Vendue Range, and a Claim About It

A plank causeway crosses standing water in the foreground and runs up into a street of shuttered houses, with a heavy pedimented portico standing open at the right. The Library of Congress carries the street as 'Vandree Range' — the spelling of somebody writing down what he heard — and adds a claim: the building on the left is where the first secession meeting was held.

The street is Vendue Range, and two other views of it are published in this collection: vendue is an old word for a sale by auction, and the Range was a short commercial run from East Bay to the Cooper River wharves. The secession-meeting claim is the repository's and is reproduced as theirs; the delegates who passed the Ordinance of Secession did so at St. Andrew's Hall and signed it that evening at Institute Hall, both on Meeting Street, and nothing consulted here connects the first secession meeting to this block.