An opening in the bottom floor of an 1850s home in Charleston, SC! What is this used for?

A questioner asked:
An opening in the bottom floor of an 1850s home in Charleston, SC! What is this used for?

Some of the answers were:

1. Probably just an way to access your crawlspace, there’s usually plumbing, wiring and potentially ductwork that periodically may need maintenance -I agree. Sometimes the simplest answer is the correct one.
2. This is it. My house in Virginia, built in 1949, had this access as well.
3. Can confirm. Grew up in a farm house build in the early 1800s. My dad and I found access panels like this in the kitchen and bathroom, both of which opened up to water pipe connections with in line shutoffs.
4. Also in older houses sometimes this would be used for cooling drinks. An old house we once had, had a little box with beer in it. Kept them quite chilled.
5. It could also be to cover up a floor register from an old central heat system.My grandmother lives in a house built in about 1890 that was fitted with central heating in the 1940s that has absolutely massive floor vents
6. definitely crawlspace access. new wood framing. if it’s an old house and it got remodelled they probably put it in to get to plumbing and electrical easier. I’ve worked in Charleston for years, we put these in all the time, the houses sink and the exterior access gets blocked or it’s a long crawl from the wall.
7. Agree you can see outline of it around the hole. That black is where the lip of the grate sat.Also the screws and 2×4’s look newer and the flooring on the cover doesn’t match the original floor.
8. 3 story home built in the 1850s near downtown Charleston has a ~2×3′ opening on the bottom floor. The crawl space underneath is around 3 feet deep and spans almost the full area of the home.
9. Probably cold storage for vegetables and canned foods. If it was built in 1850 it’s unlikely that it had indoor plumbing that would make it necessary to access pipes. It would sometimes become necessary to add additional support to walls and floors, commonly done by shoring up whatever needed support from the crawlspace.
10. I was an insulator for a year and had to insulate crawl spaces which meant going in them. They were all usually 1.5 to 4 feet deep with full coverage of the house, most likely just access to anything under the house. If you ever decide to go in there I’d say just watch out for bugs, spiders like living down there.