Ruth Spills the Truth

Ruth Miller and I

Ruth spilled the truth about historic Charleston.

I had the opportunity to hear from one of Charleston's experts on the historic churches and graveyards.

Ruth Miller came to Charleston with a background in world history and world geography, before coming to Charleston she was a school teacher, she worked with a touring company in Charleston, and she has been involved with Charleston history for over 40 years.

She has written many books on Charleston history and graveyards, which can be found here.

Miller said, "Winners write history books." By this she meant that when someone wins a war, they will write the history in favor of themselves. They want to make themselves look good. After the Civil War many of the American history books changed.

In many history classes, we learned that the great colonial cities were Boston for the dumping of the tea, New York for being the richest and largest city and Philadelphia where the founding fathers met in the third city. However, not a whole lot is mentioned about Charleston.


Prior to the Civil War, in 1776 Charleston's population was as big as Boston, had more money than New York and was the richest city in colonial America. This is what would have been read in every history book before 1860. This all changed in 1865 when the North won the Civil War.

Ruth Miller and Patrick Harwood talk
about the symbols in the tomb stone.

According to Miller, the peninsula of Charleston has more 18th century graveyards than any other city in America. If you were to go to Boston or Philadelphia you would find graves of two different religions, whereas, in Charleston you would 12 18th century graveyards each of a different religion.

With more religions comes more people and more graveyards and graves making Charleston the largest colonel city in America.

Each graveyard can tell us a lot. They can tell us about history of the people in the area and the plants that were planted. Back then, they planted plants that would survive on their own, they did not plant new plants every year, they would regrow.

They would mark a grave with plants such as, cedar trees, evergreens and daffodils and as Charleston expanded form the peninsula, many of the plants they planted to mark the graves were found in pine forests.

By findings these they were able to find graveyards that had been long lost and long forgotten, however, the plants still remand.

"What you don't see can be just as important as what you do," Miller said. She said this because there is always something to find that will spill some truth about history. Even today they are still finding old graveyards that have been forgotten.

This is one of Ruth Miller's books.

With the 12 church graveyards, no African or African American graves would be found. In Charleston by 1710 there was a black majority, but by looking at the marked graveyards you would never know. Many of the long forgotten graveyards would most likely be the graves of the blacks.

Miller said, "The white people write the history and it was very easy to erase black history." All of the plantations in Charleston had slaves, however, all of the slave headquarters were removed, there were no black graveyards, and therefore no history of blacks in the south.

This is interesting because today Charleston embraces the history without trying to rewrite it.

Thanks to my Beyond the Grave professor, Patrick Harwood, I was able to hear from Ruth Miller which was such a great experience and I was able to learn many things I did not know before.

 This post is full of information I learned from Ruth Miller's talk.