Coming Street Cemetery, Charleston South Carolina

Date added: October 11, 2024

Categories:
South Carolina
Cemetery

Overview of Cemetery from Southwest Corner (1995)

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The Coming Street Cemetery, established in 1762, is privately owned by Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim ("Holy Congregation of the House of God"), a congregation whose synagogue is a fine Greek Revival structure erected in 1840, the second oldest synagogue extant in the country and the oldest in continuous use. This cemetery, which is located on Coming Street about ten blocks north of the Beth Elohim synagogue at 90 Hasell Street, is significant as the oldest Jewish burial ground in the South; for its association with the history of Beth Elohim, a congregation established in 1749 and the birthplace of Reform Judaism in America in 1824; as the chief cemetery for Charleston's significant Jewish community since the colonial era; and for its fine examples of late-eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century gravestone art.

Congregation Beth Elohim acquired this site in 1764 from Isaac DaCosta, a founder of the congregation who had laid out this site in 1754 as a private cemetery; the oldest extant gravestone in the Coming Street Cemetery is that of DaCosta's friend Moses Cohen (1709-1762), the first rabbi of Beth Elohim. Jewish pioneers began to settle in Charleston soon after the establishment of the Carolina colony in 1670, and many Sephardic Jews were attracted to South Carolina by its promise of religious freedom and toleration. Within the first hundred years, certainly by the time of the American Revolution, Charleston boasted a large and influential Jewish community, one which included "more Jews … than in any other city in North America" by 1800.

The Coming Street Cemetery includes portions of other historic Jewish cemeteries as well, particularly private family cemeteries, such as the Lopez Family Cemetery, including the grave of Catherine Lopez, who was not permitted burial in the main cemetery because she had not converted to Judaism, laid out adjacent to the main cemetery and later incorporated into it. One section of the cemetery is at a slightly higher ground level than the rest, and was originally established as a separate cemetery in the 1840s when a dispute over the propriety of installing an organ in the synagogue split the congregation into factions. The trustees of Beth Elohim, following the strict Sephardic ritual which forbids the use of music other than vocal music, denied a petition to place an organ in the synagogue; the members, meanwhile, overruled the trustees and approved the purchase of an organ by a close vote in July 1840. Forty members of Beth Elohim who had opposed the purchase and use of an organ in the synagogue withdrew from the congregation and established a new congregation which they named Shearith Israel ("the Remnant of Israel"); they also established a separate cemetery adjacent to the Coming Street Cemetery and built a wall dividing the two. Soon after the end of the Civil War, however, the two congregations, known as the "Organ Congregation" and the "Remnants," respectively, were reunited in the Beth Elohim congregation, the wall was torn down, and the newer cemetery was incorporated into the older main cemetery. Remains of the dividing wall are still extant.

By 1887, after over a hundred years of burials in the Coming Street Cemetery, Beth Elohim established a new cemetery on Huguenin Avenue, on Charleston Neck between the city and North Charleston. Burials in the Coming Street Cemetery are now restricted to those few vacancies in historic family plots.

Site Description

Coming Street Cemetery, established in 1762, is an approximately one-acre site at 189 Coming Street, between Morris and Cannon Streets in downtown Charleston, South Carolina.

A perimeter stuccoed brick wall, part of it original, is an important feature of the site and has been a major factor in keeping the cemetery intact for over two hundred years. The cemetery itself contains some six hundred marble and brownstone gravestones, most dating from the last half of the eighteenth century (the first burial dates from 1762) or the first half of the nineteenth century. It includes many box tombs, table-top tombs, obelisks, and columns, several of them fine examples of late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century gravestone art, and many signed by such prominent local sculptors and stonecutters as A.F. Chevreaux, M. Gannon, G. Rennie, D.A. Walker, Edward R. White, and William T. White. Many gravestones feature Hebrew inscriptions and/or Jewish religious motifs.

A few of the many significant examples of gravestone art in the Coming Street Cemetery include the graves of Joshua Lazarus (1796-1861, president of Beth Elohim 1850-1861 and president of the Charleston Gas Light Company 1848-1856), featuring a fluted column on a pulvinated pedestal, surmounted by an urn; Marx E. Cohen, Jr. (1839-1865, a Confederate soldier killed in March 1865, near the end of the Civil War), an obelisk featuring bas-relief crossed flags (the South Carolina state flag and Confederate battle flag) above the inscription and a bas-relief cannon below; Catherine Lopez (1814-1843, wife of David Lopez, who built the Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim Synagogue in 1840), a box tomb in a Gothic Revival enclosure described by one authority as a "stone canopy," featuring a pointed arch with spandrel ornamented with quatrefoiled and traceried fretwork and a pointed arch iron railing; and Jacob Barrett (1848-1883), featuring a curvilinear pediment and flanking bas-relief Corinthian columns, and containing an oval tablet surmounted by a bas-relief bouquet.

The present appearance of the Coming Street Cemetery is little altered from its historic appearance, though some damage to individual gravestones and enclosures from pollution and the climate, from vandalism, or from Hurricane Hugo (1989) is more or less evident.