Charleston native Bernard R. Fielding Jr. was shocked when he saw the gutted interior of a three-story 18th century building that looms on Logan Street that once housed his family’s business, the Fielding Home for Funerals.
The ceilings and walls were stripped away to expose the interior bricks and hand-sawed pine beams that are silent reminders of the craftsmen who built 122 Logan St. with tools and skills from a bygone era.
Fielding’s grandfather, Julius Fielding, purchased the 1790s-era building in 1928 to use for the business and as a family residence. The building had been a dance hall, among other things, in the city’s red-light district, according to a report prepared by BVL Historic Preservation Research.
“Ever since I can remember, I’ve been around there doing things” from digging graves, driving limousines and comforting the mourners, said the 56-year-old Fielding. “Being born into the family business, you don’t have any choice,” he said with a laugh.
Now the stuccoed building has been reduced “to the bones,” Fielding said. “Seeing how the joints are held together and seeing where the fireplaces were is almost like the graceful lady has revealed her secrets,” he said, noting how he can now see the cracks in brick walls from the city’s devastating 1886 earthquake.
David Ellis, a superintendent for Willis Hagood Construction, is waiting for a city permit to start the reconstruction of the building for its new owner, the Charleston Day School. The independent school opened in 1937, and it moved to its current location on Archdale Street in 1986 near the funeral home. The school bought the building in 2023 for slightly more than $10 million.
Its restoration began in February, said Ellis, who said the company hopes to finish the work in 2027. The school plans to use the building for administrative offices and a variety of student functions, said Jon Meredith, head of school.
The recent pause in the restoration recently gave master craftsman David Hoffman of Charleston a chance to see and touch the workmanship of those artisans from a bygone age who he reveres. Hoffman has been preserving the city’s historic architecture since 1979.
This old building
The interior bricks throughout the building are a full range of colors from light red to dark brown due to how close they were to the wood burning in a kiln, Hoffman said. “The closer to the fire, the darker the brick. Before the Civil War, this is how all bricks were made,” he said. “The industrial revolution changed it.”
Hoffman and Ellis talked about how the Lowcountry’s “rising damp” wicking out of wet soil has been the enemy to the mortar that holds bricks together. It took skilled mason years to perfect a reliable mortar-mixing technique, Hoffman said. “Charleston masons were at the top of their game,” he boasted.
Ellis and Hoffman pointed to changes in windows, fireplaces and mantels as evidence of ongoing repairs or new building techniques from the 1800s into the 20th century.
“This building probably started out without stucco,” Hoffman said. “Most of the stuccoed buildings in the city came about either stylistically or because of the earthquake” to hide cracks in the walls, he said. Steel earthquake rods were installed across the building just below the roof line. The exterior “pattress plates” are visible at the end of the rods.
Many of the tools used to construct the building, such as a two-man pit saw, still exist, but they are seldom used, said Hoffman, who has an extensive collection of antique hand tools. “This was a building that was handmade with all local materials with skills that are almost never practiced in the 21st century,” he said.
Ellis said it is difficult to find skilled bricklayers, plasterers, carpenters and roofers in Charleston who work on historic buildings.
“It is hard to find good skilled help, and when we do find the good guys, we do our best to hang onto them. The good guys are busy, and they are not cheap,” he said.
The same applies to finding and keeping experienced craftsmen who can teach the next generation of masons, said Christina Rae Butler, provost of the American College of the Building Arts in Charleston. The four-year masonry degree at the college was discontinued about four years ago because of the difficulty in finding teachers, she said.
“There is so much work and so few masons that it was hard to find any that had time or willingness to teach,” she said. “I am sure they’re out there,” she said. A local bricklayers union also does training, she added.
Oral history project
Charleston Day’s Meredith said the school is planning an oral history project to capture “the way this building and the Fielding Home for Funerals was part of the culture of Charleston, specifically the African American community in Charleston.”
The school is also planning a curriculum that would use the oral histories “to make sure that Charleston Day School students know the impact this building and this family had on Charleston,” he explained.
The Fielding family also influenced local politics. Fielding’s father, Bernard Fielding, in November 1990, became the first Black person elected as a probate judge in Charleston County. In 1970, Fielding’s uncle, Herbert U. Fielding, became the first of three Black peoples elected to the South Carolina General Assembly since Reconstruction.
The Fielding family tells its story in The Fielding Home for Funerals Project, a one-hour documentary on YouTube.
Bernard Fielding Jr. said the school’s oral history project “is a great idea especially, if it is going to be part of the curriculum that the students can learn from it. It has been a bittersweet thing to sell the building and to dissolve the corporation,” he said. “We are just glad it is going to live on in a capacity that can still serve the community.”
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