The Granite Roadways of Gilded-Age Charleston

During the twilight years of the nineteenth century, radical changes to local thoroughfares helped the City of Charleston evolve from a declining seaport into a tidy modern metropolis. Uniform blocks of durable granite displaced most of the city’s lumpy cobblestone streets during the 1880s, after which the municipal government achieved mixed results with trials of several curious paving compounds.

As I described in the previous episode, Charlestonians of the immediate post-Civil War era endured poor road conditions while local officials repaired damaged pavements in numerous streets. The city maintained approximately forty miles of roadways at that time, crisscrossing the peninsula from South Battery Street northward to Mount Pleasant Street. By the end of the 1870s, just over sixteen miles of these thoroughfares were paved with some kind of material atop the native soil. Cobblestones obtained from discarded ships’ ballast accounted for at least nine of the total miles; wooden planks covered more than five miles; macadam (crushed stone) pavement improved one mile of King Street between Broad and Calhoun Streets; crushed oyster shells covered a further mile of Meeting Street, from Mary Street to the city’s northern boundary; and one short stretch of patented wooden blocks enhanced King Street between Hasell and Wentworth Streets.[1] 

Although the municipal treasury of the 1870s was too poor to pave urban roadways with more permanent materials, local officials kept track of civic improvements elsewhere and waited for better days. They embraced, for example, the advice of a recognized paving authority with a Lowcountry connection. Quincy Adams Gillmore had supervised the United States’ bombardment of rebellious Charleston during the early 1860s, but, more than a decade later, Gillmore became the chief engineer of a multi-million dollar project to create a pair of massive stone jetties that permanently improved the flow of ship traffic in and out of Charleston Harbor. In a letter to a New York journal published in 1876, and in a book on roadway engineering published the same year, Gillmore ranked the strengths and liabilities of various types of street paving then available. He narrowed the options to a pair of leading contenders, asphalt and cut stone, which he considered suitable for different types of traffic. Gillmore described “square blocks of stone” as the ideal paving “for business thoroughfares with a heavy traffic,” while asphalt pavement, which was then spreading across many Northern cities, was better suited to “avenues lined by residences and largely used as pleasure drives.” “Upon hygienic grounds,” wrote Gillmore, “asphalt stands conspicuously first, stone [blocks] second, and wood [blocks] third in order of merit.”[2]

Gillmore’s advice represented the latest word in nineteenth-century street engineering, but the materials in question were beyond the means of Charleston’s post-war economy. Bituminous asphalt was an expensive import at the time, harvested from natural deposits located far from the Lowcountry of South Carolina. Similarly, the nearest stone quarry was in Richland County, near the capital city of Columbia, and granite blocks suitable for street paving were subject to the additional expenses of skilled labor and intermodal freight. Although Charleston’s City Council funded a considerable number of street-repair projects during the late 1860s and 1870s, officials focused their efforts on the restoration of old-fashioned pavements familiar to those who remembered the city’s antebellum traditions. In 1878, however, they embraced the spirit of innovation by importing from England a fifteen-ton steam-powered rolling and crushing machine, which augmented rather than replaced older horse-drawn equipment that continued to smooth the city’s lumpy streets for another generation.[3]

Charleston’s political climate began to change in December 1879, when local voters elected William Ashmead Courtenay, the city’s first mayor to serve two consecutive four-year terms. A few weeks after taking office, Courtenay delivered a speech containing a scathing review of the street policies of his predecessors. In the fourteen years since the post-war restoration of municipal government, Charleston’s City Council had spent a total of more than $1.3 million on various street improvement projects. “What has been done with this vast sum of money,” Courtney asked, “and not a street in the city in any sort of order.” 

