The Rise of Asphalt Roadways in Twentieth-Century Charleston

Modern travelers across the city and county of Charleston roll across a continuous ribbon of asphalt that facilitates an expanding cycle of population growth and cultural diversity. The roots of this blacktop conveyor belt extend back more than century, when a series of obscure political changes unleashed an unprecedented burst of infrastructure development that literally paved the road to Charleston’s present economic prosperity.  

The first automobiles in Charleston appeared at the dawn of the twentieth century and their numbers multiplied exponentially in succeeding years. Drivers traversing the sparsely-populated Lowcountry at that time faced a challenging landscape dominated by dirt roads and aging wooden bridges. Granite block surfaces in Meeting and King Streets funneled travelers into an urban streetscape teeming with pedestrians, bicycles, horses, carriages, and carts moving across a motley variety of paving materials. Although most of the city streets remained unimproved at the turn of the century, the principal thoroughfares used for daily commerce were paved with some form of robust surface. Asphalt had been the preferred paving material across the United States since the 1870s, and the city of Charleston had made two small experiments with “sheet asphalt” in 1894–95, but the exotic material was too expensive for more extensive applications in the Palmetto City. Granite blocks had dominated Mayor Courtenay’s aggressive street-improvement campaign of the 1880s, replacing generations of cobblestone paving, but the city imported no further granite blocks for paving purposes after the 1890s. 

To improve the flow of traffic within the city at the dawn of the twentieth century, civic leaders turned first to a relatively new product known as vitrified brick. The term “vitrified” denotes a clay product identical in size and shape to a normal mass-produced brick, but has been modified to render its surface impervious to water and other liquids. In this respect, vitrified brick compares favorably with stone as a durable paving material, and has the added advantages of being cheaper to produce and more regular in shape and size than cut stone. Use of these specialized bricks in American roadways commenced in Charleston, West Virginia, in 1870 and then spread rapidly to numerous other communities in subsequent years.[1]

The municipal government of Charleston, South Carolina, began investigating the possibility of using vitrified bricks for street paving at the twilight of the nineteenth century, following a trend adopted by a number of other Southern cities during the 1890s. The first local trial of this novel material commenced in 1901, when city workers bricked one block of George Street, between King and Meeting Streets.[2] Local travelers embraced the resulting uniform and relatively smooth surface, inspiring the city to green-light a slew of further vitrified brick projects. Between 1903 and 1911, the city imported several million vitrified bricks to pave all of George, Cleveland, Columbus, Hayne, and St. Philip Streets, as well as portions of America, Broad, Calhoun, Cannon, Church, King, Rutledge, and Wentworth Streets.[3] Some of this work displaced granite blocks laid a generation earlier, which city workers then re-laid in other streets in need of improvement. 

The cumulative length of these vitrified brick roadways was just shy of six miles, all laid atop a bed of local sand like the older surfaces of cobblestone and granite block paving.[4] The local Chamber of Commerce endorsed the bricks in 1911 as “the cheapest permanent pavement” available, and among the most “easily repaired after having been cut into for the purpose of repairing water and gas pipes, drains, etc.”[5] By that time, however, city officials had discovered that the brick roadways were not as durable under heavy traffic as they had expected. Furthermore, the sandy foundation supporting them was prone to displacement and wash-out as the volume and weight of automobile traffic increased during the early years of the twentieth century.[6] With one minor exception, the city laid no new brick roadways after 1911.[7] The best-preserved evidence of this brief campaign now lies in Church Street, between Water Street and South Bay, which was paved in 1908 with “Catskill” bricks imported from New York. 

The conclusion of the city’s flirtation with vitrified bricks also marked an important milestone in the history of mobility in Charleston. After nearly a century of street paving work that commenced in 1818, the total length of improved roadways within the city limits finally surpassed that of unpaved roads by the end of 1911.[8] The municipal government had spent several millions of dollars in tax revenue over successive generations to pave the port city’s principal commercial and residential thoroughfares, but the slow growth of the municipal tax base, combined with a tenacious local adherence to a dwindling agricultural economy, continued to retard the modernization of Charleston during the early years of the twentieth century.

