Assistants among the Ruins

Three of George Barnard’s assistants pose here among the ruins of the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist and St. Finbar. The huge sanctuary had a nave of 54 feet high and 25 feet- wide side aisles. Towering overhead is the cathedral’s 200-foot-tall tower. On her twenty-third birthday, Dec. 17, 1861 (six days after the fire) Emma Holmes toured the Burnt District and found beauty even in the cathedral’s ruins. “Everything is so transformed by the work of a single night,” she wrote in her diary, “that it seems as if we were carried centuries back and stood among the ruins of some ancient city.”

This is the caption as printed in 100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Charleston in the War. It has not yet been through this site’s research and fact-checking pass.