Ansonborough spreads out around you, one of Charleston's oldest neighborhoods, laid out in the early eighteenth century and named for British Admiral George Anson. The neighborhood developed as a prosperous residential area close to the wharves, home to merchants, factors, and professionals who wanted to be near the commercial heart of the city. A catastrophic fire in 1838 swept through much of Ansonborough, destroying most of the colonial-era buildings and prompting an extensive rebuilding in the Greek Revival style that characterizes so many antebellum Charleston streetscapes.
Before the Civil War, Ansonborough was a mixed neighborhood by Charleston's complex social standards: white families of varying degrees of prosperity, free Black property owners who occupied the narrow legal space that antebellum South Carolina allowed, and enslaved people in back buildings throughout. In the 1960s, Ansonborough became the test case for a new kind of Charleston preservation effort. The neighborhood was slated for wholesale demolition and urban renewal.
The Historic Charleston Foundation launched its Ansonborough Revolving Fund, buying and reselling properties with preservation easements — pioneering a model of neighborhood preservation that has been widely imitated. Today the neighborhood's survival is taken for granted. At the time, it was far from certain.