492 King Street

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The structure at 492 King Street (ca. 1888) is located on the corner of King Street and Mary Street. Notably, the building looks over the site where Reverend John Bailey Adger first met his future wife, Elizabeth Keith Shrewsbury. The meeting took place in the Spring of 1831, when Reverend J. B. Adger, then in the second year of his studies at Princeton Theological Seminary, returned to Charleston for a month of Spring Break. As described in My Life and Times:

I was returning from a prayer-meeting with my mother [Sarah Elizabeth Ellison Adger] and sister Margaret [Milligan Adger Smythe]. At the corner of Mary and King streets my sister observed the above named young lady, with whom she had recently become very intimately acquainted, on the other side of King street, engaged in the duty of tract distribution. She called to her to come over. It required some little urging to get her consent, but she came.

My sister said to me, "Now you shall see blushes," and I saw them. I was introduced to her, and with me it was love at first sight. My sister persuaded her to go up home with us to take tea, and then accompany us to another religious service. I walked with the blooming stranger, and my first impressions were deepened. I visited her several times, and every Sunday took pains to slip into the infant school-room, where she taught some fifty little pupils. I stood at the door behind her back, and was charmed with her methods of interesting and instructing those little ones.

My sister very soon charged me with being fascinated. I told her I certainly was, "and now," said I, "as you sympathize strongly with me in being attracted to a foreign missionary life, you must see if, when I return to the Seminary, you cannot interest your friend's mind in the same subject, and, as you are occasionally exchanging notes with one another, you must sometimes send me one of her notes for my inspection." The following spring I returned again to Charleston, and after two or three interviews with the lady who on my previous visit had so deeply interested me, my mind was made up, that she was the one I wished to marry. But I did not then immediately propose to her.

The fact that Elizabeth Keith Shrewsbury was distributing her religious tracts in Charleston, where literacy was forbidden to nearly half the population, must have created some real tensions. Attempting to reconcile religious conviction to an immoral social system must have been enough to send anyone to Armenia.
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Philip Simmons and Pearl Fryar Garden

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The Philip Simmons and Pearl Fryar Garden is located at the rear of St. John's Reformed Episcopal Church (ca. 1850)

"This project represents an artistic collaboration between Charleston's master blacksmith, Philip Simmons, and Pearl Fryar, a self-taught topiary artist from Bishopville, South Carolina."

We do not think that Reverend John Bailey Adger, who organized the construction of the building, was an avid gardener. In My Life and Times he does mention the garden of his aunt, Agnes Adger Law. A wealthy woman who held seven human beings in chattel slavery in 1860, she funded the building of "Law Hall" at the Presbyterian Seminary in Columbia, South Carolina. The seminary was built on the grounds of the Ainsley Hall mansion, known today the Robert Mills House in honor of its architect. (Ainsley Hall was a family connection of Reverend J. B. Adger's sister-in-law Margaret Hall Moffett, the wife of William Adger)

Agnes Adger Law wandered the streets of Columbia the night that Sherman's troops burned it to the ground, and Reverend J. B. Adger noted that:

"Where my aunt passed the next day and night she could not herself tell, and it was only on the second or the third day that some friends found her wandering through her old ruined garden, and she was, by them, removed to rooms in the Seminary building, which had been vacated."

Left destitute, she died shortly thereafter.

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St. John's Reformed Episopal Church

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At the encouragement of Reverend John Bailey Adger, the Charleston Presbytery built the church that today serves its congregation at 93 Anson Street as St. John's Reformed Episcopal Church (ca. 1850). Reverend J. B. Adger had served as a Presbyterian missionary to Armenia until his wife, Elizabeth Keith Shrewsbury, received slaves in an inheritance. The Presbyterians did not allow slaveowners to serve as missionaries, and the Adgers never returned to Armenia. Instead Reverend J. B. Adger decided to establish a church to serve the slaves of Charleston. His project met with mixed reviews from Charleston's white population. The slaves of Charleston were not consulted.

The church was dedicated on Sunday, May 26, 1850. As Reverend J. B. Adger notes in My Life and Times, "the congregation that assembled to take part in the dedication of the house to the worship of God by negroes, was composed exclusively of white people." It is not clear what non-white people thought of this arrangement.

In 1850, six people were held in slavery by the Reverend J. B. Adger while he served as minister of the church.

The church was located just two doors down from the house occupied by Major William Jacint Laval and his wife Sarah Caroline Ward. In the best Charleston tradition, the neighbors were also cousins. Doubly so, in fact. Reverend J. B. Adger was the son of Major Laval's aunt Ann Jacks' stepdaughter's nephew, and he was also the brother-in-law of Sarah Caroline Ward's cousin's son-in-law.

Small world.