The upper area of the peninsula that makes up Charleston, South Carolina is home to a number of older southern cemeteries. Once this was the ‘country’ where war dead and large monuments could be placed.

A cemetery was a new idea breaking tradition with a person being buried in their church’s grave yard. Charleston being an old city, on the water, meant space was at a premium.

The image below is from a cemetery built because Charleston had an epidemic that filled a church grave yard. A new location was needed.

This was the mid 1800’s and wrought iron was becoming a simple and decorative fence.

Above can be seen an old brick wall that separated two different cemeteries. This side was a Lutheran cemetery, mostly German immigrants at the time. The far side was the beginning of an older established, almost Gothic, burial ground.

It’s common along here to have people born outside the US, here Hanover, Germany. Charleston was the wealthiest shipping port prior to the Civil War. Merchants moved there from all over the world beginning in the early 1700’s.

The older cemeteries (above) have many simpler grave sites. After 1861, the start of the Civil War, Charleston was no longer wealthy, or even a functioning city.