Following the conversion of the city’s new Beef Market into a dormitory in the autumn of 1793, the business of vending fresh provisions in Charleston meandered across the urban landscape for more than a decade. The older marketplaces in Tradd and Queen Streets absorbed most of the central-city commerce, while residents of peripheral neighborhoods briefly patronized forgotten smaller markets on South Bay and the east end of Calhoun Street.
The refugee crisis gripping the City of Charleston during the second half of 1793 was not the only burden weighing on the minds of community leaders at that time. A few months prior to the mass exodus from Cap-Français, declarations of war between France and Britain sent shock waves across the Atlantic to North America and the Caribbean basin. Colonists loyal to the rival nations immediately began converting commercial vessels into offensive privateers that harassed the maritime trade of all nations plying international waters from Trinidad to Nova Scotia. While the United States government strove to maintain neutrality between the nation’s two principal allies, President George Washington advised the governor of each state to prepare defensive fortifications along the Atlantic coastline in case of war with one or the other. Authorities in the Lowcountry of South Carolina responded by initiating a series of military projects in the autumn of 1793 that continued into the new year. In Charleston Harbor, for example, officials began spending public funds to stockpile arms and ammunition, to refurbish both Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island and Fort Johnson on James Island, and to build a new waterfront battery on the Charleston peninsula, eventually called Fort Mechanic.
When the state legislature reconvened at Columbia in May 1794, Governor William Moultrie informed the elected assembly that he had recently ordered various repairs to the public arsenal in Charleston, a brick warehouse standing near the southwest corner of Meeting and Broad Streets. The fifty-year-old structure, which we’ll discuss in a future episode, was not sufficient to house the latest acquisitions of artillery and other military stores, so Moultrie “applied to the Corporation of Charleston for the use of the Market near the Court House”—that is, the old Beef Market at the northeast corner of the same intersection. City Council “readily agreed to let the public have it,” said the governor, who recommended the brick market “be fitted up in a rough and cheap manner and divided into three apartments, one of which can be given for the work shop of the military workmen, and the other two may be disposed of as guard rooms or other public uses as occasion may require.” After the legislature agreed to fund Moultrie’s proposal, laborers converted the old Beef Market into a military post during the summer of 1794.[1]
The inhabitants of urban Charleston who procured daily provisions for their respective families during this era no doubt grew frustrated with the city’s shrinking menu of public marketplaces. The transformation of the new Beef Market into a refugee dormitory and the military usurpation of the old Beef Market funneled the vending of all meats and vegetables back to the Lower Market at the east end of Tradd Street, where the ongoing improvement of neighboring wharf properties constrained the movements of both customers and vendors bringing large quantities of produce and animals to the site in watercraft and horse-drawn carts. In September 1794, a grand jury formally complained about “the want of a more roomy market” in Charleston, “particularly as there is one in the central part of the city [i.e., in Market Street], which we recommend for the use of the retailers of beef to be re-established and put in proper repair.”[2]
Despite the obvious need for additional public marketspace for the daily sale of fresh provisions, the city government was reluctant to initiate any new capital projects during a period of political and economic uncertainty. In the spring of 1794, for example, City Council briefly considered the possibility of rebuilding the defective Governor’s Bridge in East Bay Street before resolving to defer that much-needed project. The municipal government was, at that moment, obliged to focus its limited funds on the completion of a large Orphan House on the north side of Boundary (now Calhoun) Street.[3] Meanwhile, French-speaking refugees from Saint-Domingue continued to occupy the 200-foot long market shed in Market Street, though some of the immigrants quartered there must have settled elsewhere by the middle of 1795. In August of that year, a local schoolmaster named Jehu Hoskins advertised the removal of his private academy into “the room over the New-Market.”[4]
Fortunately for local shoppers, the completion of various state fortification projects provided a means of relieving the city’s market congestion. Fort Mechanic, built atop the ruins of a colonial-era bastion bordering the present East Battery Street, was sufficiently advanced to receive its heavy cannons at end of 1794, and the completed fort soon after took custody of the remaining military equipment housed in the old Beef Market.[5] In late August 1795, Charleston’s Commissioners of the Markets published a call for bids to rehabilitate “the old Beef Market in Broad Street,” including new wooden shingles for the roof, wooden stalls for the interior, plaster for the ceiling, and repairs to the brick floor within. The work was completed by December 12th, when the commissioners informed locals “that the Old Market at the corner of Broad and Meeting Streets, commonly called the Beef Market, has been lately repaired; and that they can there be supplied with beef, mutton, pork, veal, poultry, corn, rice, and all kinds of vegetables, in the same manner as the Lower Market.”[6]
Customers visiting the east end of Tradd Street during the early months of 1796 no doubt witnessed smaller crowds and enjoyed greater freedom of movement within the familiar marketplace, but the reduction of traffic at the Lower Market did not last. On June 13th, just six months after the reopening of the old Beef Market, a major fire burned a zig-zag swath of property from the intersection of East Bay and Queen Streets to the site of the refurbished structure. The conflagration charred scores of shops and residences before citizens arrested the blaze at the northeast corner of Broad and Meeting Streets, where the flames completely destroyed the colonial-era marketplace.[7] Once again, all vendors of meats, vegetables, and fruit were obliged to congregate within the cramped Lower Market, where declining conditions bred frustration and potential disorder.
