Charleston City Market

The land itself was a condition of the gift. In 1788, Revolutionary War general Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and other landowners donated a strip of recovered marshland on one condition: the city had to use it for a market, in perpetuity, or the land reverted. That agreement held. The first sheds went up around 1790; after a fire destroyed the original headhouse, architect Edward B. White's Market Hall — Greek Revival, four Doric columns, bucrania carved into the entablature as a nod to the meat trade — completed the complex. Today the vendors sell sweetgrass baskets alongside souvenirs. The market endures because the deed required it to.