Colleton Square: Prelude to Market Street

Colleton Square is a place-name rarely heard in Charleston today, but millions of people tramp through its historic boundaries every year. Granted to an aristocratic English family in 1681, this creek-side tract was subdivided in the 1740s by investors who envisioned a residential and commercial neighborhood fronting a working canal. Their efforts flourished after the removal of intrusive fortifications, but the subsequent transformation of the canal into Market Street at the dawn of the nineteenth century obscured memories of the colonial square.

Readers familiar with the “Grand Model” of urban Charleston will recognize Colleton Square as a later amendment to the 1672 plan of a then-unnamed town on the peninsula called Oyster Point. Following the removal of South Carolina’s provincial government from its original seat at Albemarle Point (now Charles Towne Landing State Historic Site) to Oyster Point in the spring of 1680, the Lords Proprietors of Carolina in London sent additional instructions to their deputies at “New Charles Town”: The surveyor general was to reserve at least five acres of contiguous land within the new capital for each of the eight proprietors (or at least those who requested such a tract), taking care to preserve “the regularity & streightness of the streets” established in the Grand Model of the town nearly a decade earlier.[1]

According to instructions, the resident chief surveyor delineated an irregular tract containing nine acres, two roods, and twenty-one perches of land near the northeastern boundary of Charles Town, immediately south of an unnamed street that later became known as Pinckney Street and east of the street now called Meeting Street. This vacant parcel, identified as Lot No. 80 in the Grand Model, included both highland and marshland abutting a serpentine creek flowing into the tidal waters of the Cooper River. To the immediate northeast of the creek’s mouth, the surveyor created two smaller waterfront lots numbered 50 and 51, each containing approximately half an acre (like most of the other lots in the nascent town). The proprietors’ deputies in Carolina then issued grants for this land on 5 March 1680/1 (on the Julian Calendar), assigning the larger Lot No. 80 to Sir Peter Colleton (1635–1694), one of the original Lords Proprietors of Carolina, and lots 50 and 51 to his younger brothers, James and Thomas Colleton.[2]

The ten-plus acres granted to members of the affluent Colleton family might have acquired the name “Colleton Square” by the turn of the eighteenth century, but few in the neighborhood had occasion to use that name. Sir Peter and his brothers and their respective heirs ignored these relatively small, urban possessions for more than half a century, preferring instead to focus their energies on the development of large rural plantations in both Carolina and Barbados that used enslaved laborers to augment the family’s wealth.[3]

In the meantime, the development of Charles Town (renamed Charleston in 1783) during the later years of the seventeenth century gradually revealed a number of geographic anomalies in the Grand Model. The original surveyors of the 1670s had evidently underestimated the quantity of acres in the town’s northeastern quadrant, to the north of modern Queen Street, and their mistakes on paper were compounded on the ground by the mis-placement of numerous lot boundaries during the 1680s. The creek running through Sir Peter’s Colleton’s Lot No. 80, for example, was originally depicted as extending westwardly from the Cooper River to modern King Street, while later residents observed that the tidal waters barely reached modern Meeting Street. To address one facet of a much larger cartographic conundrum, the provincial government of the early 1690s created a row of additional lots sandwiched between the western edge of Lot No. 80 and the east side of modern Meeting Street—a site now occupied most conspicuously by the City of Charleston’s Market Hall.[4] That area was not originally part of Colleton Square, but it was annexed thereto in the late 1740s.

The lack of a Colleton presence at Colleton Square fostered the rise of a misleading placename by the end of the seventeenth century. During the 1680s and 1690s, Colonel Robert Daniel obtained grants for several Grand Model lots abutting the southeastern edge of the creek flowing through Colleton Square, which, coincidentally, marked the northern terminus of the quay that became East Bay Street. Daniel’s long tenure of that site inspired locals to identify the Colleton-owned watercourse as “Daniel’s Creek.” Early residents of the town might have traversed the unimproved margins of Daniel’s Creek to bathe, fish, or cast shrimp nets, but there was no bridge or causeway to facilitate vehicular traffic across the ten-acre site. Following the construction of Craven Bastion around the year 1709 (now under the steps of the U.S. Custom House at 200 East Bay Street), that brick landmark effectively served as the northern terminus of urban Charleston.