Coincidently, one week after the loss of the old Beef Market, surveyor Joseph Purcell laid out a new street for the municipal government, running forty feet wide between King and Meeting Streets. The modest pathway, 464 feet in length, provided a direct link between two existing thoroughfares—the recently-created-and-then-abandoned Market Street to the east, and a narrow footpath to the west called Parsonage Lane. The legal existence of Market Street, stretching from Meeting Street to the Cooper River, had evaporated in the autumn of 1793, but the creation of a new public right-of-way in mid-June 1796, directly in line with the abandoned thoroughfare, suggests that Charleston’s municipal government hoped to regain title to the land donated eight years earlier by General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and his neighbors. If city officials hoped to negotiate with Pinckney for the restoration of Market Street during the ensuing months, they were soon disappointed. That July, President Washington invited the forty-six-year old general to serve as the new United States minister to the Republic of France, and Pinckney sailed away from Charleston at the beginning of September 1796.[8]
Public frustration with the lack of sufficient market space in the city continued to grow through the remainder of the year, as did complaints about City Council’s lack of financial transparency in general. In a scathing editorial about the appropriation of municipal funds, for example, an unidentified “Native” of the city directed public attention to “that costly and useless market near the Governor’s Bridge,” then full of French refugees, as a notable example of fiscal mismanagement.[9] Charleston’s market commissioners then spent the winter of 1796–97 developing a pragmatic solution to the city’s marketplace blues, while hoping to draw as little from the public treasury as possible.
At a meeting of City Council in early February 1797, the commissioners presented a frank and detailed report for public consideration. The physical state of the Lower Market at the east end of Tradd Street was both “disagreeable and embarrassing,” they stated bluntly, blaming the site’s “contracted position” for its poor condition. The recent “loss of the Beef Market” in Broad Street obliged all local butchers to congregate at the watery east end of Tradd Street, where “it is a well-known fact, that the vegetable market, at times, so encroaches upon the street [i.e., East Bay Street] as to interfere much with the passing of different kinds of carriages.” Furthermore, recent modifications to William Crafts’ wharf, immediately north of the public property, caused scouring rainwater to pour southward, undermining the wooden fabric of the market shed. Mr. Crafts had also threatened to erect a wall along his property line, said the commissioners, to prevent market customers from trespassing daily across his private wharf. In short, the report concluded that the Lower Market was a serious nuisance to public order and no longer fit for purpose.
