East Side History Series: Hampstead

The Original Plat of Hampstead Village, by Henry Laurens

by Susan Millar Williams

The neighborhood we now know as the East Side was born in 1769 as Hampstead Village, a suburb of Charleston located outside the city lines, which ended at Calhoun Street (then known as Boundary Street). Hampstead was made up of three adjoining parcels purchased by Henry Laurens, a partner in one of the largest slave trading companies in the American colonies.

Like many of today’s residential subdivisions, and like many English villages, Hampstead was designed to include public space in the form of a large square or “mall.” The center of this planned neighborhood was on a slight swell of higher ground then known as Hampstead Hill, close enough to the Cooper River to afford charming water views and refreshing sea breezes. Laurens laid out 140 lots on his 99 acres. He sold only 68 of them in the first two years, 38 of those to his business partner William Bampfield. This peaceful, picturesque planned community might have built up quickly if it hadn’t soon become a war zone. In 1780, during the Revolutionary War, British troops attacked Charleston from the north, and Hampstead became a staging ground for battle.

The area, then known as “the Neck,” eventually established its own government, collected taxes, elected a mayor who served with no salary, and maintained a police department. In 1849, the City of Charleston expanded its boundaries to Mount Pleasant Street, incorporating Hampstead. Many residents opposed the change, suspecting that the city would tax them more and impose unwelcome rules. But the population grew exponentially in the 1850s and 1860s, especially during the Civil War, when people frightened by the Union bombardment and burned out by the fire of 1861 moved uptown. Real estate was less expensive in Hampstead, and it was legal to build wooden houses there. (In the lower wards, the city required houses to be built of brick or stone to reduce the danger of fire.)  After the war, large numbers of African Americans moved into the area.    

Columbus and America Streets did not originally cut through Hampstead Park—traffic had to skirt around the edges of the square until 1905, when the company that owned the cigar factory petitioned the city to make Columbus a “modern thoroughfare”—a direct route from the railroad station at the foot of Columbus Street to Meeting and King. On April 18, 1905, the News and Courier observed that “countless children” had “played, fought, and screamed beneath the shade” of the large trees in the park, thousands of pedestrians had sheltered beneath their branches, and “many tramps” had “sat themselves down near the trees and meditated and smoked.” But the newspaper felt it was safe to say that never before had the trees attracted more attention than when they were threatened with removal. The trees lost the battle, of course—those in the path of the new pavement were cut down.

Despite years of searching for an answer, I still don’t know when America Street was extended through the center of the park, cutting it into quarters. If you know, please tell me! 

For more on the Village of Hampstead, see Between the Tracks: Charleston’s East Side During the Nineteenth Century    http://lcdl.library.cofc.edu/lcdl/catalog/lcdl:53539

For another version of Laurens’s plat and a brief account of how the American Revolution affected Hampstead: https://follynot.org/lot-and-neighborhood/