Southern Places
About the authors
English Purcell Hurteau
English Purcell Hurteau
English Purcell Hurteau
English Purcell Hurteau describes herself as a photographer of everything. During her last seven years at SC Ports, she was their staff photographer—her wildlife and nature photographs are on exhibit at the Port headquarters building in Mt. Pleasant and are represented in private collections. She is drawn to light and color in her photog
English Purcell Hurteau describes herself as a photographer of everything. During her last seven years at SC Ports, she was their staff photographer—her wildlife and nature photographs are on exhibit at the Port headquarters building in Mt. Pleasant and are represented in private collections. She is drawn to light and color in her photography and is not bashful about the post-production process. Her goal is to dazzle and instruct.
English has always been a tad obsessed
with history, especially Charleston and the
Lowcountry. She attended the University of South Carolina and started out as a business major. A few months in she called her mom and told her she wanted to change her major to archaeology. Her mom said that would be fine, but before doing so, wanted her to spend a summer volunteering at a dig, where she couldn’t obsessively wash her hands, take two showers a day, and would be sweaty and dirty all the time. Needless to say she kept her business major but stayed obsessed with history. She is immediate Past Chairman of the Charleston County Historic Preservation Commission, Chairman of the McClellanville Arts Council Board, Secretary of the Cape Romain Lighthouse Preservation Society,
team member of the Santee Delta Project, and was previously Secretary of the Board of Trustees of the Charleston Museum. She is also an administrator of the popular Facebook group Charleston History before 1945. In January 2025, English retired from SC Ports after 31 years.
William P. Baldwin
English Purcell Hurteau
English Purcell Hurteau
A lifelong resident of the Carolina Low
Country, William P. Baldwin is an award-winning novelist, poet, photographer, biographer, and historian. He graduated from Clemson with a BA in History and an MA in English. He ran a shrimp boat for nine
years and then built houses, but the principal occupation of his life has been writing. His works
A lifelong resident of the Carolina Low
Country, William P. Baldwin is an award-winning novelist, poet, photographer, biographer, and historian. He graduated from Clemson with a BA in History and an MA in English. He ran a shrimp boat for nine
years and then built houses, but the principal occupation of his life has been writing. His works include the popular oral histories Mrs. Whaley and Her Charleston Garden and, with Genevieve “Sister” Peterkin, Heaven is a Beautiful Place. For its depiction of Southern race relations, his first novel The Hard to Catch Mercy won the Lillian Smith Award. He wrote three more.
He collaborated with architectural photographer N. Jane Iseley on Charleston,
Charleston Impressions, Daytrips from Charleston, Plantations of the Low Country, and Low Country Plantations Today, and the recently released The Preservation of Charleston. With photographer V. Elizabeth Turk he did Mantelpieces of the Old South, a study of the HABS photographers. He edited three collections of HABS
photography: Beaufort, Sacred Places of the Low Country, and Carolina Plantation and Vennie Deas Moore’s Home: Portraits from the Carolina Coast. He wrote My Guide to a Holy City and was a contributing
essayist to Picturing the South. Most recently, CLASS Publishing brought out Carolina Rambling, a Visual and Poetical Tour, a beautiful book featuring Selden Hill’s color photography. And next also with CLASS came Frances Benjamin Johnston’s CAROLINA.
Every morning he at least attempts to write a poem and afterwards walks or kayaks in the surrounding
wilderness.