Charleston, SC news and local guide

The Cusabo, including the Kiawah, and the Ittiwan lived in the area before the colonists came. Charles II granted Carolina to eight Lords Proprietors on March 24, 1663. In 1670 Governor William Sayle brought settlers from Bermuda and Barbados, who founded Charles Town at Albemarle Point on the west bank of the Ashley River. It was the first comprehensively planned town in the Thirteen Colonies, following the Grand Model drawn up for the Proprietors by John Locke, but it was never incorporated in colonial times. The settlers declared war on the Cusabo in October 1671, allied with the Westo, who traded in enslaved Native people, and then switched sides in 1679. A second settlement on Oyster Point, where the Ashley and Cooper rivers meet, begun around 1672, replaced the first in 1680. The original site is now Charles Towne Landing. With its fine harbor, the town was the fifth largest in North America by 1690.

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Disaster struck repeatedly. Smallpox broke out in 1698, an earthquake in February 1699 set off a fire that burned about a third of the town, and yellow fever killed about 15 percent of the survivors. There were five to eight serious yellow fever outbreaks in the first half of the 18th century, and malaria was endemic until the 1950s. The town was fortified under a 1704 plan, as Spain and France contested Britain's claim. A hurricane on September 5 and 6, 1713, flooded much of the town and killed at least seventy people. Weak and corrupt government made Charles Town a haven for pirates, and in May 1718 Blackbeard blockaded it for several days. Sources Wikipedia: Charleston, South Carolina