• HOME
  • FEATURES
    • Best Of Cover Shoot
    • Pet Owner’s Stories
    • People
    • Places
    • Issues
    • Remembering
    • Things
    • To Do
  • DEPARTMENTS
    • Finance / Real Estate
      • Financial Articles
      • Top 10 Most Expensive Homes Sold
      • Real Estate
        • Real Estate Experts
        • Articles
    • Attorney Directory
    • Ask the Experts
    • Business
      • Belle Hall Shopping Center
      • Lowcountry Women in Business
      • MP Business
    • Entertainment
      • Golf
    • Fashion & Beauty
    • Food & Drink
    • Giving Back
    • Health & Wellness
      • COVID-19 Articles & Resources
    • House & Home
    • Learning
      • Wando High School
    • Love & Marriage
    • Pets
    • Relax & Retire
  • Read Magazine
  • MORE MAGS
    • Charleston Women 👩‍🏫🏢
    • Lowcountry Cuisine 🧀🍷
    • Best of Mt Pleasant Mag 🏆🏆
    • Charleston Women in Real Estate 👩🏘️
    • MP Business Mag 🏢
    • MP Pets 🐶🐱
    • Charleston Independent School Directory 🏫
    • MP Senior Living 👴👵
    • More Mags
      • IOP Mag
      • SI Mag
      • MP Town Hall Magazine
  • OUR TOWN
    • MP Town Hall
    • MP Town Council
  • DIRECTORIES
    • East Cooper Church Directory
    • East Cooper Fitness Directory
    • Local 2019 CPA Tax Directory
    • Mount Pleasant Apartment Directory
  • SUBSCRIBE

Mount Pleasant Magazine

Mount Pleasant Magazine (Mount Pleasant, SC) informs residents and visitors about people, places and happenings around our area.

Shop Belle Hall
  • Best of Mount Pleasant
    • Best of MP Podcast
    • 2021 Best of Mount Pleasant including Previous Years
    • Best of Mount Pleasant Winner Articles
    • 2021 Best of Mount Pleasant Cover Photo Shoot
    • Best Of Magazines
    • Best Of Videos
    • Best Of Party Photos
    • Best Of Plaques
  • VOICE for MP Podcast
  • Real Estate Podcast
  • Our Winners
  • Advertise
    • Advertise With Us
    • Media Kit
    • Video Testimonials
  • MORE
    • MP Neighborhoods
    • East Cooper Online Network
    • Real Estate Experts
    • Attorney Directory
    • News
    • Contact

The Roaring ’20s: Life in the Lowcountry 100 Years Ago

Posted by MPM 2 Comments

1929 parade celebrating the Cooper River Bridge
To herald the grand opening of the Cooper River Bridge in 1929, a parade was held along a 100-mile route from Charleston to Conway.
The Roaring ‘20s. The phrase suggests flappers, frolic and frivolity. But, the prosperity that much of the country experienced was not replicated here. Most local residents struggled in a stagnant economy. Droves of men left to find work in cities up North.

Tourism became the hope for economic growth. In 1923, Charleston’s Mayor Thomas Stoney dubbed Charleston “America’s Most Historic City” and promised that tourism would be a top priority. The News and Courier printed a highway map from the Northeast to Charleston and distributed it nationwide. Historical markers were placed along the route. Paved roads and electric street lighting enlivened the old city’s worn and dusty appearance. By the end of the decade, tourism had become the area’s largest industry, yielding $4 million in 1929.

Many wealthy Northerners purchased Lowcountry plantations as winter retreats. Notables such as John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Solomon Guggenheim, Henry Luce and A. Felix Dupont became known as “the Wall Street Planters.”

In 1928, the Osgood family moved from Massachusetts and bought a home near Alhambra Hall. There, they created a public garden with thousands of camellias and azaleas. A 200-foot walkway framed the water’s edge, complete with a huge anchor and chain. They called their mini paradise “Pierates Cruze Gardens,” a reference to “pirate’s pie,” a breakfast dish from their native New England.

downtown Charleston bridge historic photo

For most local folks, the decade was still a struggle – as it had been since the end of the Civil War. “Nobody had anything, but they didn’t know there was anything else,” recalled Inez Spalviero Cox. The late Martha Gaillard remembered her childhood picking vegetables and pecans on Boone Hall Plantation, earning a penny per pound. She went to school only from January through April. Black children attended Laing school on the corner of King and Whilden Streets in the Old Village. The old school’s bell stands in front of the Miriam Brown Community Center.

White children attended Mount Pleasant Academy, a few blocks away on the corner of Pitt and Venning, and took a ferry downtown to Memminger High or Charleston High. The ferry from Hibben Street was the only way to get there.

Prohibition was barely enforced. There were very few speakeasies; instead, mom-and-pop groceries were gathering places that openly served alcohol. “If they had moonshine, they had customers!” recollected one old-timer. Many people also made their own wine and homebrew. Slot machines and lotteries were widespread.

The 1920s brought radio into homes, but locals also experienced the Jazz Age through live entertainment. While black residents had limited options until a dance pavilion opened at Riverside Beach (Remley’s Point) in 1930, some white residents headed across the Pitt Street Bridge via trolley to dances at the Atlantic Beach Hotel on Sullivan’s Island. The Isle of Palms was billed as the “Coney Island of the South,” with its 50-room Seashore Hotel, dance pavilion and amusement rides – including a 186-foot Ferris wheel and carousel.

Cooper River Bridge - tolls collected on the Mount Pleasant side. (Photo courtesy of Charleston County Public Library.)
Tolls were collected at the toll house on the Mount Pleasant side of the Cooper River Bridge.

Lacy Miller of “The Gracie and Lacy Show” said that there were dance pavilions in Mount Pleasant, too. One was Alhambra Hall, and the owners even provided a ferry to transport folks from the city.

