St. Philip's graceful white steeple has crowned the Charleston skyline since the current building was completed in 1836, watching over your walk today. The congregation itself is far older — it was established in 1680, making it one of the first Anglican parishes in the American South, and the original St. Philip's served as a lighthouse, its steeple visible to ships navigating the bar at the harbor entrance. The churchyard on both sides of the building contains some of the most significant graves in South Carolina.
John C. Calhoun, the senator, Vice President, and fierce defender of slavery and states' rights, was buried here in 1850 — though his body was later moved to Marion Square in a more prominent location. DuBose Heyward, the Charleston novelist whose 1925 book Porgy inspired George Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess, is also buried in this churchyard. The congregation split during the Civil War, as many Southern parishes did, over loyalty to the Episcopal Church's national structure versus the Confederacy.
St. Philip's is a place where the beautiful and the troubling coexist in the same stones — elegant architecture memorializing men whose legacies remain deeply contested.