Maps and plats of Charleston from the first half of the eighteenth century indicate that most residents lived and worked within a rather compact geographic range between the south side of Tradd Street and the north side of Queen Street. While the town’s population began to expand in the 1730s and residents erased the old earthen fortifications, Colleton Square remained a relatively undisturbed landscape. Its natural appearance contrasted sharply with that of Rhettsbury, William Rhett’s suburban estate on the north side of modern Pinckney Street, and his bustling maritime center at the waterfront site known as Rhett’s Point or “The Hard.”

The first step towards the development of Colleton Square occurred in July 1736, when Sir Peter’s grandson, John Colleton of Fairlawn Barony (in Monck’s Corner), sold Lot No. 80 to a group of investors.[5] The deed-of-sale names only George Hunter (ca. 1700–1755), a Scots-born professional surveyor, but later documents indicate that he purchased the nine-plus acres using funds contributed by two silent partners, attorneys Thomas Ellery (ca. 1700–1739) and Charles Pinckney (1699–1758). The trio envisioned a residential and commercial subdivision standing along the northern edge of meandering Daniel’s Creek, which they planned to transform into a navigable canal. Descriptions of their goals and proposed methods do not survive from 1736, but a number of useful hints appear in subsequent records.

Under George Hunter’s professional guidance, the trio of investors began to lay out streets on the landscape shortly after their purchase. Visual evidence of their work first appears in a well-known map of Charleston that was drawn by Hunter (identified as “G. H.”) and published in London in June 1739 under the title The Ichnography of Charles-Town, at High Water. Hunter was a highly-skilled, life-long bachelor draftsman who became Surveyor General of South Carolina in 1743, and worked closely with the provincial government for twenty-five years before his death in 1755. We can, therefore, embrace his 1739 illustration of urban Charleston and his own property therein as a reasonably accurate representation of their appearance at that moment.

The basic outline of Colleton Square in the 1739 Ichnography resembles that shown in the Grand Model of a half-century earlier, with the addition of Craven Bastion standing next to the southeast corner of the square. Daniel’s Creek appears as a meandering flood plain, approximately three hundred feet wide at the mouth, extending from the Cooper River westward to Meeting Street. A linear street or canal, approximately forty feet wide, follows an east-west axis through the center of the creek, like modern Market Street, extending from Church Street eastward to a long, narrow bridge over the mouth of Daniel’s Creek. The bridge definitely existed in some form by 1739, though the precise date of its construction is lost. The street or canal running to and under the bridge, however, was a figment of George Hunter’s imagination at that moment. Later evidence provided by Hunter himself demonstrates that the street or canal now called Market Street was created some years later.

The 1739 Ichnography of Charles-Town also depicts a rectangular grid of four streets in the northern half of Colleton Square, stretching between East Bay and Church Streets. A caption identifies them as Thomas, Ellery, Charles, and Pinckney Streets, three of which survive on the modern landscape. Pinckney Street (33 feet wide) appears on the Grand Model of the 1670s and evidently acquired its present name during the subdivision of Colleton Square the late 1730s. Charles Street (33 feet wide) became part of Anson Street two centuries ago. Thomas Street (20 feet wide), more commonly identified as Hunter Street in documents of the 1740s, was renamed Guignard Street a generation later. Ellery Street (20 feet wide) was erased by the City of Charleston in 1840, but it once followed an east-west line parallel to and 150 feet south of Guignard Street.[6]

Another useful illustration published in the summer of 1739, known as the Exact Prospect of Charles Town, includes a small glimpse of Colleton Square at the extreme right-hand edge of the image. Just behind and to the right of Craven Bastion, one can see part of a bridge supported by wooden posts, evidently extending northwardly over the channel of Daniel’s Creek. As many frustrated pedestrians and drivers well know, the site of that early bridge is now under the constricted intersection of East Bay and Market Streets.