Such undesirable conditions at the east end of Tradd Street “induced the commissioners to look forward to a proper place to recommend as a change of situation.” Rather than suggest a restoration of the defunct Market Street project, they nominated the east end of Queen Street as “a very proper situation to combine the meat, vegetable and fish markets on one spot.” The sloping, waterfront site, home to the city’s Fish Market since 1770, measured just thirty-three feet wide and extended approximately 150 feet eastward from East Bay Street, but it was primed for expansion in 1797. Ten years earlier, the city had obtained but not utilized a state grant that extended the public right-of-way in Queen Street a further 660 feet eastward to the channel of the Cooper River. The commissioners had also negotiated with Samuel Prioleau, owner of the land abutting the north and south sides of the street, who offered to donate portions of his wharf property to facilitate widening the public marketplace to the commodious breadth of seventy-two feet. Within this enlarged space, the commissioners proposed the construction of a new brick market shed, twenty feet wide and 150 feet long, with eaves projecting seven feet beyond the walls along all four sides. Placing this new structure to the east of the existing Fish Market would allow seafood commerce to continue as usual during its construction, after which the city could build a new shelter for vending fish atop pilings sunk in the river at the eastern terminus of the newly-extended street. Following the removal of the old Fish Market, the city could then fill, grade, and pave with brick a large open space abutting East Bay Street, reserved for the sale of vegetables brought to the city in wagons and carts from the countryside. To raise the funds necessary to complete this ambitious market plan in Queen Street, the commissioners proposed selling the public land at the east end of Tradd Street, the value of which they opined was “more than sufficient” to cover the proposed expenses.[10]
Charleston’s City Council embraced the new, centralized market plan in early March 1797 and prepared the necessary legal foundation. An ordinance ratified in late April authorized both the construction of the proposed brick structure at the east end of Queen Street, “to be called the City Market,” and the sale of the waterfront property identified since the 1750s as the Lower Market.[11] Four months later, Samuel Prioleau formally conveyed to City Council two long strips of land abutting the east end of Queen Street, measuring twenty-four feet to the north and fifteen feet to the south, expanding the public right-of-way from thirty-three to seventy-two feet wide and 573 feet long. The parties also agreed to reserve space at the northeastern end of the expanded thoroughfare, twelve feet in breadth, “to be kept open as a ferry slip” for the use of disembarking passengers.[12] Prioleau’s agreement with the city in mid-August 1797 marked the beginning of significant but long-forgotten public project, and also marks the genesis of the present thoroughfare called Vendue Range, though that name wasn’t coined until more than a decade later.
Immediately after Sam Prioleau signed his deed-of-gift to City Council, the Commissioners of the Markets published notice of their desire to contract “for the building [of] a Public Market, at the east end of Queen-street-continued.” They sought bids for raising a structure measuring 150 feet long and twenty feet wide, “the foundation to be sufficiently thick and compact to admit a cistern under the whole, and to be raised 16 inches above the level of the street.” The four walls required a series of “arched pillars” of brick, each ten feet high, surmounted by a hip roof covered with “glazed pan tiles” and eaves projecting seven feet beyond the pillars on each side. The contract also required the construction of a “coved ceiling, lathed and plaistered” within, “a cupola sufficient to hang a good bell, to be erected on the center of the roof,” and “the floor made sufficient for the purpose intended.”[13]
Construction of the new market in Queen Street commenced at some point in late 1797 and continued for approximately two years.[14] Its long gestation likely stemmed from the challenging topographical conditions now obscured by two centuries of later development. City officials specified in August 1797 that “the whole of the building” was “to be placed to the eastward of the present fish market,” pointing to a site now encompassing the eastern half of modern Vendue Range. Because the daily tides still washed over that ground at the end of the eighteenth century, the preparatory work of filling and compacting the surface probably consumed much more time than the construction of the brick-and-wood edifice.
The market project in Queen Street might also have lagged during the brief quasi-war with France, the commencement of which in 1798 triggered a renewed flurry of military preparations in Charleston and other coastal communities across the United States. Amidst a wave of anti-French sentiment, inspired in no small part by the infamous XYZ Affair in Paris, Minister Charles Cotesworth Pinckney received a hero’s welcome when he returned to Charleston in early February 1799.[15] Ten months later, the Commissioners of the Markets finally began selling leases for the wooden stalls within the completed market in Queen Street. The old Lower Market at the east end of Tradd Street officially closed at noon on 20 December 1799, after which the new “City Market” in Queen Street became Charleston’s sole venue for retailing fresh provisions to a population of approximately twenty thousand residents.[16]
Four months later, in April 1800, the market commissioners solicited bids for the construction of a new Fish Market in the Cooper River, twenty feet beyond the new eastern terminus of Queen Street. The proposed structure was to rise above a foundation of eight “piers of palmetto, to be sunk in the water,” sufficiently robust to support eight brick pillars arranged in a rectangle measuring twenty by thirty feet, surmounted by a roof of tile or slate. The commissioners did not mention a floor or any interior features, but expressed their desire to finish the building “as soon as possible,” including the extension of a wooden “bridge of twenty feet from the present wharf, to be made separately.” Although the date of its completion is now obscure, Charleston’s newest waterfront market almost certainly required significant repairs after the city weathered a powerful, destructive hurricane in early October 1800.[17]