“The well-known Belgian pavement, in solid granite blocks, laid in the best manner, costs about $1.50 per square yard. Assuming the average of 42 feet for width of street from curb to curb, there would be in every mile of this substantial street paving, 24,640 yards, multiplied by $1.50 cost per yard, and $36,960 is the aggregate per mile. If this vast outlay since 1866, of $1,318,813.81, had been expended on this indestructible paving, we should have today thirty-eight miles of first-class streets, needing no renewal for fifty years. As it is, we are now very nearly as badly off in condition of streets as we were in 1866. Is our city to go on forever in the old routine? . . . I have recently driven over the streets on which the produce and merchandise carriage is done, and over which passengers come into the city. Their condition is simply disgraceful, and the wonder is, how the [commercial] hauling is done at all.”[4]

Under Mayor Courtenay’s leadership, the city inaugurated a new era of street paving marked by the rapid proliferation of granite block roadways. To defray the costs of this expensive campaign, City Council initiated a practice of issuing municipal bonds; that is, incurring long-term public debt to expedite the construction of much-needed infrastructure. Rather than focusing the city’s street improvement program on the traditional routes used by vehicles hauling heavy freight between the Cooper River waterfront and the several railroad depots north of Calhoun Street, as Council had done since the 1820s, Courtney ordered the immediate improvement of King Street, a retail thoroughfare described by the Charleston News and Courier in the spring of 1880 as “essentially the street of the ladies, and the most important in the city to be kept thoroughly in order, as to roadway and sidewalks, and to be thoroughly policed.”[5]

During the second half of 1880, laborers covered most of the dusty, macadam roadbed in King Street with many thousands of cube-shaped blocks of granite, extending from Broad Street northward to Line Street, though preserving the wood block pavement between Hasell and Wentworth Streets. This extensive project, incidentally, required the removal of “several hundred” wooden posts supporting numerous shops signs and fabric awnings over the sidewalks, and the disposal of more than a hundred “stone carriage steps” that had long prevented the feet of affluent ladies from touching the dirty roadway when alighting from their horse-drawn carriages. 

At the same time, city workers laid a contrasting style of pavement in Alexander Street, stretching from Calhoun Street northward to Chapel Street. Rather than cover the entire roadbed with expensive granite, city officials chose to lay a strip of stone blocks, twenty feet wide, down the center of Alexander Street, and to pave the two outer edges, abutting the sidewalks, with linear swaths of cheaper cobblestones. City workers then proceeded to lay the same sort of “combination roadway,” as it became known, in Tradd Street, east of Meeting Street, as well as Beaufain, Anson, Spring, Market, Hasell, Amherst, and other streets leading to the Cooper River waterfront.

The flurry of granite block paving in 1880 displaced a mass of cobblestones previously laid in some of the aforementioned streets. Instead of discarding these irregular stones into nearby salt marshes as landfill, the city opted to recycle them in other, previously-unimproved streets. Commencing with the spring paving season of 1881, city workers laid new ribbons of old cobblestones in Beaufain Street, Cumberland Street, George Street, the western half of Tradd Street, and used the old stones to supplant the wooden plank road in King Street between Vanderhorst and Sheppard Streets.[6]

The city’s next major paving project, initiated in 1881 and completed the following spring, replaced the lumpy cobblestones in East Bay Street with granite blocks, extending from the northern edge of the High Battery seawall up to Pinckney Street. A similar endeavor, executed in stages between 1881 and 1884, installed a continuous field of stone blocks in Meeting Street, stretching from South Bay to Calhoun Street. In 1883, workers extended the granite paving into Broad Street, from East Bay to Washington Square Park. City and county officials then collaborated to resolve long-standing complaints about the great noise of hoofbeats and carriage wheels traversing the cobblestones at the busy intersection of Broad and Meeting Streets. In front of both City Hall and the County Courthouse, workers replaced the irregular stones with a cross-shaped swath of “noiseless” wood blocks, laid amidst the perpendicular junction of several streetcar rails lines, and slathered them with a top dressing of tar and gravel.[7] 

