October, 1765: A Masked Mob Searches Henry Laurens' House," written by Faye Jensen for the South Carolina Historical Society blog, Oct. 3, 2023.

Historic Houses of South Carolina by Harriette Kershaw Leiding, published 1921, available for free download.