Later in the year 1739, after the bloody slave uprising known as the Stono Rebellion, Charlestonians learned that Britain had declared war against Spain. That European conflict, later called the War of Jenkins’ Ear, or the War of the Asiento, extended into the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic waters of the Southern colonies, but South Carolina’s provincial government felt relatively safe during the early years of the war. For the moment, the owners of Colleton Square continued their development scheme without interruption.

A more robust depiction of Colleton Square survives from the spring of 1743, when George Hunter drew a plat illustrating the initial subdivision of the property he shared with Charles Pinckney and Ann Ellery—widow of Thomas, who died in 1739. The remaining partners divided the nine-plus acres into approximately three dozen lots of various shapes and sizes arranged in three categories—high land fronting the aforementioned streets, marsh land in the creek bed, and water lots fronting the Cooper River. Each investor received a roughly-equal mix of three lot types in his/her respective share.[7]

Contemporary with Hunter’s 1743 plat of the subdivision of Colleton Square, the surviving partners petitioned the South Carolina General Assembly for logistical assistance. The three investors submitted a hand-drawn plan of the site and explained that they had initiated construction of a wooden bridge over Daniel’s Creek because they and their neighbors to the north “have no way of communication with the said Bay Street or other parts of the town without going a great way round about.” They had spent significant time and money “in building the said bridge, as far as it is yet finished,” but had reached an impasse. Now they were willing to finish the bridge and extend East Bay Street northward through their property and to the town boundary “if they should be reimbursed the expense of building the said bridge and finishing the same.” Several of their neighbors to the north had agreed to share the expenses of that work if the government would accept all future responsibility for the maintenance of the bridge and the northward continuation of East Bay Street. Members of the Commons House of Assembly appointed a committee to investigate the matter in March 1743, drafted a bill for the project the following October, and in May 1744 ratified a law to finish the bridge and extend East Bay Street.[8]

The surviving engrossed manuscript of that 1744 law includes a hand-colored illustration of Colleton Square that was evidently executed by George Hunter and presented to the General Assembly with the aforementioned petition in March 1743. In contrast to Hunter’s contemporary plan of the square’s subdivision, the plat annexed to the 1744 law includes no streets beyond East Bay Street, nor any canal running under the narrow wooden bridge that extended several hundred feet across the mouth of the creek. Hunter and his copartners might have staked-out the several new streets and lot boundaries in the northern half of Colleton Square, just below Pinckney Street, but the waterway known as Daniel’s Creek was still a serpentine creek flooding a tidal plain approximately twice the breadth of modern Market Street.[9]

The original copy of Hunter’s 1743 plat of the subdivision of Colleton Square does not survive, and all subsequent copies include some confusion about the labeling of various lots. Nevertheless, numerous recorded deeds demonstrate that the three investors began selling and further subdividing their respective portions of Colleton Square in 1744. Adjacent Grand Model lots numbered 50 and 51, granted to James and Thomas Colleton in 1681, were not part of George Hunter’s subdivision of Lot No. 80, but their development commenced around the same time.

Hunter’s first sale in Colleton Square was to a friend named Robert Raper (ca. 1710–ca. 1779), who acted as managing agent for the Carolina plantations owned by John Colleton of Hanover Square, London. In May 1744, Hunter sold to Raper a prominent lot at the northwest corner of Hunter Street and East Bay. The western edge of Mr. Raper’s lot abutted an unnamed north-south street that appears in Hunter’s 1743 subdivision plat, stretching southwardly from Hunter Street to the canal in Daniel’s Creek. Several years later, Raper purchased all of the land on the west side of this unnamed street, which acquired the name Raper’s Alley before the American Revolution. Later historians and city officials unfamiliar with the colonial career of Robert Raper subsequently altered the street’s spelling to Rafer, Roper, and other variations, but the legitimate name is in fact Raper’s Alley.[10]

