East Side History Series: Made Ground

The Dump, Charleston City Yearbook, 1936.

by Susan Millar Williams

As many avid bottle hunters know, the present-day East Side neighborhood rests on the trash of yesteryear. During the early 1880s, the streets that surround our campus—America, Drake, Blake, and Nassau—were being used as a landfill for the city, with garbage carts arriving daily to dump their contents in the roadways. In 1880, both America and Nassau Streets were extended 300 feet north of Cooper Street, creating new sections of the neighborhood.  Bay Street (now East Bay) was extended northward, “which, according to the News and Courier, brought the neighborhood “about thirty minutes nearer the business portion of the city.”

The immediate effects were unpleasant. Hampstead residents complained in 1880 that the “putridinous matter” being deposited in the area smelled sickening. Foul odors, called “miasmas,” were then thought to cause disease, including the deadly yellow fever. City authorities retorted that the garbage was “well covered with sand.” Cinders from the railroad were also used as fill.

When the new cotton factory was under construction in the early 1880s, the creation of “made ground” moved into the marsh, where four acres were filled in four months.  The “vast waste” of the marshlands was soon being colonized by railroad spurs, wharfs, “monster depots,” warehouses, a freight depot, a hoisting engine and an automatic system for moving coal and other supplies.

“Made ground” has serious drawbacks—it is far less stable than soils that build up gradually through geological forces, and it can be extremely hazardous when buildings shift during an earthquake. This tendency was well-documented even before a devastating quake struck Charleston in August, 1886.  Yet thousands of cartloads of debris generated by the disaster were brought to the East Side and used as fill. Before the incinerator was built on Drake Street in 1936, the city disposed of garbage in the dump pictured above, which was on the outskirts of the neighborhood.