St. Michael's Church

St. Michael's Episcopal Church stands on the southeast corner of Meeting and Broad streets at Charleston's 'Four Corners of Law,' on the site of an earlier 1681 wooden church built by St. Philip's parish. Construction of the present building began with the cornerstone laid by royal governor James Glenn in February 1752; the exterior was largely complete by 1756, and the congregation began worshipping in the new structure in 1761. Although the architect is unknown, the design closely echoes 18th-century English pattern-book churches, particularly James Gibbs's St Martin-in-the-Fields in London, and the building's two-story Tuscan-columned portico was the first of its size in colonial America.

The 186-foot steeple has dominated Charleston's skyline for more than two and a half centuries. The bells inside were imported from England in 1764, taken to England as a Revolutionary War prize, redeemed by a London merchant and returned, sent to Columbia during the Civil War, cracked in the 1865 fire there, and ultimately sent back to England to be recast in their original moulds and rehung. Inside, the long center pew has hosted worshippers from George Washington to Robert E. Lee, and a Tiffany stained-glass window in the chancel was added in the 19th century.

The church survived the 1886 Charleston earthquake, repeated hurricanes, and the Civil War shelling of the city. Designated a National Historic Landmark by the U.S. Department of the Interior in 1960, it continues today as an active Anglican parish at the heart of Charleston's historic district.

Among its more poignant 19th-century burials is Harriott Pinckney Mackie, a teenage Charleston heiress who died on June 4, 1804 and was interred at the church. Period accounts disagree about whether her death was natural or whispered to be poisoning over an inheritance she was about to claim through marriage.