Concerns for road noise as well as economy influenced the choice of material for the city’s next experiment in street surfacing. Echoing modest local trials made in 1873 and 1888, laborers in 1912 commenced a more extensive campaign to pave sections of various streets with creosoted wooden blocks laid on modern concrete foundations and grouted with asphalt filler. Their initial work covered just two zones of heavy traffic, in St. Philip Street between Calhoun and Vanderhorst Streets, and in King Street from Ann Street to Columbus Street. Between the autumn of 1913 and the end of 1914, wooden blocks displaced granite roadways in Broad Street, from East Bay to Meeting Street; Hasell Street, from Meeting to King Street; Rutledge Avenue, from Bull to Calhoun Street; Cumberland Street, between Meeting and Church Streets; Market Street, between Meeting and King Streets; in Meeting Street, from Calhoun to Broad Street; and in King Street, from Broad to Hasell Street, and from Columbus to Line Street.[9]

The brief burst of wood-block paving in urban Charleston between 1912 and 1914, covering a total of 2.22 miles of roadway, was a curious, retrograde endeavor replicated by other communities pursuing similar budget-conscious methods of improving urban streets.[10] Viewed from the broader perspective of paving history over the past three centuries, this episode also represents a sort of red-herring—a relatively inconsequential diversion from the principal storyline. The road to mobility nirvana was paved with asphalt, and some civic leaders active at that time were determined to sidestep obstacles blocking the path to future prosperity. 

Mayor John Patrick Grace, elected to office in late 1911, had campaigned on a progressive platform that promised to jettison moribund political traditions and pursue modern solutions to community needs. Having proposed a new method of funding a more comprehensive street paving program, Mayor Grace used contacts within the state capital at Columbia to secure a constitutional referendum on local ballots in November 1912. The change approved by the majority of Charlestonians that autumn empowered the municipal government to assess one quarter of all future street paving work on the owners of land abutting the roadways in question. City Council had briefly floated this concept in 1792, and Mayor John Wagener had proposed such a change in 1872, but civic leaders in Charleston had long ignored a strategy that resulted in well-paved streetscapes in many other communities.[11] 

The success of Mayor Grace’s 1912 referendum empowered city officials to plan a robust slate of roadway improvements to commence in the spring of 1913. Fortunately for local residents and visitors, the dawn of this new era of street paving coincided with another economic development—the diminishing price of asphalt. Budget-conscious Charlestonians of the previous generation had admired the celebrated paving material used in other, more affluent communities, but considered it prohibitively expensive at home. The price of naturally-occurring bituminous asphalt at the end of the nineteenth century reflected its relative scarcity and the expense of transportation from foreign suppliers like the island of Trinidad. Charleston also lacked both a local plant to prepare the raw materials and the specialized machinery necessary for the application of sheet asphalt. In 1901, for example, when local investors sought to pave roadways and footpaths within the campus of the South Carolina Inter-State and West Indian Exposition (now the site of Hampton Park), they hired the same Boston asphalt company that had paved one-half mile of East and South Battery Streets in 1894.[12] 

During the early years of the twentieth century, however, agents of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey constructed a sizeable refinery plant on Charleston Neck, immediately north of Magnolia Cemetery, a project that inspired local contracting firms like the Simons-Mayrant Company to procure the expensive equipment necessary for street paving. By the time the Grace administration began planning its grand paving endeavors, the business of transforming local stores of crude oil into a viscous product suitable for street paving had lowered the cost and raised the possibility of paving the entire city with asphalt.[13]

Starting in 1913, Charleston’s municipal government went on a sustained street-paving spree, mostly using sheet asphalt laid atop a concrete foundation. Their initial focus was not the major commercial thoroughfares, as in earlier paving campaigns. Rather, the city began paving a variety of shorter streets in response to petitions submitted by property owners willing to share the expense with the city. This work, augmented by the aforementioned installation of several wood-block roadways, displaced a number of older granite blocks and vitrified bricks that workers transferred and re-laid in other deserving streets. Because the city’s object was to reduce the milage of unimproved streets on the peninsula as quickly as possible, however, the optimistic speed of the asphalt work occasionally paved over the older surface materials without proper excavation.[14] 

