History
from Charleston County Public Library : South Carolina History & Genealogy
Charleston Multimedia Project : Guidebook : Radcliffeborough : Calhoun Street
This Greek Revival, two story brick house on a high brick basement was built after 1834 by Frederick Shaffer, a prosperous building contractor. The house is reminiscent of houses in Beaufort, having a T-shaped plan with a central hall and a columned piazza across the front. It has unusually fine plasterwork and Greek Revival wood work in the interior. The house remained in Shaffer’s family until 1885, when it was purchased by Isaac Bardin, a prosperous cotton merchant. During the ownership of the Bardin family, the house was connected with the unsolved slaying of Thomas Pinckney Jr., a young attorney, in 1899. Pinckney was found across the street in the graveyard of Bethel Methodist Church, having been shot twice in the back, and died two days later without naming his killer. He was said to have been visiting a Miss Bardin on the night of the shooting. Closed hearings were held, no charges were filed, and details of the case were never made public.
from The Buildings of Charleston - A Guide to the City’s Architecture
by Jonathan H. Poston for Historic Charleston Foundation
The Shaffer House survives as one of the great suburban villas that lined Boundary Street, later called Calhoun Street. This section of the former Wragg lands, today considered part of Radcliffeborough, devolved to the wealthy planter Joseph Manigault in the early-nineteenth century. Frederick Shaffer, a rising house carpenter or building contractor, purchased this lot as well as several others in this area from Manigault over a nine-year period. Shaffer apparently constructed this Greek Revival style house with his own craftsmen. The building holds many similarities with some of the other suburban houses built with their faces to front the street in the plantation style, such as the Robert Martin House at 16 Charlotte Street. A balustraded wood staircase serves as an approach to the raised double-tiered piazza and five bay facade with a rectilinear, Gothic Style central architrave. Brick side wings and a rear addition add exceptional size to this dwelling. The rear dependency surviving at 63 Pitt Street once housed eighteen slaves who served the Shaffer household. The front coping surmounted by a wooden fence and the hatched front gates comprise unique survivals of the typical nineteenth-century enclosure of such a suburban property.
Shaffer’s estate sold the residence in 1885 to Isaac Barden. During this occupancy the house became infamous due to the 1899 murder of Thomas J. Pinckney Jr., a prominent young Charleston attorney who was found shot twice in the back following a call at the house. The younger members of the Barden family were associated with the crime, but after closed hearings no charges were ever brought in the case.