David Lopez, Jr.

The builder of some of the city’s great structures

Here lived David Lopez, Jr. (1809–1884), a contractor who built many imposing buildings in Charleston, including the new Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim (1840), Farmers and Exchange Bank, 141 East Bay Street (1853), South Carolina Institute Hall (1854; burned in 1861), and Zion Presbyterian Church (1859), as well as residential tenements. Like other builders of the era, he employed slaves, not only as laborers but also as skilled craftsmen. Some of the workers belonged to him, and some he hired from other slave holders.

David Lopez was the son of Priscilla Moses Lopez and David Lopez, Sr., who died when young David was just two, bequeathing him “My Negro Boy Named Mathew (the Child of Nancy) and also two Union Bank Shares….” David Jr. was married twice, in 1832 to Catherine Dobyns Hinton (1814–1843) and in 1846 to Rebecca Moïse (1814–1858).

David Lopez’s religious views offer us a puzzle. Initially in favor of an organ in the synagogue, he soon changed his mind, siding with the Orthodox members who left KKBE (ironically, the building he had constructed). Then there is this: his first wife was not Jewish. When she was not allowed to be buried in the Coming Street Cemetery, he bought a small piece of land where she could be interred adjacent to Shearit Israel’s burial ground, on the north side of KKBE’s cemetery. Her funeral monument is one of the grandest in the cemetery.

David Lopez, Jr. (1809–1884), 1938

Lopez gravesites

Lopez resignation from KKBE

Zion Presbyterian Church