Look down at the cobblestones beneath your feet on Chalmers Street, one of the oldest streetscapes in North America. Look down at the paving beneath your feet: these rounded stones are believed to be ballast carried in the hulls of ships that sailed from Europe and Africa. Ships crossing the Atlantic needed weight for stability, so they loaded stones at their port of departure and dumped them when they took on cargo — cargo that often included enslaved human beings.
The stones of Chalmers Street may have arrived in the same vessels that brought captive Africans to this shore. At the eastern end of the block stands the Pink House, built around 1712 of Barbadian coral stone, believed to be the oldest surviving building in Charleston. It served as a tavern and reportedly as a brothel in the eighteenth century.
The French Quarter neighborhood you are in takes its name from the Huguenot refugees who settled here in the late seventeenth century, and many of the city's oldest buildings are concentrated within a few blocks. Walking Chalmers Street is walking directly on the material residue of the Atlantic world — trade, displacement, forced migration — compressed into these rough and beautiful stones.