The work of removing debris and repairing storm damage occupied most Lowcountry residents into the spring of 1801, by which time citizens were already complaining about deficiencies within the new public marketplace in Queen Street. Transcriptions of their specific grievances do not survive, but no doubt they deemed the new “City Market” too small, and perhaps objected to its distance from the neighborhoods sprouting farther to the south, west, and north of the colonial waterfront. In response to a vocal portion of the outlying constituents, City Council ratified an ordinance in August 1801 to create a “temporary Market on South Bay, as near the public hay market as may be found convenient, at which market shall, and may be sold, all the articles of every description, which now are, or may be sold at the market at the east end of Queen-street.”[18] This “temporary” marketplace, erected for the significant expense of $1,400 on rented wharf property “nearly opposite” the south end of Legare Street, officially opened the public on 18 March 1802. On that occasion, the market commissioners announced that “the butchers of this city have agreed to keep it furnished with meat, and there is every reason to believe, from its nearness to the islands, it will be constantly furnished with vegetables and fruits.”[19] Few details concerning the “South Bay Market” now survive. It closed when the ground lease expired on 20 May 1808, and a local auctioneer sold the buildings for scrap in April 1810.[20]
Residents of Charleston’s northernmost neighborhoods, expanding on both sides of Boundary Street during the early years of the nineteenth century, evidently envied the market convenience enjoyed by their neighbors to the south. After hearing of their petitions to City Council for fair play, Christopher Gadsden felt inspired to contribute a new marketplace within his own burgeoning suburb. In early March 1805, the twilight of his eighty-one years, General Gadsden conveyed to the city government a rectangular parcel of private property now forming part of Calhoun Street, measuring 110 feet by 390 feet, encompassing all of the modern roadway from the west side of modern East Bay Street to the east side of Washington Street. Two months later, in May 1805, City Council ratified an ordinance “for establishing a market at the east end of Boundary-street” on the land donated by Christopher Gadsden. Preoccupied by another important project, however, the city pledged to contribute just $500, or one half the cost of a shed to be erected on the new site, on the condition that members of the surrounding neighboring could match the city’s appropriation with donated funds.[21]
The deed of Gadsden’s gift to the city includes a tinted illustration of the “Intended Market” standing in the center of the donated land. The rectangular structure appears to measure approximately sixteen feet wide and perhaps 125 feet long, composed of brick piers like the market sheds recently built in Queen Street. Evidence of its construction is now lacking, but an 1806 plat of the site shows a smaller, nearly square structure positioned closer to the east end of the donated land, suggesting that the community was not entirely invested in the project.[22] In any case, the Boundary Street Market operated for at least five years before a city ordinance in 1811 authorized the Commissioners of the Markets to lease the building for use as “a hay or forage market.” It was restored to general market use in 1823, but fell into a state of disrepair a decade later and was sold in August 1837. Following the removal of the worn-out shed, the city extended Boundary (now Calhoun) Street eastward to its present extent.[23]
Meanwhile, back at the dawn of the nineteenth century, the topic distracting City Council away from the Boundary Street Market in 1805 forms the next chapter in the history of Charleston’s public markets. Through private conversations not recorded for posterity, agents of the city government secured General Pinckney’s approval to resurrect of the abandoned Market Street plan of 1788. Tune in next time, when we’ll examine the terms and conditions of the revived project, and trace the first steps in the creation of the historic landscape we see today.
[1]Moultrie’s manuscript message is found at South Carolina Department of Archives and History (hereafter SCDAH), Governors’ Messages (series S165009), No. 610, under the incorrect date of 18 May 1794; the text of Moultrie’s message appears under the correct date of 8 May 1794 in Michael E. Stevens, ed., Journals of the House of Representatives 1792–1794. The State Records of South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press for SCDAH, 1988), 545.; Stevens, Journals of the House of Representatives, 1792–1794, 566 (10 May 1794).
[2] South Carolina State Gazette, 3 October 1794, page 3, presentment No. 6.
[3] See the municipal notices concerning the bridge in Charleston City Gazette, 22 October 1793, page 3; City Gazette, 21 February 1794, page 2.
[4] City Gazette, 24 August 1795, page 2.
[5]City Gazette, 18 November 1794, page 3; William Moultrie to the General Assembly, 13 December 1794, SCDAH, Governor’s Messages, 1794, No. 16.
[6]City Gazette, 24 August 1795, page 3; City Gazette, 12 December 1795, page 3.
[7]City Gazette, 14 June 1796, page 3; John Drayton, A View of Carolina (Charleston, S.C.: W. P. Young, 1802), 204–5.
[8] See plat No. 195, dated 17 June 1796, in the John McCrady Plat Collection, held by the Charleston County Register of Deeds (hereafter CCRD); George Washington to Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, 8 July 1796, in the collection of George Washington Correspondence, 1781–1798, Mss 178 at the Charleston Library Society; City Gazette, 3 September 1796, page 2.
