This Glimpse contains one of my favorite father/son memories — the baseball lodging in our gate while tossing with my son when he was young. Besides being able to catch baseballs, a very cool thing about the gate is that it was designed for us by Philip Simmons, the famed Charleston blacksmith. Even cooler, the gate was built on The National Mall in Washington, DC in 2001 at the Smithsonian Institutions’ American Folklife Festival. Even cooler, each decorative scroll was wrought by a different student of the School of the Building Arts (now the American College of the Building Arts). And to make it that much more cool, the ornament on top of the gate was added by Mr. Simmons at the very end, because he “wanted my wife to have a diamond.”
While it may be a modest gate, its story is as good as any in Charleston!