I’m Evan, and I run Staying in History with my wife, Shannon. This whole thing started with a room in Charleston that was hit by a cannonball.
It was December 2018. Shannon and I had been dating a week, though we’d been talking since early summer. Wisconsin winters have a way of making any warm city sound like a worthwhile destination, so we picked Charleston, South Carolina, mostly because neither of us had ever been. A quick Google search for something central (and available last-minute) turned up a small inn on Broad Street with excellent reviews, and we booked it without doing much more thinking than that.
We arrived at the John Rutledge House Inn, tired from the previous 17 hours in the car, expecting little more than a bed and home base for the next four days. At check-in the concierge mentioned, almost as a matter of course, that the room we’d been given had taken cannon fire during the Civil War. Then he reached under the desk and pulled out an old black and white photograph, and pointed to the exact spot on the wall where the ball had come through. He told us about it the way people tell stories about places they actually love. Not a tourist presentation but a thing he knew the way you know something about the place you call home.
We carried that feeling with us the rest of the trip. Charleston asks you to hold a lot at once, cobblestone streets and church bells and the harbor, alongside a history that includes real cruelty in the same blocks we were wandering through with coffee in hand. We spent our days walking all of it. We spent our nights back in that small house on Broad Street. Neither of us said the word out loud yet, but by the second night I already knew we’d be back.
That whole next year, Charleston kept finding its way into our conversations. One of us would bring up a memory from that trip and we’d be transported right back. It felt less like an “if” and more like a “when” we would return. But we never debated where. The John Rutledge House Inn was the only hotel either of us would have named out loud.
So there we were. 2019. New Year’s Eve. Back in Charleston. Back at the John Rutledge House. This time I was carrying a ring. On the second floor balcony, with the whole city quiet below us, I worked up the courage and asked Shannon to marry me. She said yes. We celebrated with pours of port and sherry in the lobby, still a little stunned and beyond happy.
By then that inn wasn’t just a place we’d stayed twice. It had become the place, the one that would come up whenever either of us pictured places that mattered. So when we started planning our wedding, the courtyard at the John Rutledge House Inn was at the top of our list. We picked a date a year after the proposal, exactly two years after that first accidental trip to Charleston. We planned it small, just the people who mattered most to us, brought together to the one place that already felt like it belonged to our relationship.
Then 2020 happened, and small and intimate stopped being a choice anyone got to make. The wedding we’d pictured in that courtyard, the one where we’d get to share our favorite place with our favorite people, didn’t happen.
What we could still do was go back to Charleston for our honeymoon. So that December we did, staying in the same room, except this time we were married, and this time some small piece of our own history was folding itself into a building that had already survived two and a half centuries of other people’s.
Someday we’ll bring our daughter onto that same balcony. I picture telling her this is where I asked her mom to marry me. And knowing that balcony was there before us and it’ll be there after, and someday it’ll be as much hers as it is ours if she so desires.
Buildings hold on to what happens inside them if the people who own them care enough to let them, and that’s most of why Shannon and I built this site, to help other travelers find a place worth adding their own chapter to.