Why did the workhouse in Charleston become a symbol of Southern inhumanity during the 1800's?
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these streets could talk, imagine what they would say.” That is especially true in the case of what used to be The Sugar House on what is now the corner of Logan and Magazine Streets near Fielding’s Home for Funerals, The Robert Mills Housing Projects, and The Old City Jail Building. It is rare that person who walks by there today knows that this was once a slave torture chamber during the days of slavery where slave masters once sent enslaved people for disobedience.
According to the Charleston News and Courier of December 27, 1931, “Before the American Revolution, there was on this ground a Sugar House for the manufacturing of loaf sugar. About 1775, this was converted into a Work House. Slaves were sent to the Sugar House for punishment, and advertisements for runaway slaves ask that they be returned to the Work House.” Elijah Green, an elderly ex-slave interviewed by a black Charlestonian named Augustus Ladson in 1937 recalled, “The Work House (Sugar House) was on Magazine Street, built by Mr. Columbus C. Trumbone.” Henry Brown, another local former slave interviewed by Mr. Ladson, remembered, “No slave was supposed to be whipped in Charleston except at the Sugar House. There was a jail for whites, but if a slave ran away and got there he could disown his master and the state wouldn’t let him take you.”