St. Philip's Church

Two facts about this church get swapped constantly, so take them in order. St. Philip's has the oldest congregation in Charleston, founded in 1680. It does not have the oldest church building. That is St. Michael's at Broad and Meeting, built between 1752 and 1761. The church standing on Church Street today went up between 1835 and 1838, and its steeple came a dozen years after that.

The mix-up is understandable, because the two parishes were once one. The first St. Philip's, a small frame building of about 1681, stood at the corner of Broad and Meeting on the exact ground St. Michael's occupies now. When the Commons House of Assembly split Charleston into two parishes in 1751, St. Michael's was built on the old site and St. Philip's kept the Church Street ground it had moved to decades earlier.

Three buildings on two sites

The congregation traces itself to a land gift of 1680 from Originall and Millicent Jackson, and the frame church that followed was the first Anglican church founded south of Virginia. A hurricane damaged it, the parish outgrew it, and in 1710 work started on a much larger brick church on the present Church Street site. It took thirteen years and held its first services on Easter Day 1723. Part of the money came from colonial duties on rum, brandy and enslaved Africans.

That second building is the one Edmund Burke praised in 1777 as exceeding everything of its kind in America. It nearly burned in the great fire of 1796, saved by an enslaved Black boatman who tore the burning shingles off the roof and was freed as a reward. It burned to the ground on the night of February 15, 1835.

The vestry wanted an exact copy. Their architect, Joseph Hyde, talked them out of it, and the interior he built swapped the old heavy Tuscan columns for lighter Corinthian ones after St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London. The congregation was worshipping in the new church by 1838.

One argument from that rebuild is still visible from the street. The city wanted to widen Church Street and take the porticoes and tower to do it. The vestry replied that a fine steeple was more ornamental than a mere street, and won a compromise: the church was shifted slightly east, and Church Street now bends around the tower that juts into it. Stand at Queen Street and look north and you can see the road giving way.

The steeple, and the light in it

Edward Brickell White, who also designed the French Huguenot Church, drew the steeple, and it was built between 1848 and 1850 in the Wren and Gibbs tradition. It also worked for a living.

In 1893 the federal Lighthouse Board approached the vestry and got permission to put a light in the steeple for a rent of $300 a year. Gas pipes were run from the city mains to a burner in a reflector 140 feet up. That light was the rear marker of the Fort Sumter Range; the front marker was on Fort Sumter itself, and a ship lining the two up was in the main channel. It ran until July 1915, when a new front light made it redundant, and the South Carolina Encyclopedia records a brief revival in 1921.

The Civil War had already put the steeple to a different use. St. Philip's gave its chime of bells to the Confederate government in 1861 to be cast into cannon, and during the Federal bombardment of the city Union gunners used the steeple to sight on. Shells hit the church ten times, piercing the roof and wrecking the chancel and the organ. The steeple itself came through.

So did the 1886 earthquake, which damaged the building badly, and a lightning fire in the 1920s, after which Simons and Lapham extended the chancel by 23 and a half feet. They built the extension above the graves it stood on rather than move them. St. Philip's was listed on the National Register and designated a National Historic Landmark on November 7, 1973. Most recently the steeple spent much of 2025 inside scaffolding for the parish's Shine the Light restoration, which repaired stucco and ironwork and re-gilded the cross in 24-karat gold leaf.

The two graveyards

This is what makes St. Philip's worth walking to rather than looking at. The parish buries on both sides of Church Street, and the two yards were never interchangeable.

The eastern yard wraps around the church itself, behind a fence and gates of 1826. The western yard, opposite, was set aside in 1768 for the burial of "strangers and transient white persons," and it has been called the Strangers' Graveyard ever since. Its wrought iron gates went up around 1770 and, along with those at the Miles Brewton House, are thought to be the only pre-Revolutionary iron gates left in Charleston.

Guides shorten this to natives on the east side, non-natives on the west. That is roughly the effect but not the rule. The 1768 designation turned on being a stranger or a transient rather than on birthplace, and church members were buried in the western yard freely in later years, so a grave on the west side proves nothing by itself.