[9]City Gazette, 26 August 1796, page 2, “For the City Gazette.”
[10] Plat of a low water lot to be granted to the City of Charleston, 27 June 1787, in SCDAH, State Plat Books (Charleston Series), volume 10, page 222; City Gazette, 7 March 1797, page 2, “Commissioners of the Market.”
[11]City Gazette, 7 March 1797, page 2, “City Council, March 2, 1797”; “An Ordinance for building the City Market, and selling the land on which the Lower Market Stands,” ratified on 28 April 1797, in Edwards, Ordinances, 1802, 172.
[12] Samuel Prioleau to the Commissioners of the Markets (John Mitchell, Nathaniel Russell, William Somersall, Joseph Vesey, and Adam Gilchrist), release of two lots at the east end of Queen Street, 17 August 1797, CCRD U6: 9–11.
[13] City Gazette, 19 August 1797, page 3.
[14] An advertisement published in mid-April 1798 mentioned a lot on East Bay Street “very near the spot on which the New Market is now building” (see City Gazette, 19 April 1798, page 3); Another newspaper reference to a City Council meeting in August 1799 mentioned “the new market, now erecting” on the public land at the east end of Queen Street (see City Gazette, 24 August 1799, page 2).
[15] City Gazette, 5 February 1799, page 3.
[16] City Gazette, 18 December 1799, page 3. Note that the western end of the new market in Queen Street, as well as the “vegetable market paved with brick not covered,” appear in a plat executed in August 1804 and recorded in CCRD, volume S7, between pages 142–43. The U.S. Census of 1800 counted 18,824 inhabitants within the City of Charleston, but the city’s own count, published in J. L. Dawson and H. W. DeSaussure, eds., Census of the City of Charleston, South Carolina, for the Year 1848, Exhibiting the Condition and Prospects of the City, Illustrated by Many Statistical Details, Prepared under the Authority of the City Council (Charleston, S.C.: J. B. Nixon, 1849), 10, counted 20,473 people.
[17] City Gazette, 5 April 1800, page 3; for a description of the hurricane in question, see South Carolina State Gazette, 6 October 1800, page 2.
[18] “An Ordinance for erecting a temporary Market on South Bay, and for other purposes therein mentioned, ratified on 24 August 1801, in Edwards, Ordinances, 1802, 222.
[19] City Gazette, 18 March 1802, page 1. In the city’s annual accounts for 1801–2, published in Charleston Times, 1 September 1802, the treasurer recorded the disbursement of $1,400 to “towards building the new market on South Bay”; The accounts of 1804–5, published in Charleston Courier, 31 August 1805, page 2, include a payment of $450 to Charles Lining for three years’ “ground rent” for the “Market on South-Bay,” at the rate of $150 per annum. In his 1854 Reminiscences of Charleston (Charleston, S.C.: John Russell, 1854), 33, Charles Fraser recalled seeing in 1807 “a market on South Bay, nearly opposite to Legare-street.”
[20] See section 16 of “An Ordinance for the uniform regulation and government of the Public Markets in the City of Charleston; for the adjustment of Weights and Measures in the said City; and for other purposes therein mentioned,” ratified on 6 May 1807, ordered “the market on South Bay” to close at the expiration of the present lease (see Edwards, Ordinances, 1807, 432–53); In the annual summary of city accounts for the year 1807–8, published in Courier, 3 September 1808, page 1, the treasurer recorded a final payment of $150 to Charles Lining for one year’s ground rent “to 10th May last”; City Gazette, 14 April 1810, page 3, “Public Notice.”
[21]Christopher Gadsden to the City Council of Charleston, conveyance and plat, 5 March 1805, CCRD P7: 204–6; “An Ordinance for establishing a Market at the East end of Boundary-street, in Charleston,” ratified on 7 May 1805, in Edwards, Ordinances, 1807, 283–85; Courier, 2 August 1805, page 3, “Notice.”
[22] See, for example, a plat by Joseph Purcell in March 1806 on page 40 of the City Engineer’s Plat Book, held by the Charleston Archive at the Charleston County Public Library; copied in Plat No. 533 in the John McCrady Plat Collection.
[23] Charleston City Council, The Ordinances of the City Council of Charleston, South Carolina, Passed since the First of September, 1807, and to the 13th of November, 1815 (Charleston, S.C.: G. M. Bounetheau and Lewis Bryer, 1815), 523–24; City Council proceedings of 3 July 1837, printed in Courier, 20 July 1837, page 2; Courier, 29 July 1837, page 3: “By Elliott & Condy.”
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