In front of you is the Aiken-Rhett House, arguably the most important antebellum townhouse complex in the United States. Built around 1820 and extensively remodeled in the 1830s by Governor William Aiken Jr., this property is remarkable not for its opulence alone — though it is extraordinary — but for what survived intact into the present. Most antebellum townhouses were modernized repeatedly as technology and fashion changed.
The Aiken-Rhett House was not. When Historic Charleston Foundation acquired it in 1975, they found the original wallpaper, the original gas light fixtures, the original furniture — and crucially, the original enslaved quarters, kitchen, stables, and outbuildings in the rear of the property, barely altered since the antebellum period. This is an almost unique survival.
You can walk through the spaces where enslaved people lived and worked and understand, in physical terms, the proximity and the gulf that existed simultaneously between enslaved workers and the family they served. Governor Aiken enslaved more than seven hundred people on his rice plantations outside the city. During the Civil War, General P.G.T. Beauregard used this house as his headquarters.
Today the Historic Charleston Foundation deliberately presents both the grand front house and the enslaved quarters with equal seriousness. They are equally part of the history, and equally part of what this city was.