Reconstructing the Streets of Post-Civil War Charleston

Amidst the financial doldrums that followed the American Civil War, Charlestonians struggled to reconstruct their politics, rebuild their economy, and repair a neglected streetscape. Budget constraints compelled officials of the late 1860s and 1870s to perpetuate old-fashioned paving habits and to recycle outdated materials, but a few novel additions to the public right-of-way cheered the spirits of local drivers, pedestrians, and velocipedestrians.

Let’s begin with a brief review of the previous episode: There were no paved streets or roads anywhere in Charleston County before the summer of 1818, when the municipal government began laying cobblestones in the busiest stretch of East Bay Street. In subsequent decades, locals witnessed several bursts of street improvement interrupted by periods of economic stagnation. Although everyone understood that paving augmented the value of abutting properties, fostered personal mobility, and lubricated the wheels of profitable tourism, city officials of the antebellum period did not improve the streets simply to make Charleston more attractive or enjoyable. They devoted most of the city’s limited resources to the work of improving thoroughfares frequented by horse-drawn wagons, carts, and drays moving tons of heavy freight between the railroad depots above John Street and the commercial wharves along the Cooper River waterfront. 

By the time South Carolina seceded from the United States in 1860, Charlestonians traversed a landscape in which most of the streets and roads remained unpaved and a minority of urban streets were covered with a hodge-podge of materials. Sidewalks in the most trafficked and most affluent areas of the city were paved with brick, others with oyster shells, while many neighborhoods, especially in the northern suburbs annexed in 1850, lacked sidewalks altogether. Cobblestones lined the streets of the waterfront commercial area, ranging from the northern edge of the High Battery seawall to Market Street and extending westward from the Cooper River to Meeting Street, through which the lumpy paving continued northward from Broad Street to Mary Street. 

King Street, between Broad and Calhoun Streets, constituted the city’s principal retail corridor, but the daily traffic of pedestrians, horses, and lighter vehicles did not require heavy cobblestones to keep the road in passable condition. Instead, the city provided a gravelly pavement of macadam (i.e., crushed stones) and oyster shells. Cheaper wooden plank roads lined a number of smaller streets carrying significant volumes of commercial traffic, and plank highways in both King and Meeting Streets extended from the railroad depots between John and Mary Streets to the city boundary near Magnolia Cemetery. Beyond the city limits, the parish Commissioners of Main Roads continued the Meeting Street plank road to the Six Mile House (now the site of Success Street in the City of North Charleston).

At some point after Charlestonians initiated a Civil War with the United States in April 1861 to defend a colonial economy rooted in unfree labor, Confederate officials in the city deemed it necessary to appropriate some of the street cobbles for military purposes. The geographic extent of their un-paving work is now unclear, but was perhaps confined to the waterfront area along the Cooper River. Photographs taken in the city shortly after the arrival of Union forces in the spring of 1865, now digitized by the Library of Congress, show no paving of any kind in East Bay Street and in the several wharf-access lanes to the east, while the cobbles remained intact in Meeting, Market, Queen, and Broad Streets, at least as far west as Meeting Street. 

In the aftermath of the war, Charleston and the South Carolina Lowcountry in general experienced years of significant economic depression that retarded the improvement of local highways and byways. Robust street paving was not considered a luxury reserved for affluent neighborhoods at that time. In the golden age of steam power, street pavement was an essential element of public and commercial infrastructure. Many cities in the Northern States had paved their most important streets with uniform blocks of granite, forming durable roadways like those found in the old capitals and port cities of Europe. Devastated by war and economic changes, Charleston could not afford anything superior to old-fashioned, irregular cobbles discarded by transient ships. 

