Eastside History Series: The East Side (Hampstead) in 1872

Available at the Library of Congress

By Susan Millar Williams

This map, aptly titled A Bird’s Eye View of the City of Charleston, is like having a window on the neighborhood in the 1870s.

Hampstead Mall is at the center, cut into quarters by walkways though not yet by streets. The railroad runs along the Cooper River, just as it does now. Cooper Street marks the northern edge of the city as well as of the neighborhood, which is bordered by fields and marshlands.

The lot now occupied by the Cigar Factory has several houses on it—houses that were torn down to make way for the factory in the early 1880s. The space now occupied by the Palmer Campus was also filled with houses.

Notice the towered building in the spot where Fraser Elementary now stands. This structure was built as a cotton factory, but by the time this map was drawn, it was being used as the City Almshouse.

Eason Iron is visible at the corner of Nassau and Columbus, complete with a cloud of vapor rising from its smokestack.

The large columned building at Amherst and Bay is the Faber-Ward House, now home to a number of businesses and organizations including the South Carolina office of the American Civil Liberties Union. The pond behind it is long gone except during floods, when that intersection is one of the first places in the city to fill with water. The open area along Hanover Street, near Amherst and Reid, was then the German cemetery.

You can see the railroad station on Line Street as well as other buildings that serviced the railroads, which employed many neighborhood residents and dominated the late nineteenth-century landscape. 

I always feel in looking at this map that if I zoom in close enough, I might be able to peer into windows and see people going about their business. Notice the tiny horses on Meeting Street in the top right corner of this detail.