Elliott Street stretches out around you in the Harleston Village neighborhood, an area that developed primarily in the early nineteenth century as Charleston's professional and merchant class built homes beyond the original colonial city. The neighborhood takes its name from Benjamin Harleston, who subdivided his land here in the 1770s. Nearby stands the College of Charleston, founded in 1770 and the oldest municipal college in the United States — a colonial institution that educated the sons of planter families and produced lawyers, ministers, and politicians who shaped South Carolina's history, including its decision to secede from the Union.
Elliott Street and the surrounding neighborhood preserve a streetscape of Federal and Greek Revival townhouses that illustrates the architectural ambitions of antebellum Charleston's middle and upper-middle classes. Not everyone in this neighborhood was wealthy, but the neighborhood's physical character reflected the aspirations of a city that invested heavily in its built environment. William Rhett, the early eighteenth century privateer and slave trader who suppressed piracy in Carolina waters and captured Stede Bonnet, is associated with this area.
The juxtaposition is characteristic of Charleston: civic virtue and moral ambiguity residing in the same biography, the same neighborhood, the same history.