Who was trading, and where

The business directory

Charleston in 1852, trade by trade and street by street, out of the city directory itself.

6,8051852 entries
5,147with an address
4,2481861 houses
80streets on the map
132trades indexed

The businesses, A to Z

Every entry, alphabetically by surname, as the directory of 1852 prints it. Pick a letter:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

What this is

1852. Directory of the City of Charleston, for the Year 1852 — Charleston: Published by J. H. Bagget, 1852. Names, occupation, place of business and residence of the inhabitants generally. The scanned book. It gives an occupation, a place of business and a residence for each inhabitant.

1861. Census of the City of Charleston, South Carolina, for the Year 1861 — Prepared under the authority of the City Council by Frederick A. Ford. Charleston, 1861. Number, owner and occupant of every house on every street. No occupations are given. The scanned book. 4,248 houses are transcribed, of which 169 have an occupant that is plainly a business rather than a person. It is a property register, not a directory: it says who was at a number, not what they did there.

1854. The Southern Business Directory and General Commercial Advertiser was examined and not used. Its Charleston pages are description and display advertisements, not a structured trade list — good for a particular advertisement, no use in bulk.

Read by machine, and it shows. About eight entries in ten now parse cleanly and about one in twenty-five takes the wrong address off the line. Every entry is published with its source line beside it. (Twenty-four 1852 records drawn at random from those with a business address and checked by eye against the directory's own line. 19 of 24 were fully correct; 1 took the wrong address. A rule-based check over the whole set — does an occupation contain a house number, is an address out of order — passes 86% of records.) Nothing is corrected silently: the source line is printed under every entry in small type.

Street, never building. Charleston renumbered its streets between 1882 and 1886 and again afterwards, so an 1852 number cannot be turned into a modern address. The map below places each street, not each shopfront — the same rule the photographers' studios are held to.

Where the trade was

Each circle is a street, sized by how many businesses the directory puts on it. The point is the middle of the street within the built-up city; it is not where any one business stood.

Trades

Occupations as the directory prints them, where five or more people share one. The rest keep their occupation on their entry but have no page of their own.

Streets