Winding through the city of Charleston the Gateway Walk begins on Archdale Street at the Unitarian Church graveyard, passes by residences and businesses on charming alleys, past the Library Society, Circular Church and the Gibbes Museum and ends in the graveyard of St. Philips Church. The Walk was founded by the Garden Club of Charleston in 1930 and is their oldest project. Renowned landscape architect Loutrell Briggs designed the Walk at that time. On a beautiful Fall Day, the Kiawah Island Garden Club joined a longtime member of the city garden club, Karen Prewitt, for a guided tour of the entire walk with special insights into the plantings and the funerary art. The Unitarian Church’s wild and unkempt looking graveyard is intentional.
The Church’s basic premise it that our spiritual journey has problems and how we deal with these obstacles determine our outcome. Weeding would symbolically remove these obstacles. The wife of Reverend Samuel Gilman, pastor from 1791-1858, designed the graveyard as a park. Adjacent is the graveyard of St. John's Church, much more orderly and neater. An early pastor was named Bachman and he was an ornithologist. When John J. Audubon came to South Carolina, Rev. Bachman was very helpful to him. In fact, Rev. Bachman’s wife and daughter painted the backgrounds for his bird illustrations. Funerary art is very architectural generally and you can see three distinct styles in these graveyards. The oldest is Renaissance, later Neo-Classical and finally Gothic Revival which came in around 1840. The Renaissance often features skulls and crossbones, “memento Mori” meaning always to remember you will die. The Neo-Classical features acanthus leaves, meaning immortality. Flowers carved on gravestones each have very specific symbolism. Icons, symbols which show a belief, include a broken-off pedestal meaning a life cut short, and a palmetto growing out of a fall oak tree symbolizes the triumph of South Carolina over England in the Revolutionary War. The Gothic Revival was popular during Victorian times and often graves would be surrounded by head, foot and sides of standing granite as if they were a bed: symbolizing eternal rest. The Circular Church is the third building on the site of the first church built in Charleston.
Meeting Street is named for the church as the concept that it was the meeting place for all denominations not Anglican. It is in the Romanesque/Renaissance style with no steeples. Robert Mills, the first native born architect in the U.S., designed it. Of course, it is also the oldest graveyard in Charleston. The graveyard of St. Philips, and Anglican church, is divided into two sections. The East graveyard is adjacent to the church and is where the earliest members, the “born heahs” were buried. The West graveyard is for the “come heahs”. There is a large tomb in the West graveyard where John C. Calhoun, a US vice president under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, was interred. That is because he was not born in Charleston but during the Civil War he was exhumed and reburied next to his wife in the East graveyard. After the War, when his pro-slavery opinions were out of favor, he was returned to the West side.
There are many more stories and historical highlights to learn on the Gateway Walk and you can find guides for the walk online.
