Things to do nearOld Exchange and Provost Dungeon

Built between 1767 and 1771 by British colonial authorities, the Old Exchange and Provost Dungeon served simultaneously as a customs house, a public exchange for merchants, and a place of detention. Its lower level, the Provost Dungeon, held prisoners during the American Revolution, including several signers of the Declaration of Independence who were captured when British forces occupied Charleston in 1780. That occupation lasted nearly two and a half years, and the dungeon's thick walls absorbed much of its suffering. Before the current structure was built, the site held the Half-Moon Battery, a fortification dating to the late seventeenth century, and remnants of that earlier construction are still visible beneath the floor.

In the decades after American independence, the building hosted George Washington during his 1791 Southern tour, a visit commemorated in the building's interpretive exhibits. Today the Old Exchange and Provost Dungeon operates as a museum staffed by costumed interpreters who guide visitors through the exchange hall and down into the dimly lit basement, where mannequins and original stonework bring the prison's grim history into focus.

The exhibits balance the mercantile ambitions of colonial Charleston with the city's darker histories, including the role the exchange played in the transatlantic slave trade. The building's architecture, a Palladian design attributed to the firm of William Rigby Naylor, remains one of the finest examples of Georgian public architecture in the American South. For anyone serious about understanding how Charleston and the young nation were shaped, this landmark offers a depth and specificity that few historic sites can match.