Eastside History Series: Rope Walk - North Side of Line Street from Meeting to Aiken

by Susan Millar Williams, Ph. D.  

Charleston has always been a busy port, and in the nineteenth century shipping required rope—lots of rope. During the nineteenth century, the Hampstead neighborhood manufactured rope, probably at first using a low-tech method that required workers to lay out strands of tarred hemp and twist the fibers together while walking through a long covered space and later employing some machinery to speed up and standardize the process.

Most rope walks looked a lot like the covered bridges you see in old prints of the New England countryside, if several were strung together end to end. They were essentially long, skinny sheds that allowed cables to be fabricated in standard lengths without the need for splicing.
  

The Hampstead rope walk ran along the north side of Line Street for two and a half blocks. This map, published in the Charleston News and Courier on September 11, 1884, designates it as the “old” rope walk, so it may have ceased operating by then.

Sadly, there is nothing left of the old Hampstead Rope Walk, but we can imagine what working there might have been like. Nineteenth century rope making was, by all accounts, a hard, dirty business. 

For more information

• This website explains the process of making rope in more detail and describes one of the few existing historic ropewalks, located in Charlestown, Massachusetts.
• This one features historic photographs of the Massachusetts rope walk, which is being redeveloped as apartments, with a small museum.