Allan Safe

“So, how much does that thing weigh?” is typically the first question I’m asked when someone first sets eyes on the rather foreboding iron safe standing in its own corner within The Charleston Museum’s main storage room. Unfortunately, I still don’t know for sure, but based on similar, late nineteenth century pieces of the same size and material, it’s probably in range of three tons.

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By the time Charleston’s famed James Allan Jewelry Company closed its doors in 1960, the store had liquidated most of its retail inventory to its loyal paying customers. In fact, in the Museum’s archives there is a series of photographs taken during Allan’s “going-out-of-business” sale, some showing an impressively crowded sidewalk outside the old storefront at 285 King Street. One particular personal favorite depicts dozens of would-be bargain hunters scrunched shoulder-to-shoulder inside the store’s main showroom all looking for a last-minute swift deal on the myriad ceramics, silverwares, timepieces, and eyewear the Allan family had traditionally kept in stock for most of the company’s 105 years.

However, what about all the other stuff those workaday shoppers were clearly not interested in or perhaps never thought to ask about? Things like account books, hand tools, machinery, and, of course, the monumental combination-lock safe that James Allan himself had ordered from New York’s Herring & Farrel Company back before the turn of the twentieth century? Fortunately (in this instance anyway), The Charleston Museum was more than happy to lend a hand by accessioning many of those items into its permanent collection.

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Besides its considerable weight, the safe measures over seven feet tall and five and one-half feet wide. Moreover, its six-inch-thick solid iron walls and doors render it not at all what anyone would consider “portable.” Thus, to exhibit Allan’s safe – or even move it more than a few feet – would require some serious machinery. In fact, before the present museum building could even be completed in the early 1980s, James Allan’s safe had to make its move from the old museum on Rutledge Avenue well before the rest of the collection. Using a crane, crews hoisted the behemoth into a then uninstalled window facing John Street, then slowly wheeled it to its current resting place. Only after the Allan safe and a few other massive items (including the Atlantic Right Whale that still graces the Museum lobby) were relocated from the old address to the new could the final closing in of the museum’s walls be completed.

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Now, just because we don’t display James Allan’s largest (and undoubtedly heaviest) possession, it certainly doesn’t mean it has gone to waste. The history department, in fact, still today employs the safe as a secure (and quite reliable) storage vault for The Charleston Museum’s extensive jewelry collection much the same way Allan did all those years ago. Indeed the locks still work beautifully as does the dial – the combination of which I won’t be divulging here.

Of course, more recent acquisitions have, over time, brought in not only some of James Allan’s fine jewelry and silver, but some of his documents, shop tools, and equipment as well. Pullers, pliers, dies, and even his anvil showed up here a few years ago. Sure it’s heavy, but at least we don’t need a crane to move it.

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