The Charleston Archive at the Charleston County Public Library houses a number of photographs, prints, and other images relating to Charleston. These materials can be grouped into the following categories:
- Photographs from the City of Charleston: A collection of several hundred images representing a variety of city officials, public buildings and grounds, and civic events from the 1930s to the 1980s.
- Cooper River Bridge Photographs: A collection of approximately 600 images of the construction of the first Cooper River Bridge in Charleston, 1928-1929. NEW: View these images at the Lowcountry Digital Archive.
- Charles N. Bayless Photographs: A collection of approximately 1,750 images of buildings in downtown Charleston, taken between 1979 and 1988 as part of a photographic project funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. NEW: View these images at the Lowcountry Digital Archive.
- Photographic Passbook from the South Carolina Interstate and West Indian Exposition: A collection of approximately 1,250 small photographic portraits of person who purchased season passes to the South Carolina Interstate and West Indian Exposition that was held in Charleston in 1901-1902.
- Clippings from Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Newspapers: Approximately one hundred printed illustrations taken from mid- to late-nineteenth-century publications such as Harper’s Weekly Magazine, Harper’s Monthly Magazine, and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.
NOTE: ACCESS TO THESE IMAGES IS BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.
If you have any questions regarding the scope or content of these collections, please use the form below to contact the Charleston Archive staff.
If you would like to obtain reproductions of any of the visual materials contained in CCPL’s Charleston Archive, or to request permission to publish such images, please consult our REQUEST FOR REPRODUCTION AND USE OF IMAGES (a PDF file).