According to jazz historian Ben Franklin of the University of South Carolina, there was a racial divide in the Jazz Age. Besides the segregated venues, the musical style of blacks and whites was quite different. White jazz was ragtime, dance music, later evolving into the big band sound; black jazz was blues.

Local musicians often moved to the national stage. One of them was Charlestonian Fud Livingston, great-uncle of Charleston’s current mayor, John Tecklenburg, who explained Livingston’s distinction was his ability as a composer and arranger. Some historians even put him on par with Duke Ellington. His most famous work, “I’m Through with Love,” has been recorded by many artists through the years.

Charleston’s Jenkins Orphanage Band also contributed significantly to the music scene. With their frequent street performances, Franklin described the band as more like a marching band than jazz. Nonetheless, a number of the kids later played with the Duke and Count Basie. Contrary to local legend, the young musicians didn’t devise the dance, the Charleston; that was conceived by Lowcountry native Charleston Brown, who performed a Geechie dance on street corners in New York City. James P. Johnson wrote a song to accompany it for the Broadway hit “Runnin’ Wild” in 1923, perhaps after seeing Brown there.

In the 1920s, Mount Pleasant was mostly rural. Laurie Bonneau said her family, the Robinsons and Wilsons, owned land at Six Mile and delivered produce by wagon to area grocers. Another resident, Ruth Wright, explained that many East Cooper families sold their vegetables downtown at the City Market. Today, Wright sells sweetgrass baskets near the corner of Broad and Meeting Streets where, a century ago, her grandmother sold bouquets of flowers that she grew in her own yard at Six Mile. Black women also sold flowers door to door in the city’s neighborhoods and are depicted in iconic paintings by Elizabeth O’Neill Verner. Other street vendors, called “hucksters,” were known for the various chants they sang as they roamed the streets with their wagons of seafood, vegetables and fruit.

With the advent of tourism in the 1920s, many black women began selling sweetgrass baskets along what is now Highway 17. The coastal highway had originally been Highway 40, and U.S. 17 ran further inland through Moncks Corner. Charleston’s former Mayor John P. Grace, was influential in having the highways re-routed, and a toll bridge spanning the Cooper River was built to connect automobile travelers directly with the peninsula. This new continuous route heralded a drive “all the way from Canada to Cuba.” Mount Pleasant’s Mayor T.G. McCants announced the bridge would “enlarge our world” and offer new opportunities for growth in his town.

A century later, the Roaring ‘20s have quieted and the 2020 vision sees things quite differently. From here, what will change and what will remain the same? Only time will tell.

By Mary Coy

RELATED: Mount Pleasant: The First 100 Years

Sharing is Caring

Possibly Related:

No related posts.

Filed Under: Remembering Tagged With: Nov Dec 2019

Comments

  1. Jim Rowe says

    January 12, 2020 at 10:51 pm

    Outstanding summary
    Need more of this history

    Reply
  2. Judith Auld Byrd says

    July 16, 2020 at 3:27 pm

    My parents told me of dances they attended at Oakland Plantation in Mt pleasant in the early 1930s, Oakland had a large room over a 3 stall garage where friends and neighbors joined for a good time,

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Search the Site


We're on Facebook We're on Twitter Mount Pleasant Magazine Youtube Channel We're on Pinterest Mount Pleasant Magazine Facebook Community We're on Instagram
READ ONLINE
Read the digital magazine now.
GRAB A COPY
Where can I pick up a copy of Mount Pleasant Magazine?
SUBSCRIBE
Get Mount Pleasant Magazine Delivered.

2021 Best of Mount Pleasant Final Results

Best of Mount Pleasant Podcast

Backyard Retreats, Mount Pleasant, SC​ - Where Your Retreat to the Good Life Begins!
Listen to Charleston's Pet Podcast.
Read Charleston Women Magazine online now.
Need a doctor? Charleston Physicians can connect you with Mt Pleasant doctors.


Online Magazines

Mount Pleasant

Lifestyle Magazine

Read Isle of Palms

Magazine Online

Read Sullivan's Island

Magazine Online

Take a Bite

Lowcountry Cuisine Magazine

Convergent Financial Group - Planning & Investment Advice You Can Trust
Isle of Palms Magazine - family of sites logo
Mount Pleasant Magazine - family of sites logo
North Mount Pleasant Magazine - family of sites logo
Sullivan's Island Magazine - family of sites logo

Recent Posts

Southern Bell Living: A Wealth of Experience in Real Estate

By Lindsay C. Bishop In a place like Charleston, where houses go under contract the same day they’re listed, there’s no shortage of Realtors®. With so many well-qualified professionals to choose … Continue Reading

GrandScapes: Highlight Your Home

By Stacy Domingo Winner of Best Landscaper and also a nominee for Best Place to Work, GrandScapes is the go-to company for landscaping services in Charleston. Open since 2009, GrandScapes has … Continue Reading

Daniel Island Section

Keeping the Dream of Playing Tennis Alive: The South Carolina Junior Tennis Foundation

Since 1973, South Carolina’s Lowcountry has welcomed players from the Women’s Tennis Association once a year for the annual Volvo Car Open, North America’s largest women-only tennis tournament. … Continue Reading

Truly One-of-a-kind: 369 Ralston Creek Drive

Big cities certainly have advantages – culture, dining, employment opportunities and excitement. But face it: Sometimes people yearn for a peaceful, serene atmosphere where they can relax, raise a … Continue Reading

More Daniel Island Section Posts

SEARCH

Featured Pages

Mount Pleasant Apartments
East Cooper Online Network

Copyright © 2021 · Mount Pleasant Magazine, All Rights Reserved. Advertise With Us.