The most famous occupant fits the old pattern anyway. John C. Calhoun, born in Abbeville District, died in Washington on March 31, 1850 and was laid in what was meant to be a temporary vault in the western yard on April 26. During the Civil War, with a Union occupation expected and his remains an obvious target, he was quietly moved across the street and reburied in an unmarked grave in the eastern yard. He was brought back afterwards, and the heavy sarcophagus you see now dates from the 1880s.

Edward Rutledge, born in Charleston in 1749 and one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, is here. So is DuBose Heyward, who died in 1940 and whose 1925 novel Porgy became the Gershwin opera; he was also the first writer-in-residence at the Dock Street Theatre across the road. The yards also hold Rawlins Lowndes, president of South Carolina in 1778 and 1779, Colonel William Rhett, the pirate-hunter who took Stede Bonnet, the historian Edward McCrady, several colonial governors and five Episcopal bishops. Christopher Gadsden, the patriot who gave his name to the flag, is said to lie in an unmarked grave here at his own request.

The Sue Howard Hardy photograph

One grave in the western yard is why ghost tours stop here. Sue Howard Hardy delivered a stillborn child on June 10, 1888 and died six days later; mother and baby were buried together. On June 10, 1987, ninety-nine years to the day, an amateur photographer named Harry Reynolds shot a few frames through the bars of the locked gate while testing a camera. One came back showing a shawled figure bent over the Hardy grave.

The claim that Kodak examined the negative and found no tampering travels with the story everywhere and cannot be traced to any source. The date is the part that holds up. We tell it properly, with what the record supports and what it does not, in our Charleston ghost stories guide and among the haunted places in Charleston. If you would rather hear it standing at the gate after dark, most evening ghost tours come down Church Street.

Visiting today

A lot of guides imply more than exists here. There is no ticket desk, no visitor center and no published opening time for the sanctuary. The official site, stpchurch.org, has pages for worship, directions and giving, and none for tours.

The dependable way in is a service. The 8:15 a.m. Sunday Eucharist is said, without music. The 10:30 a.m. principal service has the choir, and alternates between Holy Eucharist on the first, third and fifth Sundays of the month and Morning Prayer on the second and fourth. Choral Evensong is at 4 p.m. on most second Sundays from October through May and is the best of them if you are there for the room rather than the sermon. Parking is free in the church lot and the city garage while a service is on.

For one week each spring the parish has traditionally run a Tea Room in the parish house and courtyard, serving okra soup and Huguenot torte, with the sanctuary open for prayer and docents in the narthex answering questions. That is the one week a year the church routinely opens itself to strangers, and it is not running in 2026, cancelled because of the Shine the Light construction.

The graveyards are free and visible through their railings at any hour, but they close without notice, because burials still happen here. If a gate is open, walk in quietly and stay on the paths. If it is locked, the western yard reads well enough from the sidewalk, which is where Reynolds was standing in 1987.

Is it worth it?

Yes, for anyone already walking the French Quarter, which is nearly everyone. It costs nothing, takes fifteen minutes, and the graveyards give you Calhoun, a signer of the Declaration and the author of Porgy within a couple of minutes of each other. The bend in Church Street and the porticoes are worth the stop on their own.

No, if you want an interior. There is no guarantee you will get inside and no interpretation if you do. Travelers who want to sit in a great Charleston church and be told about it should go to St. Michael's, which keeps church and churchyard open on set weekday mornings, or buy a walking tour with graveyard access.

Skip it entirely if you are picturing a cemetery you can wander at length. Both yards are small, the paths are short, and the gate may be shut when you arrive.

Getting there and what's nearby

St. Philip's is on Church Street between Cumberland and Queen, one block east of Meeting and two west of East Bay. Church Street is one way on this block, so the church tells drivers to navigate to 79 Cumberland Street instead, which puts you at the parish lot and the city garage together.

The Dock Street Theatre is directly opposite at 135 Church, free to walk into on weekdays from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. when nothing is being rehearsed. Philadelphia Alley opens off Queen Street a few doors east, and the Powder Magazine of 1713 is at 79 Cumberland beside the garage. Our French Quarter guide links them into one loop of about an hour, and the Charleston attractions index has the rest of the peninsula.