The Williams Mansion

The Williams Mansion at sixteen Meeting Street is an Italianate manor house that rises above its neighbors with a scale and architectural ambition unmatched in the city. Built between eighteen seventy-five and eighteen seventy-six for the businessman George Walton Williams, the twenty-four-thousand-square-foot structure was conceived as a Southern counterpart to the grand estates of Northern industrialists. Its exterior profile is defined by its massive footprint and intricate Victorian-era details, which announced the arrival of the Gilded Age in post-Civil War Charleston.