Circular Congregational Church

Most people find this place by accident. There is no ticket desk and no interpretive signage worth the name, just an iron fence on Meeting Street with a yard of slate and marble behind it. Walk through the gate and you are in the burial ground of a congregation that has been meeting on this spot since about 1681.

The building behind the graves is the fourth on the site, finished in 1892. The one before it was a genuine circle, designed by Robert Mills, and it burned in 1861. The brick from its ruin is in the walls you are looking at.

Why Meeting Street is called Meeting Street

Charleston had two congregations in 1681: St. Philip's, which was Church of England, and the Dissenter's Society, which was everyone else. The dissenters here were English Congregationalists, Scots Presbyterians and French Huguenots, who agreed on almost nothing except that they were not Anglican, and they built a plain wooden meeting house at the northwest corner of the walled town.

People called it the White Meeting House. The road that ran to it became Meeting House Street, shortened over time to Meeting Street. The South Carolina Encyclopedia credits that building with the street name, and the present sanctuary occupies the same ground.

The congregation never settled on a denomination. Its own records from February 5, 1775 say it "suffered itself to be called either Presbyterian, Congregational, or Independent." Twelve Scots families gave up on that vagueness in 1731 and left to found First (Scots) Presbyterian.

The graveyard, which is the actual attraction

More than 500 gravestones remain, naming about 730 people, and another 620 appear in church records with some indication they were buried here. A hundred and fifty of the burials happened before 1776.

The dates are worth getting right, because guidebooks round them down. The earliest grave is from 1695 and carries no inscription: an arched brick vault south of the sanctuary said to hold Henry Simonds, who gave the congregation this lot in the early 1690s. The earliest inscribed gravestone is from 1729. The yard does go back to the 1690s, then, but you cannot read a stone that old.

What you can read is a century of New England slate, carved up north and shipped down. The church says one gravestone historian counted more of these 18th-century slates here than anywhere else in the country. Walk the yard in date order and you watch American ideas about death change in stone: skulls and crossbones on the earliest markers, then skulls with wings, then the wings stay while the skull softens into a face, and by the middle of the 1700s portrait busts. The bust of Solomon Milner, who died in 1757, is the one people photograph.

Two things to find. The Peronneau slates carry rare medallion portraits, including one of Henry Peronneau, a Huguenot from La Rochelle who landed in South Carolina in 1687. The Hutson-Peronneau vault near the middle of the yard is the largest monument here, roughly ten feet in every direction; a survey in the early 1980s found at least 18 people inside it, among them Richard Hutson, chosen Charleston's first mayor in 1783.

A British cannonball burst in the yard during a Sunday service in 1780, and earthquake, fire and vandalism have done their work since. Restoration has been a joint project with the Historic Charleston Foundation, and the church keeps an online directory of gravestones and monuments.

One modern thing is easy to miss: a blue line painted at the edge of the yard, marking projected storm surge for a hurricane the size of Hugo now and in 2050 and 2100. The ground here is about 10.9 feet above sea level, one of the higher points on the peninsula, and that is the church's point: a surge of five feet in this yard would flood several public housing blocks.

Robert Mills, and the church that burned

By 1802 there was a waiting list for pews. Martha Laurens Ramsay proposed a circular building, and Robert Mills drew the plans. Mills was born in Charleston in 1781, so he was in his early twenties when he drew it, three decades before he won the competition for the Washington Monument. It is one of the first substantial buildings with his name on it.

What he built, finished in 1806, was 88 feet across with seven doors and 26 windows, and it was said to hold 2,000 people. The church calls it the first major domed building in North America, and a visitor in 1818 called it "the most extraordinary building in the United States." It had no steeple until 1838, which produced a Charleston rhyme about a pious town that built a church on Meeting Street "but could not raise the steeple." The congregation answered it that year with a spire 182 feet tall.

On December 11, 1861 a fire started near the Cooper River and burned diagonally across the city overnight, leaving the brick walls of Mills's church standing and nothing else. The ruin then stayed where it was, a roofless circle on Meeting Street, for a quarter of a century while a broke congregation worshipped in borrowed rooms. The 1886 earthquake made the walls a hazard, and in January 1888 the congregation began pulling them down.

