Clerk of Council Records, 1890-1975

Are you curious about the evolution of Charleston municipal operations in the 20th century? Historical records from the Department of the Clerk of Council from circa 1890 to 1975 are now available to be researched! The Department of the Clerk of Council is responsible for documenting, recording, and interpreting the history of the City of Charleston. The Department consists of the Offices of the Clerk of Council and the Records Management Division (that's us!).

These records are among the City's records of permanent retention and have recently been rehoused in acid-free folders and processed for research use. This collection includes records about the boards, commissions, and committees of the City Council, covering the legislative decisions of Charleston during a time of immense change as well as providing a peek into the past.

Topics found in this collection include the creation of the then municipal Charleston airport, segregation, desegregation, annexations of surrounding areas into Charleston, the discussion of proposed ordinances, the development of city government into what it is today, and more.

Note: materials and subjects in this collection may overlap with other items at the Records Center. Please contact us if you are interested in researching with us or have any questions.

View the finding aid here. Keep reading to learn more about the process.

Over several weeks, I spent time mulling over 12 boxes of records that had been inactive for years and needed to be processed as archival collections. The boxes were beginning to sag in some places, and adhesive had long since released its grip on labels, leaving either no labels or layers of barely-hanging-on labels revealing an archaeological look into municipal frugality and supply reuse. The papers themselves were not faring much better; many began to fall apart in my hands, and some old fax papers were so thin they were nearly transparent. Much patience and love would be needed to deal with the project.

I started with taking inventory- what was in these boxes? I quickly learned that there was not much structure to the boxes. The folders were loosely organized by year, but that wouldn't help us nor researchers understand what was in this collection, so we decided it would be better to organize everything by subject or by the standing committee that created the file. I then got to work making piles of everything that went together and the years in which they belonged. This was the longest part of the process, organizing and ordering the delicate papers, trying to make sense of the thousands of sheets that seemed to multiply with each box. But in the end, order was brought to the chaos.

Every piece of paper was a jigsaw puzzle resulting in 312 folders. The archival task of processing (bringing intellectual control and order to collections) answered many questions about the history of the department and those who served as the City's Clerks of Council, yet it also uncovered more questions and potential for research. It is this collection and its mysteries that inspired this blog and my deeper dive into the tenures of early Clerks of Council of the City of Charleston. Stay tuned for more!