Charleston Work House

Charleston Work House. . Based on the English practice of housing the poor, the first act to establish a work house came locally in 1736. The first building, doubing as a public hospital, opened in 1738 at the southwest corner of Magazine and Mazyck (now Logan) streets. By 1740, laws calling for all captured runaway enslaved people to be confined in the Work House until claimed by their owners or sold changed the building's original purpose. In 1768, a new hospital for white paupers was built to the south, and the old Work House became exclusively "a place of correction" for the enslaved., After a fire in May 1780, the British occupying the city moved the Work House to a former sugar refinery at the west end of Broad Street. Charleston, incorporated in 1783, continued to imprison and punish enslaved Blacks there before moving the Work House to a newly constructed jail near its original site in 1786-87. In 1804 the Work House returned permanently to the old jail next door to the still extant Charleston District Jail of 1802., At the Work House, owners were charged by the city for incarcerating enslaved people and for those "corrected by whipping." There were fees for shackling and unshackling, with rules noting no more "than twenty lashes at one and the same time, nor more than two corrections in a week." The city also received revenues from the sale of unclaimed enslaved people who had escaped bondatge. In 1825, a large treadmill, an especially onerous form of forced labor, was installed., In July 1849, enslaved Nicholas Kelly led a rebellion that enabled the escape of 36 others; all, however, were recaptured and Kelly and two others were hanged. Afterwards, the building was enlarged and remodeled in 1850-52 to resemble a fortress-like Gothic revival structure. Union soldiers were imprisoned here in the Civil War, and with slavery's 1865 end, the building became a segregated Black hospital. The building was razed after the 1886 earthquake and the land sold. The brutal history of the Work House was formally addressed in the City of Charleston's 2018 resolution apologizing for slavery., (captions) , The Charleston Work House, from Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Frbruary 18, 1865. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. , Itemized Work House receipt, noting payment to the City to incarcerate an enslved man named Gilbert, January 20, 1830. Daniel Huger Papers, Courtesy of the South Carolina Historical Society.