In December 1865, one month after U.S. military officials permitted members of City Council to resume their municipal duties, the city’s street commissioners announced their intention to commence limited repairs, opining that East Bay Street and Broad Street “require the first attention of Council, on account of being the most public thoroughfares for the whole business community.” An advertisement published in January 1866 solicited bids for repaving East Bay Street, from Market-street to the northern terminus of the High Battery seawall. The call for estimates described the preferred method of laying the roundish ballast stones, repeating instructions adopted by City Council in the spring of 1856. First, the street was to be “properly graded, upon which four layers of four inches each in thickness, of clean sea sand or gravel should be placed, each layer to be dampened and thoroughly rammed or rolled, so that when the four layers are finished[,] they will be reduced to twelve inches in thickness, then about three inches of loose sand to be placed to receive the stones.” The city required the cobblestone to be “of the best” quality and size, “say from six to ten inches deep and of a diameter equal to half their length, to be placed as near as possible to each other—then to be heavily rammed so that they will not be liable to be misplaced by the heaviest use to which they may afterwards be exposed.”[1]

A revised request for paving proposals, published six months later, extended the contract to include the same stretch of East Bay Street, as well as Broad Street (from East Bay to Meeting), Queen Street (from East Bay to State Street), and “the several streets leading from East Bay to the wharves.” The published specifications for the work also streamlined the directions for laying cobblestones. In July 1866, the city required prospective contractors to grade each street to create the standard convex profile, then to cover the surface with a layer of “sea sand twelve inches deep,” which was to be properly compacted or “rammed.” Oblong cobbles were then “to be laid endwise and close together, the smaller end to be embedded in the sand; to be then covered with a thin layer of sea sand and well rammed” to “form an even surface on the top.” The final step called for the cobbled surface “to the covered with a layer of sea sand one inch deep” to create a reasonably smooth roadway.[2] 

Modern audiences might question why officials prioritized the paving of several short streets leading from East Bay to the commercial wharves, both before and after the Civil War, while neglecting other streets carrying more traffic and those traversing affluent neighborhoods. Their reasoning reflects a tacit understanding of the city’s topography invisible to most residents of twenty-first century Charleston. The early generations of street improvement work across the city, especially along the Cooper River waterfront, required the addition of sand and other materials to level the junctions and intersections of every street. As I explained in the previous episode, the city commenced in 1818 a long campaign of adding fill material to the concave surfaces of colonial-era streets to create higher convex profiles that shed rainwater to the periphery. When workers finished re-cobbling East Bay Street in the spring of 1867, its surface was at least twelve inches above the level of the several short streets leading to the commercial wharves in the Cooper River. This difference in height impeded the passage of horse-drawn vehicles hauling freight to and from ships docked along the wharves, and obliged the city government to lend a helping hand to raise the level of the old wharf streets. A witness on the scene in November 1867 recorded a valuable summary of the situation: 

“For some time, preparations to pave the streets leading to the wharves have been in progress, and the piles of [cobble] stones and sand that have been deposited along the edge of the sidewalks were a convincing proof that the work would not long be delayed. The pavement on Broad street is now completed, and the contractors will soon commence operations on the different wharves. These [wharf] streets have for a long time been in a deplorable condition, and though many efforts have been made by the wharf owners to raise their level, no lasting good resulted. Every rain converts the streets into mud ponds, through which the [horse-drawn] drays flounder, bespattering everything within their reach with a liberal allowance of the adhesive mixture. Since the paving of East Bay this evil has been felt to a much greater extent, as the wharves are somewhat lower than the level of that street, and it required an effort for a horse to jerk a loaded dray from the mud to the hard pavement. The paving on East Bay and Broad street has been well done, and when that on the wharves is completed, the commercial facilities of Charleston will be largely increased. Every day renders the work more necessary, as the supply of cotton is constantly increasing.”[3]

Shortly after the work of re-laying cobbles in East Bay and adjacent streets commenced in the autumn of 1866, residents saw other laborers installing long steel rails along various streets for Charleston’s first generation of horse-drawn street cars (see Episode No. 113). The advent of street railways in the Palmetto City, a project first proposed before the war, sparked a contentious relationship between the streetcar companies and the city’s engineering department that continued into the 1940s. The introduction of the rail lines in the late 1860s and their subsequent expansion compromised the integrity of paved surfaces, while the maintenance and improvement of city streets occasionally blocked the path of rolling street cars. 

