The Charleston Library Society has received a $4,850 grant from the South Carolina State Historical Records Advisory Board (SC SHRAB) to process and re-house its manuscript collections. The Society has also pledged a match of $3,826 to support this project.

Established in 1748, the Charleston Library Society is the South's oldest cultural institution and the third oldest library in the United States. For more than 250 years it has collected, preserved, and made available cultural materials for the use of its members and researchers from around the world. Today, it is a circulating library and a repository of rare books, periodicals, manuscripts, clippings, maps, directories, almanacs, and visual materials.

Grant funds will be used to purchase acid-free folders and boxes and to process their manuscript collections. The Society’s nationally significant manuscript collections include letters from George Washington, Nathaniel Greene, Francis Marion, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, John and Edward Rutledge, and Alexander Hamilton. The Society is also a repository for important 19th and 20th century South Carolina documents.

Unprocessed materials in the manuscript collections relate specifically to the history and culture of 19th and 20th century Charleston, a treasure trove for historians and researchers. Items include DuBose Heyward’s original manuscript of Porgy, the log of the Confederate raider CSS Shenandoah, and the travel journals of the Ravenel family. Many of these materials are housed in files and boxes that are not acid-free, making their preservation especially critical.

This project is one of seventeen funded by the SC SHRAB for 2008. In addition to grant funding for historical records projects, the SC SHRAB, whose members are appointed by the Governor, serves as the central advisory board for historical records planning in the state. The board also encourages the state’s local governments and non-government repositories in their efforts to identify, preserve and provide access to South Carolina’s historical records. Staff support is provided to the board by the SC Department of Archives and History.

Grant funds are provided to the SC SHRAB by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the grant-making branch of the National Archives (http://www.archives.gov/nhprc/), and are re-granted by the board on a competitive basis to South Carolina local governments, institutions and organizations.

For more information on the Charleston Library Society project, please contact Eric Emerson at (843) 723-9912 or eemerson@charlestonlibrarysociety.org. For more information on the South Carolina State Historical Records Advisory Board, re-grants, and other resources available, please visit http://www.state.sc.us/scdah/shrab/shrab1.htm.

The Charleston Library Society is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a $25,000 grant from the Post and Courier Foundation.

This grant will assist the Charleston Library Society in its efforts to raise money for the replacement of the HVAC system in its main library building.

This unit was replaced following Hurricane Hugo in 1987 and is critical to maintaining conditions for patrons and the organization's circulating collections housed in the building.

The first, handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence is iconically familiar to Americans, but that's not the way most citizens read its inspiring words in 1776.

At the instruction of the Continental Congress, copies were sent out from Philadelphia to be publicly read and printed in the newspapers of the day. In this state, the first appearance of the Declaration was in The South Carolina and American General Gazette of Charleston.

Only one copy of that newspaper for Aug. 2-14, 1776 is known to exist. It was unveiled this week at the Charleston Library Society, at 162 King St., where it will be on public display through November.

The four-page broadsheet is set in narrow columns and close type, and the Declaration was printed on page 2. The issue also carried notices of slave sales and escaped slaves that contrast sharply with the Declaration's stated rights of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

As historian David Moltke-Hansen said in his introductory comments at the unveiling, the Declaration contained ideals "that Charleston would not embrace for generations." Neither would the rest of the nation.

Ironically, the Gazette was owned by a loyalist, Robert Wells, who ultimately was forced to leave the state. As Dr. Moltke-Hansen noted, the new nation's victory over Britain actually meant "the curtailment of his rights and his eventual exile."

The newspaper was purchased for $140,000 at auction by The Post and Courier Foundation in 2000 so it could be brought back to Charleston.

Its return to the Library Society is especially appropriate, since it had been surreptitiously removed from the Society's original files of the Gazette, probably in the late 19th century.

The newspaper will be kept in a climate-controlled vault, but for the rest of the month, it can be viewed by the public in the Society's main reading room.

The Gazette may have been a modest medium to introduce the Declaration to South Carolina, but the events that soon followed in this state, and elsewhere, showed the power of its ideas, and of the printed word.

The South Carolina and American General Gazette from Aug. 2-14, 1776, was acquired at auction by The Post and Courier Foundation. It is on permanent loan to the library society.

The paper carried news in Charleston of the Declaration's public proclamation and printed its entire contents. It was the only paper in the state to publish the full text of the historic document.

The society plans to display the original paper to the public for about the next two weeks at its 193 King St. headquarters, said Eric Emerson, executive director. After that, the four-page broadsheet will be stored in a vault to protect it from light damage, he said.

The original and a high-quality color copy will be made available to researchers, Emerson said. The original could be brought out for future public displays, but the society has no plans to do so right now, he said.

The South Carolina and American General Gazette was published by Robert Wells and was one of three papers of the period printed in Charleston. It has no connection to The Post and Courier, which dates from the Charleston Courier, first published in 1803.

The Gazette's journey back to the Holy City began in 2000, when a Virginia rare-newspaper dealer and appraiser put it on the auction block at Christie's in New York. Word of the paper's existence and sale reached the offices of The Post and Courier Foundation, a separate, nonprofit corporation established by the newspaper.

After some legal claims about the Gazette's ownership, the foundation took possession of the document in 2001, after bidding $140,000 for it at auction in 2000.

The unveiling Wednesday included a presentation on Wells by David Moltke-Hansen. The event also was meant as a nod of gratitude to The Post and Courier Foundation, "for rescuing and returning" the paper to Charleston, the society said.