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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