The momentum of Mayor Grace’s asphalt street paving campaign fostered significant changes in local mobility that were apparent to anyone traversing the peninsular city. In upper Meeting Street, north of Spring Street, for example, the old oyster-shell road created in 1868 was transformed in to a seamless ribbon of asphalt in 1916. Voters ejected J. P. Grace from office that same year, however, and the United States’ subsequent involvement in the Great War in Europe stalled local infrastructure improvement for several years. By the end of 1917, the same year the state General Assembly created the South Carolina Highway Department, the progressive city of Charleston boasted a total of six miles of sheet asphalt paving.[15]

The war in Europe diverted materials and labor away from domestic infrastructure for the entirety of 1918, but the local campaign to spread asphalt across the streets of urban Charleston resumed the following year. Voters also re-elected Mayor Grace at the end of 1919, after which the pace of blacktop paving accelerated rapidly. His administration scored another historic milestone at the end of 1922, when asphalt became the predominant road surface within the city limits, covering more than thirteen of the city’s seventy-four miles of urban roadways. The pace of asphalt paving increased during the subsequent administration of Mayor Thomas P. Stoney and reached another milestone in 1926. By the end of that year, sheet asphalt covered forty-four miles of city streets—more than half of the urban total. At the same time, the total length of streets paved with cobblestones, granite blocks, vitrified bricks, and wood blocks declined with each passing year. Coincidentally, the final mention of an urban wooden plank road, in Concord Street just south of Laurens Street, appeared in a 1926 report recommending its removal.[16]

The Charleston Evening Post celebrated the city’s paving progress with a glowing article published in August 1926. “Within ten years the metropolis of the Carolinas has progressed from one of the worst paved to one of the best paved cities in the South,” said editor Manning J. Rubin, a transformation, he observed, “made possible through the law which requires the owners of abutting property to pay for street improvement.” “The march of progress and material improvements has not been at the expense of the ‘old Charleston’ that Charleston reveres and preserves. But it has made the city a better place in which to live, and more attractive to residents and visitors. Folks who cast aspersions on the city simply demonstrate their ignorance of what has taken place. They are blind to the metamorphosis of Charleston. . . . It has been only within the past few years that such important arteries of traffic as Meeting, Calhoun, King, Ashley, Cannon, Spring and Columbus streets, and others were paved with asphalt.”[17]

Among the notable thoroughfares we might add to Mr. Rubin’s list is historic Broad Street, which received its first blacktop coating, and its first-ever continuous surface treatment from river to river, in 1928. Asphalt paving and other street work continued into 1929 and 1930, but thereafter the municipal government froze all capital improvements as the Great Depression paralyzed the national economy. The ensuing World War also siphoned away labor and petroleum products for military purposes, although Charleston’s City Council used federal money in 1942 to pave the west end of Calhoun Street, adjacent to a temporary U.S. naval facility at the city marina. Beyond this work and occasional asphalt patching, the city performed no street paving from 1931 through 1945.[18]

In the middle of this long paving hiatus, Charlestonians witnessed another significant moment in the history of local mobility. The rapid proliferation of asphalt paving across the peninsular city during the 1920s convinced the operators of the local streetcar network that diesel buses would serve local riders better than the older electric trolleys, which clashed daily with the increasing volume of automobile traffic. City Council approved the change in January 1938, after the trolley company promised to remove all steel rails embedded in various streets and to repair the resulting damage to the asphalt paving. The old streetcars disappeared that February, as I described in a previous program (see Episode No 114), but the work of removing the steel rails was never finished, and the city government effectively abandoned the issue in 1948. Nearly a century later, perambulating shoegazers can spot rusty rails peeking through cracks in the asphalt in several downtown streets.[19]

The Depression years were not totally devoid of local paving progress. The federal Works Progress Administration worked with state and county officials in the 1930s to launch a “farm to market” program to pave a number of secondary roads across the rural Lowcountry. Among their notable achievements was the old Rockville road, renamed Maybank Highway in January 1938, when it became the first asphalt road connecting Wadmalaw, John’s, and James Islands to the Ashley River Bridge and the City of Charleston.[20] A few months later, the South Carolina General Assembly ratified a law to expand the jurisdiction of the state Highway Department into towns and cities to ensure smooth urban connections with various newly-paved rural roads. To this end in January 1939, Charleston’s City Council adopted a resolution ceding responsibility for the future maintenance of several historic urban thoroughfares thereafter identified as parts of U.S. Highways 17, 52, 78, and 701.[21] 

