Ruins of the Pinckney Mansion

Miss Harriet Pinckney's mansion did not stand a chance.

The Great Fire of December 11, 1861 began in a shed behind a window-sash factory east of East Bay, near the foot of Hasell Street. Directly across the way, at East Bay and Market, stood the house Charles and Eliza Pinckney had built in 1746. With a high wind driving the fire west off the Cooper River, the place was alight almost at once.

Emma Holmes, twenty-three, mourned it in her diary a few days later:

It swept all the upper part of Hasell and many small streets near, down East Bay where Miss Harriet Pinckney's splendid mansion, once the palace of Royal Governors & for long successive years the residence of her forefathers, was destroyed. Just one year ago, I went with my mother to see her on the 17th, her 85th birthday and my 22nd, but principally to see the interior of the house, which was hung with tapestry, in antique style.

The two birthdays are the thing. Emma Holmes and Harriet Pinckney shared December 17, and a year to the month before the fire the younger woman had gone to see the older one — chiefly, she admits, to get a look inside the house. She saw the tapestries just in time.

The mansion was never rebuilt. Barnard photographed the ruins in the spring of 1865 and included the view in Photographic Views of Sherman's Campaign as Plate 59.