These projects and others displaced a growing volume of cobblestones, which the city divided among several street initiatives that continued through the remainder of Mayor Courtenay’s eight-year administration. In 1882, for example, laborers commenced a multi-season project to substitute cobblestones for a rotting plank road laid in Calhoun Street shortly after the Civil War. The stones spread eastwardly from King Street to Meeting and then Elizabeth Street, and westwardly to Smith Street and then Rutledge Avenue. Meanwhile, wood-plank roadways at the watery east and west ends of Calhoun Street persisted until the turn of the twentieth century.[8] Between 1884 and 1887, workers supplanted most of the old plank road in upper King Street with a “combination roadway” of granite blocks with cobblestone wings, extending from Sheppard Street northward to Mount Pleasant Street.[9]

The powerful earthquake of 1886 did not damage the streets of Charleston to any appreciable degree, but the disaster deflated Mayor Courtney’s ambitious street paving program. In the months following the destructive quake, private citizens and local government channeled most of their resources into repair work rather than new construction.[10] City authorities finished in 1887 the ongoing northward extension of “combination” stone paving in King Street to the city boundary, but thereafter initiated few new projects. In 1886, for example, workers not employed at the upper end of King Street laid granite blocks within in the street’s retail corridor between Hasell and Wentworth Streets, replacing the patent wood blocks installed with great expectations in 1873.[11] In 1887, for the first time in a generation, the city created no new roadways using recycled cobblestones. The failing wooden blocks laid at the intersection of Meeting and Broad Streets in 1883 yielded to noisy granite blocks five years later, excepting only that part of Broad Steet directly in front of the County Courthouse.[12] 

After a decade of focus on the construction of “permanent improvements” to urban roadways, Charleston’s street department of the 1890s shifted its priorities to the creation of numerous stone sidewalks lined by granite curbing to benefit local pedestrians. Despite this change of focus, the city’s roadways reached a few notable milestones during the final years of the nineteenth century. Between 1890 and 1891, for example, workers laid a “combination” pavement in Meeting Street from Calhoun to Sheppard Street, and extended the granite in Broad Street westward to Rutledge Avenue. During the following two years, the city continued the line of granite blocks in King Street southward from Broad to Tradd Street, and then laid a combination roadway in place of the last remnants of the old plank road in upper King Street, between Line and Sheppard Streets. These parallel projects, linked by various cross streets like Broad, Calhoun, and Woolfe Streets, produced a continuous stone path traversing more than three miles, from the southern tip of the peninsula to the city’s northern boundary. Horse-drawn wagons and carts, private carriages, horseback riders, bicyclists, pedestrians, and herds of country livestock could finally traverse the entire length (and most of the breadth) of the city along a relatively smooth and durable surface, undisturbed by boggy soil, clouds of dust, rotting wood, and other nuisances associated with earlier forms of street paving.[13]

Also during the 1890s, the city’s street department devoted considerable attention to the maintenance of existing roadways and repairs to those injured by contemporary public works projects. Laborers dug channels through numerous streets to extend and enlarge the city’s network of subterranean drains and sewers, and to lay the first pipes carrying a municipal water supply. The switch from horse-drawn streetcars to electric trolleys in 1897 also required laborers to excavate and replace many miles of steel rails in dozens of streets within urban Charleston, an intrusive project that further deranged pavements laid in the principal thoroughfares. Such projects obliged the city to repair and re-lay miles of stone paving as the urban trolley routes expanded northward to reach emerging neighborhoods north of Line Street. 