In the spring of 1867, citizens residing in Charleston’s northern suburbs petitioned City Council to renew the old and worn-out plank roads in Meeting and King Streets, extending from points just above modern Marion Square to the city’s northern limit (Mount Pleasant Street). Because the city treasury was nearly empty, Council debated the comparative merits of roads paved with wooden planks versus those paved with crushed oyster shells. Both materials were relatively cheap and abundantly supplied by local contractors, but the city engineer argued that shell would be cheaper to lay and easier to maintain in the long run than plank. After property owners along these northern routes offered to share the expenses with the municipal government, City Council adopted a compromise solution with long-lasting implications for local traffic.[4]

In the spring of 1868, city workers began constructing a broad “shell road” in Meeting Street, extending from Spring Street northward to the city boundary. The resulting smooth and permeable surface delighted recreational drivers as well as Charleston’s first velocipedestrians (aka bicyclists), but contractors laying the shells complained that their work was destroyed daily by teams of horses hauling heavy freight and by herds of cattle trekking from rural farms to slaughterhouses in the city. To preserve the new shell road from further damage, the city advised farmers, teamsters, and cattle drovers in April 1868 to avoid using Meeting Street and to follow the King Street road into town. The municipal campaign to rebuild the plank road in upper King Street commenced that same summer at its southern terminus, adjacent to Marion Square, using a herringbone pattern that progressed northwardly in stages over several years to the city boundary.[5]

Smaller plank roads also mushroomed across the landscape of urban Charleston during the post-war years, some new and others replacing those constructed in the 1850s. Many of these narrow bands of wooden planks appeared in low-lying segments of residential streets within waterfront neighborhoods on the periphery of the peninsula, covering public thoroughfares like Washington Street, Gadsden Street, and the west end of Spring Street, among others, that nature periodically transformed into tidal swamplands.[6] 

The most curious new development in the streets of Charleston during the era of Reconstruction was a brief flirtation with asphaltum. While modern asphalt paving is largely a byproduct of crude petroleum, the term asphaltum was once generally applied to a number of naturally-occurring bituminous materials. European cities had been experimenting with asphaltum as a durable and weather-proof covering for streets and sidewalks since the early decades of the nineteenth century, and the trend spread to the Americas when capitalists began monetizing natural deposits like the great Pitch Lake on the island of Trinidad and the La Brea Tar Pits in California.[7] Reports of such work likely inspired a German immigrant working for the City of Charleston named Ernst August Habenicht, who introduced his own asphaltic paving compound in 1867. Few details of Habenicht’s concoction survive, but it appears to have been a hot-mix slurry that city workers poured over patches of compacted earth, oyster shells, or gravel, perhaps using wooden forms to contain the viscous material until it hardened. Their work, which was restricted to patching sidewalks across the city, won great praise in the local press through at least the end of 1870. References to Habenicht’s asphalt sidewalks disappeared after that time, however, perhaps because local pedestrians learned that the thin blacktop pavement cracked under heavy weight, and once compromised, disintegrated rapidly.[8]

Although local government made some progress in repairing the streets of Charleston in the years following the destructive Civil War, the city’s roadways compared unfavorably to those of many other municipalities, both in the United States and abroad. “Our streets are not in a desirable condition,” lamented Mayor John Wagener in January 1872, “but we are making the most strenuous efforts for their improvement. I have made diligent enquiries into the values of paving material, and have come to the conclusion that in our [financial] condition, when we are on all sides admonished to be strictly economical, we must confine ourselves to the cobble and cracked stones, [oyster] shells or planking. The cobbles we can occasionally obtain at a low rate from ballasted vessels, and the larger rocks can be cracked at a small expense, the shells we have in abundance for the cost of hauling and the planking, especially in our suburban outlets, can be done as cheaply with us as in any other city.” 

