Fireproof Building

How to Get There

From Charleston (0 mi): Travel through downtown Charleston to Meeting Street, continue to Washington Square near Broad Street, and arrive at the Fireproof Building at 100 Meeting Street.

Overview

The Fireproof Building, also known as the County Records Building, is located at the northwest corner of Washington Square, in Charleston. Completed in 1827, it was the most fire-resistant building in America at the time, and is believed to be the oldest fire-resistant building in America today.

After an extensive renovation, the building reopened in 2018 as the South Carolina Historical Society Museum.

Description and history

The Fireproof Building is a two-story masonry structure, set on a tall stone basement with an arcade of round-arch openings and built out brick that has been stuccoed to resemble stone. The building is in the Greek Revival style, with Doric porticoes north and south, and achieves a sophisticated appearance with clean and crisp lines, and relatively little ornamentation. Inside, the building has an oval stair hall lit by a cupola. The stone stairs are cantilevered through three stories.

The building was built to house the office and records of Charleston County. The contractor, John G. Spidle, built it in 1827 to the design of Robert Mills, the nation's first domestically-trained architect and an early advocate of fire-resistant buildings. The Fireproof Building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1969, and declared a National Historic Landmark in 1973.

The building is currently the home of the South Carolina Historical Society. In the summer of 2018 the Historical Society reopened the building as a museum dedicated to the history of South Carolina and to the history of the Fireproof Building itself.

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "Fireproof Building", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0