Old Exchange building stands at the foot of Broad Street

The British colony of South Carolina finished this public building in 1771, making it the last one Britain put up in what became the United States before the Revolution. In 1917, the United States Congress deeded the property to the South Carolina State Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, to hold in trust for the Rebecca Motte Chapter.

Below the street sits a vaulted brick cellar called the Provost Dungeon. This space incorporates part of the Half Moon Battery, a section of the wall that fortified the town in the early 1700s against Spanish ships, French ships, pirates, and Native nations. Decades before the Exchange was built on top of the battery, Stede Bonnet and the pirates captured by Colonel William Rhett in 1718 were held in the prison here before their trial.

During the Revolutionary War, the British turned the cellar into a military prison. After Charleston fell to the British in 1780, a South Carolina militia officer named Isaac Hayne crossed into British lines to get medicine for his family, who had smallpox. The British forced him to swear allegiance to the Crown to avoid imprisonment. In summer 1781, Hayne rejoined the militia as the British pulled back toward the city. Loyalist militia captured him in July, and the British brought him to this building before hanging him in Charleston on 4 August 1781.

Upstairs in the Great Hall, local merchants gathered on 3 November 1774 and emptied a second cargo of tea into the Cooper River. The state convention met in the same room on 23 May 1788, making South Carolina the eighth state to ratify the United States Constitution. When President George Washington spent a week in Charleston in 1791, the city held his ball in that upper hall.