Mayor Wagener’s 1872 speech also include a genteel invitation for public-private partnerships to pave individual blocks of the urban streetscape with more expensive or experimental materials. “Whilst I am always in favor of the reasonable improvement of our highways and byways,” said the mayor, “I think that wherever extensive works are required for sections, that yield but a small return to the City Treasury, the benefited property-owners should contribute their share.”[9] In response, citizens raised familiar complaints about the great noise arising from vehicles and horses passing over the cobblestones, especially at the intersection of Meeting and Broad Streets, and about the dust arising from the gravel and oyster-shell paving in the King Street retail corridor. Local officials had briefly considered, in 1867 and again in 1869, laying a field of patented Nicolson wooden paving blocks at the busy municipal intersection, but the city killed the project when Charleston County commissioners refused to share the cost.[10] 

In the weeks and months after Wagener’s state-of-the-city speech, residents and business owners in King Street negotiated with the mayor to fund an experiment with a competing variety of wooden block called the Ballard Pavement. When logistical preparations for the work finally commenced in the spring of 1873, the local press published useful descriptions of the patented product and their hopes. “If it prove what is confidently asserted of it,” wrote one reporter, “there are other streets besides King-street that can be greatly enhanced in comfort and appearance by removing the horrid cobble stones that now jar and jolt one’s life nearly out, and play old harry with horse and vehicle. There is no place in the city that needs a noiseless pavement more than the intersection of Broad and Meeting-streets, the hard paving there now rendering it almost impossible to conduct the proceedings of Council so that they can be understandingly heard in the Chamber.”[11]

The local agent of the New-York based Ballard Pavement Company, who happened to be the son of Charleston’s inspector of streets, retrieved from Gotham “the machinery for cutting the blocks” and commenced production at John Mallonee’s planing mill on Washington Street in early 1873. In March of that year, city workers plowed up the old macadam and oyster shell paving within a single block of King Street, between Wentworth and Hasell Streets, and graded the surface “so that the middle was considerably higher than the edges.” Atop the sandy soil they laid a broad field of interlocking, wedge-shaped, rectangular wooden blocks, then filled the voids with small pebbles and covered the blocks with a generous coating of pitch or tar, probably supplied by one of the coal gas plants illuminating the streets and homes of Charleston at that time.[12] The resulting surface was deemed a “perfect success” in April 1873, admired especially by local bicyclists, but City Council did not extend or repeat the experiment.[13] 

Local officials did not articulate the reasons behind their reluctance to adopt the “noiseless” and relatively inexpensive patent wood block paving popular elsewhere during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, but some Charlestonians of that era expressed concerns about the material’s sanitary qualities. Water, urine, feces, and other organic debris could seep into the crevices between and below the blocks, where their decomposition might accelerate the natural decay of the wooden fibers. During the hot and humid summers months, as Charlestonians once believed, the noxious vapors arising from such subterranean decay poisoned the atmosphere and destroyed the health of persons living nearby. This widely-accepted theory prejudiced public officials against wooden paving blocks, and, more generally, dictated the proper season for street maintenance. An ordinance adopted by City Council in 1853 and enforced into the twentieth century made it illegal to “dig up, open or disturb the surface of the earth, within the limits of the city, between the 1st day of June and the 1st day of October, in any year, for the purpose of paving the streets, or1 excavating for drains, or laying down gas or other pipes, or of carrying on any other public improvements.” Wooden blocks provided a relatively cheap, quiet, and smooth paving solution in the 1870s, but concern for their potential impact on public health induced local officials to persevere with materials less desirable but more familiar.[14]

In short, Charleston’s municipal government of the post-war years strove to make the best use of its limited paving resources. The depressed economy precluded the purchase of robust quantities of cut stone blocks and the importation of large volumes of Trinidadian asphaltum, while sanitary fears dampened local enthusiasm for cheaper alternatives like wooden block paving. When the economy finally improved a few years later, however, voters elected a slate of progressive candidates who promised better streets. As we’ll discuss in the next episode, Charlestonians of the succeeding generation witnessed the arrival of granite blocks, vitrified bricks, and sheets of asphalt that heralded the rise of a rejuvenated Southern metropolis.