Despite the robust campaign to pave the streets of urban Charleston in the 1880s, most of the city’s public thoroughfares remained in a natural, dirty state throughout the 1890s. To extend a modicum of improvement to those residing in less-busy streets, city officials authorized in 1892 a small paving trial near the west end of Spring Street using a cheap product known as “pyrites cinders” or “cinders of iron pyrites.” The material in question was a by-product of the toxic industrial process of converting local phosphate rock into fertilizer, performed at a number of plants then operating on Charleston Neck. The slag-like cinders provided a satisfactory street surface resembling gravel, which inspired the city in 1893 to spread pyrites in Archdale Street, between Queen and Clifford Streets. During the following year, workers spread cinders along part of Rutledge Avenue between Spring and Radcliffe Streets, and along the entire length of St. Philip Street, from Beaufain Street to Line Street, through which the path of pyrites continued eastward to King Street. Workers in 1895 spread the cinders along the footpaths traversing Marion Square and in short stretches of Morris and Vanderhorst Streets. By that time, however, the city had received numerous complaints about the cinders from residents abutting the aforementioned streets. The pebbly pyrites, after lengthy exposure to traffic and the elements, crumbled into a corrosive dust that poisoned nearby trees and wafted through the open windows of nearby homes. Starting in 1897, the city adopted a policy of either removing or covering the remaining cinders over successive paving seasons until they disappeared from local memory.[14]

Charleston’s negative experience with budget pyrites contrasted sharply with the trial of a more exotic and expensive material. Bituminous asphalt was a relatively expensive product in late nineteenth century Charleston because the ingredients had to be imported from afar and there was no local plant to prepare the raw materials for application. Nevertheless, in 1884 the city spread a layer of asphalt over a gravelly rectangle encompassing more than 2.5 acres in the center of Marion Square (in front of the old Citadel building). The resulting tar-macadam or tarmac surface proved popular with both Citadel cadets performing regular drills and parades on the square and among bicyclists who staged occasional races around the asphalt track in subsequent years.[15] 

The first use of “sheet asphalt” from Trinidad to pave a Charleston roadway commenced in the late spring of 1894, when the city splurged on a beautification project surrounding White Point Garden at the southern tip of the peninsula. Contractors from afar brought materials and equipment to the Palmetto City to replace the “rough and unsightly” surface of East Battery Street and South Bay Street—a total distance of approximately six-tenths of a mile. The novel blacktop surface, laid atop a base of modern concrete and steam-rolled to perfect smoothness, also bordered the city’s first concrete sidewalks. The improved footpaths and streets were an immediate hit with promenading pedestrians, roller-skaters, and horse-drawn carriages enjoying a recreational turn through the breezy public garden. One year later, the city extended another sheet of asphalt up King Street from South Bay to Ladson Street, as requested by the owners of abutting property who volunteered to cover a portion of the luxurious expense.[16]

In the interest of providing some kind of cheap improvement to less prominent streets, the city began using in 1896 a novel material known as “cement gravel.” The superintendent of streets at that time described it as “natural formation of clay and sand, containing small pebbles, and when packed and rolled forms a hard concrete mass. It is found in South Carolina, not far from Augusta, Ga., and is used extensively for road making in Augusta and other cities, and has the recommendation of cheapness and durability.” Bicyclists in particular enjoyed the clayed surface, as they had the older asphalt parade ground in Marion Square, which workers repaved with cement gravel in 1896–97. By the end of that year, however, city authorities realized that the cement gravel, when baked by the summer sun, crumbled under the weight of passing horses and vehicles into a fine dust that wafted on the breeze across the neighborhood. Despite acknowledging this flaw, the city continued using cement gravel as late as 1902 as a cheap road covering for residential streets with limited traffic. The offensive material was never removed; rather, local traffic pulverized and thoroughly ground it into the native soil within a decade.[17] 

Looking back from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, we might describe the final decades of the nineteenth century as an ambitious and progressive era of street paving that formed a sort of prelude to the dawn of modern Charleston. The city gained approximately seventeen and a half miles of granite block paving during this period, much of which included cobblestone wings along the periphery of the roadways.[18] Most of the urban streets and all the rural roads beyond the city limits remained unimproved at the turn of the twentieth century, however, a situation that inspired local officials to devise new strategies for transforming an aging seaport into a modern metropolis. In the next episode, we’ll follow the rise of new paving materials and new priorities fueled by the proliferation of automobiles and the acceleration of local traffic. 

NEXT: The Rise of Asphalt Roadways in Twentieth-Century Charleston
PREVIOUSLY: Reconstructing the Streets of Post-Civil War Charleston
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