Ruins of the Cathedral

The marble steps in the foreground once led up to 91 Queen Street, a substantial wooden house. The view looks south across Queen near its corner with Friend Street. The steps now lead nowhere at all, which is the whole subject of the photograph — Barnard framed a set of front steps with no front door behind them.

To the left stand the ruins of the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist and St. Finbar, on Friend Street. The fire broke out on the evening of 11 December 1861 at the foot of Hasell Street near East Bay — the Mercury put it at Russell & Co.'s sash and blind factory, though others thought it was already burning in Cameron & Co.'s machine shops across the street. Driven by a hard northeast wind, it cut a diagonal swath southwest across the whole peninsula and did not stop until it reached the Ashley River below Tradd Street. It burned some 540 acres and more than a thousand buildings in a single night.

This ground was near the southern end of the burn. The fire had crossed most of the peninsula by the time it reached here, and it was running out of city to consume; a few blocks further and it met the Ashley.

More than three years separate the fire from this exposure. Barnard was in Charleston in the spring of 1865, and the ruins were still standing open — carpenters and bricklayers were in the army, and the Federal bombardment that began in August 1863 stopped what rebuilding had been attempted. The burnt district was not a fresh disaster when the photographers arrived. It was a three-year-old wound that no one had been able to dress.