St. Michael's Church (at the Four Corners of the Law, junction of Broad and Meeting Streets) is Charleston's most famous religious edifice, with a tradition of worship on the site dating from 1670.  Constructed between 1752 and 1761,  the present building is not attributed to any one architect, but the contractor and one of the original commissioners was Samuel Cardy, who emigrated from Dublin to Charleston between 1747 and 1752.  

Cardy, who is also credited with the design of the original Morris Island Lighthouse, may have drawn up the original plan for the building and certainly was involved in the execution of the work. He is also associated with the construction of the colonial statehouse, now the Historic Courthouse.

One of Cardy's fellow-commissioners was the Irish-born Andrew Rutledge (d. 1755), who became Speaker of South Carolina's Commons House of Assembly and was father of John and Edward Rutledge.  John Rutledge is buried in the graveyard alongside, as is Mary Middleton Butler, wife of Sir Pierce Butler who was a member of the church vestry.

The architecture of the church is traditional in the simple spirit of the Book of Common Prayer. The clock tower, probably the oldest functioning in the United States, has works and bells imported from England in 1764 and restored in 1993. The chancel, decorated by Tiffany in 1905, has a rail from 1772.

The organ, made by John Snetzler of London in 1768, had its case refurbished in 1994 by the Irish master-craftsman Kenneth Jones of Bray, Co. Wicklow, who also installed a new state-of-the-art 40-stop 51-rank tracker mechanism.  

St. Philip's Episcopal Parish was the first to be organized in the new colonial settlement of Charleston, when a congregation met from the early 1680s onwards in a building at the corner of Meeting and Broad, site of the present St. Michael's. Hurricane damage caused a move to the present site in 1710, when the rector was the Mayo-born Rev. Gideon Johnston, husband of Henrietta Dering Johnston (c. 1674-1729), a self-trained artist whose formative years were spent in Ireland.

A brick church was built here about 1723. It burned to the ground in 1835 and the present structure, designed by architect Joseph Hyde, was completed in 1838. A steeple was added in 1850.  

Buried in the churchyard are the Irish-born Andrew Rutledge (d. 1755), Speaker of the colonial Commons House of Assembly; his brother Dr. John Rutledge (d. 1750); John's son Edward Rutledge, a signer of the Declaration of Independence; and John Caldwell Calhoun (1782-1850), Vice President of the United States, in an elaborate tomb erected by the State Legislature in 1880.