Eastside History Series: "Don’t Blame the Weather" by Katharine Purcell, Ph.D.

Enough Pie’s Wave of Hope installation
 in front of St. Julian Devine Community Center.

Want to know whether you need to pack the car or the johnboat to travel to campus? American College of the Building Arts professor Christina Butler advises you to take a look at this map and if any of the streets on your route had a former life as a tidal creek, then bring a paddle.

Speaking at Enough Pie’s  "Awakening V: King Tide,"   Butler told an audience at the Cigar Factory on Thursday, May 11, 2017 that Charleston’s flooding woes are due just as much to early colonial building practices as they are to current climate change. And in spite of all of the repairs and new drainage projects, things will only get worse.

The problem? Eighteenth-century settlers found very little desirable real-estate on the peninsula, so they quickly set out to make their own. Anything that could not be repurposed was tossed into creeks and marshland. That meant that streets and building sites were created atop animal carcasses, vegetable material, human and construction waste, and even the corpses of British and Hessian soldiers! All of the land east of East Bay Street and north of Market Street rests on this great garbage dump, including the Hampstead area where Palmer now stands. Needless to say, in those days, ships arriving to the city could smell it before they could see it.

And who was responsible for hauling and spreading the debris? Butler says that enslaved West Africans did much of the work. This onerous task was ongoing, as each tide pulled the fill into the harbor--so much so, that dumping regulations were soon put into place so that shipping lanes would not be blocked.

West African sweat and labor built much of the land in Charleston, and West African ingenuity was used to keep it in place. Early drainage engineering first employed on the peninsula was based on the trunk systems used in rice cultivation, and by the 1850s, brick and mortar versions were buried beneath the city streets. In fact, we are still depending upon those nineteenth-century tunnels to keep our feet dry.

Unfortunately, those tunnels and the more recent pump projects are still resting on an unstable 300-year-old garbage dump. Add to that, the booming construction business on the peninsula and the rising global tides might make us all wish we were sporting gills.