Charleston — Historic Peninsula
Old Exchange and Provost Dungeon
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
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Transcript
The Old Exchange stands close to the historic waterfront because Charleston’s power began with trade. Completed in the late eighteenth century, the building served commercial and governmental functions and later acquired revolutionary associations through its use under British occupation.
The surrounding area was also connected directly to slave trading. Before Charleston required many slave auctions to move indoors in 1856, public sales took place in spaces around the commercial core, including areas near the Exchange.
Charleston was one of British North America’s major ports of entry for enslaved Africans. South Carolina’s plantation economy — especially rice — depended on enslaved labor, including agricultural knowledge brought by West Africans familiar with rice cultivation.
The basement spaces interpreted as the Provost Dungeon recall British imprisonment during the Revolution, though the building’s layered history is more complex than one dramatic label.
This is a good place to establish Charleston’s basic equation: port geography plus plantation commodities plus coerced labor produced extraordinary wealth.
The Exchange’s masonry feels permanent. The commercial system it served changed radically through revolution, abolition and modernization. Buildings often survive precisely because their original economic purpose does not. That makes them evidence — not endorsements.