Building started again in 1890 and the present sanctuary was dedicated in 1892, designed by Stephenson and Greene of New York in a Richardsonian Romanesque unlike anything else in old Charleston. A local builder, Henry Oliver, faced the new walls with brick salvaged from the 1806 church. The plan inside is a Greek cross and the outline outside is rounded, closer to a cloverleaf than a circle; the name stuck anyway. The sanctuary seats 350 under an 1890 Hutchings tracker organ moved here from Boston in 1987.

The Greek Revival building beside it is the parish house, known as Lance Hall, and it carries the heavier designation. It is credited to Robert Mills too, and the South Carolina Encyclopedia dates it to 1806. The church went on the National Register on November 7, 1973 under reference 73001683, and the parish house was named a National Historic Landmark the same day. It is not a museum; it holds the nursery, the church school rooms and the congregation's hall.

Slavery, Plymouth Congregational, and the church today

Between 1820 and 1860 this was a large and wealthy congregation that counted two state governors and the editor of the Courier among its members. It also counted a great many enslaved people. The earliest records include African American baptisms alongside white ones, and the South Carolina Encyclopedia notes that Black communicants, enslaved and free, were often the majority. Almost none of their names left the building.

In 1867, with the church in ruins, the Black members withdrew and organized Plymouth Congregational Church, though some African Americans stayed on at Circular. The congregation that rebuilt in 1890 was much smaller and poorer than the one that had filled Mills's building.

Today it is a United Church of Christ congregation, having joined the Congregational Association in 1882 and stayed with it through the UCC's formation in 1957. It was also part of the United Presbyterian Church from 1968, though it no longer holds dual membership. It took a public position for church integration in the 1960s, declared itself Open and Affirming in 1999, became a UCC Just Peace church in 2018 and an Accessible to All church in 2023. If you expected a conservative Lowcountry church, this is not one.

What visiting actually looks like

The churchyard is the visit. It is small, flat and enclosed, and fifteen minutes covers it unless you read every stone. The church's only published statement on access is that visitors are welcome to explore the grounds and the historic graveyard: no charge, no guide, no posted hours. The markers are thin slate and several are broken, so do not lean on them or take rubbings.

Getting into the building is a different matter, and you should not count on it. This is a functioning church with weddings, memorial services and rehearsals in the diary, and nothing on its site promises weekday access to the sanctuary. The reliable ways in are Sunday worship at 11:00 a.m., with communion on the first Sunday of the month; Jazz Vespers at 6:00 p.m. on second Sundays; and Piccolo Spoleto, which fills the sanctuary and Lance Hall with concerts from late May into early June, most of it free with donations welcome. Check circularchurch.org or call 843-577-6400 first.

The graveyard turns up on evening ghost-tour routes and on lists of haunted places in Charleston. Take that for what it is worth. The church publishes nothing about ghosts, and nothing in the record supports a haunting here. What the guides have is an unlit 330-year-old burial ground behind an iron fence: atmosphere rather than evidence.

Is it worth it?

For fifteen free minutes on a Meeting Street walk, yes. The 18th-century slate carving in this yard is better than anything else you can see in Charleston without paying, and the Simonds vault, the Peronneau portraits and the Hutson-Peronneau tomb are within thirty feet of each other. It belongs on any list of free things to do in Charleston.

Skip it if you were hoping to tour a historic church interior. There is no tour, no ticket and no reliable access to the sanctuary outside services; travelers who want to walk into a church and look up should go to St. Michael's at Meeting and Broad or St. Philip's on Church Street instead. Skip it too if you have restless children; this is a small yard with nothing to touch. If the building is what you want, come at eleven on a Sunday.

Getting there and what's nearby

The church is at 150 Meeting Street, beside the corner of Cumberland Street and one block south of the Meeting Street end of the City Market. The Cumberland Street garage is a few steps away at $1 per 20 minutes, free until noon on Sunday mornings for churchgoers, as is the surface lot behind the Synovus bank on the Meeting and Cumberland corner until 1:00 p.m.

The Gibbes Museum of Art is more or less across the street at 135 Meeting. Fifteen minutes further north up Meeting is the Charleston Museum at number 360, where the Lowcountry galleries fill in what the graveyard leaves unexplained. St. Philip's is two blocks east at 142 Church Street with burial grounds on both sides, so the two churchyards together make a decent hour. For the rest of the peninsula, see the Charleston attractions index and our guide to things to do in Charleston.