Although relieved of the duty of maintaining most of King, Meeting, Spring, and Lee Streets in 1939, Charleston’s municipal government re-launched an aggressive street paving campaign shortly after the conclusion of World War II. The city’s newest suburbs in the northwestern quadrant, above the Citadel’s new campus, were the first to receive new asphalt surfacing in 1946, but the paving momentum slowed considerably the following year.[22] While examining various bids from paving contractors in the spring of 1948, city officials paused to consider a radically new method of financing the work without using municipal funds and without assessing the owners of abutting property. The state Highway Department was, at that moment, expanding its federally-funded “farm-to-market” program of improving rural roads and linking them to cities and towns. If the city government ceded responsibility for more urban streets to the Highway Department, a dozen or two at a time, year after year, the people of Charleston would enjoy the benefits of improved roadways and lower tax burdens. City Council formally proposed this idea to local legislators in July 1948 and gained state approval for the transfer that September. Beginning in the spring of 1949 and continuing annually into the 1950s, the City of Charleston ceded responsibility for the maintenance of most of the city’s urban roadways to the state Highway Department.[23]

The city’s mid-twentieth-century partnership with the state’s road maintenance program, which has continued to the present day, does not extend to the narrowest lanes and alleys created in colonial times, nor to streets paved with historic materials. Travelers in the southernmost quarters of downtown Charleston will find several quaint pathways lined with cobblestones, vitrified bricks, and granite blocks, all of which survived through design rather than negligence. The most familiar of these historic thoroughfares is Chalmers Street, originally a pair of colonial-era shortcuts known as Chalmers Alley (on the east end) and Beresford Street or Mulatto Alley (on the west end) that were widened, straightened, and combined into the present Chalmers Street in 1823 and paved with cobblestones in 1852.[24] Residents abutting the lumpy roadway during Mayor Grace’s modernization campaign of the 1920s refused to relinquish its antique surface. As Manning Rubin of the Evening Post observed in 1926, “these cobblestones, harking back to an early period, help give Chalmers Street the atmosphere of an old European city. They stand today as an interesting relic of Charleston’s older civilization, and it is felt that the few blocks of cobblestones on Chalmers Street should be retained. That street is one that holds genuine charm for lovers of the old—it is suggestive of the picturesque old Charleston.”[25] 

Historic street paving, as locals realized in the 1920s, contributed materially to the broader contemporary campaign to market Charleston to visitors from near and far. Residents abutting Maiden Lane, between Pinckney and Hasell Streets, expressed a similar sentiment in 1926 and, like their neighbors in Chalmers Street, successfully preserved its historic character.[26] In subsequent decades, the city expended significant funds to maintain the cobblestones here and elsewhere, and in 1967 adopted the unprecedented and labor-intensive policy of cementing the stones in place to prevent their theft.[27] Similar concrete treatments were applied to the cobblestones in North and South Adger’s Wharf in 1988, and the footpath of Philadelphia Alley in 2005, providing residents and legions of tourists with misleading ideas about the look and feel of Charleston’s earliest paving material.[28] The “charm” of these antique roadways inspired the postmodern cobble-and-brick mashup in George Burges Lane, created in 1992 to mimic a nineteenth-century roadway linking George Street to the newly-created Menotti Street.[29] 

Charleston’s municipal government of the late twentieth century could afford the patience and expense of coddling a handful of streets paved with antiquated materials largely because it had relinquished to the state Highway Department the burden of paving and improving what is now nearly a hundred miles of urban roadways. The continuation of this public partnership into the twenty-first century, coupled with the persistent dominance of asphalt paving, has eroded our awareness of an important facet of local history. Although most of Charleston’s urban thoroughfares have retained their original breadth and length since the city’s founding in the late seventeenth century, the evolving character of their respective surfaces over the past three hundred years has facilitated significant advances in the comfort and speed of local mobility. 

Twenty-first century Charleston is a hive of fast-moving vehicles, motoring across a network of smooth surfaces that mask a matrix of historic pathways that we casually take for granted. This scenario represents a relatively recent phenomenon, however, one that will continue to evolve in the future. Proponents of new strategies to calm traffic and those seeking alternatives to impervious, petroleum-based asphalt might profit from a brief review of Charleston’s street-paving history. 

NEXT: The Waterfront Markets of Colonial Charleston
PREVIOUSLY: The Granite Roadways of Gilded-Age Charleston
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