One of Charles Pinckney’s first sales in Colleton Square, executed in August 1744, was to a Huguenot cooper named Gabriel Guignard. To the French tradesman who owned a number of enslaved barrel-makers, Pinckney sold three contiguous lots forming the northwest corner of Grand Model Lot No. 80. The property in question abutted Pinckney Street to the north, Charles (now Anson) Street to the east, Ellery Street to the south, and extended westward to a boundary later defined by Maiden Lane. Monsieur Guignard thereafter extended Hunter Street (20 feet wide) through the center of this rectangular parcel, but called the extension Guignard Street. To provide additional access through the site from the south to north, he opened French Alley, twelve feet wide, approximately where Church Street might have run if it continued northwardly across Daniel’s Creek. The Frenchman immediately thereafter subdivided his two-and-a-half acre rectangle, which was occasionally called Guignard Square, and sold a number of smaller lots to tradesmen and investors like himself.[11]

Also in the summer of 1744, Charlestonians learned that France had joined Spain in the ongoing war against Britain and its allies. The combined strength of Britain’s enemies alarmed Carolinians, who feared an invasion like that attempted by French and Spanish forces in 1706. After months of legislative debate and military planning, the South Carolina General Assembly ratified a law in late May 1745 appropriating money for the construction of a new line of earthen fortifications around the town, fronted by a watery moat. These new works, which we’ll discuss in a future program, included several detached components designed to protect Charleston’s south, east, north, and west sides. On the north side, the government ordered a group of commissioners “to cut and open a moat in or through the neck of land and marsh from Craven’s Bastion on the north end of the Bay-street to the work house in Charlestown [east end of Magazine Street] . . . of the mean breadth of thirty-six feet and as deep as possible; and also to erect one or two bastions to clear and command the said moat.”[12]

The supervising commissioners advertised in June 1745 for contractors to perform the necessary trade work, and announced their desire to hire “60 or 70 good Negroes and labourers to dig the moat.”[13] Work commenced immediately in the muddy margins of Daniel’s Creek in Colleton Square, where enslaved laborers raised an earthen rampart with wooden revetments that extended westwardly from approximately the present intersection of Market and Anson Streets to a point beyond the western end of Magazine Street. On the patch of dry land between Meeting Street and Maiden Lane, now occupied by Market Hall, the commissioners raised a large, angular bastion equipped with two cannons.

The owners of lots in Colleton Square might have been annoyed by the transformation of Daniel’s Creek into a muddy rampart fronted by a moat thirty-six feet wide and six feet deep, but the aforementioned bastion stood to the west of their property. In March 1747, however, Charles Pinckney joined with a fellow planter named Henry Peronneau to purchase the ground under the new bastion, consisting of four Grand Model lots on the east side of Meeting Street, abutting the original western edge of Colleton Square. The two investors then subdivided the four lots into fifteen smaller parcels, three of which were under the bastion. The remaining twelve lots formed a rectangle bounded to the west by Meeting Street, to the south by Ellery Street, to the east by Maiden Lane, and to the north by the extension of Hunter or Guignard Street. In June 1747, they began marketing these twelve lots as a new subdivision called “Peronneau Square,” adjacent to both Colleton Square and the sub-subdivision occasionally called Guignard Square.[14]

At that same moment in 1747, Charles Pinckney commenced building his own stately brick mansion at the southwest corner of East Bay and Hunter or Guignard Streets.[15] Joseph Black, the master bricklayer for Pinckney’s town house, had in 1746 purchased a nearby lot from Gabriel Guignard, and later purchased another lot in Peronneau Square from Pinckney.[16] The enslaved carpenter and joiner who supervised the interior work of Pinckney’s mansion—a man called Quash who adopted the name John Williams—gained his freedom after the house was finished in 1750. Shortly thereafter, he purchased (on credit) two lots in Peronneau Square, next door to the bricklayers Christopher and Joseph Black. More precisely, the urban property of John Williams once formed the northwest corner of Ellery Street and Maiden Lane.[17]

Throughout the 1750s and 1760s, the continuing sales and partitioning of lots in Colleton Square spurred the rise of more houses, workshops, and rental tenements. Britain’s long war with Spain and France ended in the autumn of 1748, but the earthen fortifications erected in 1745 lingered on the landscape for many more years. Although the crumbling berms of earth impeded both travel and development, they also served as a useful source of dirt needed to fill low-lying areas around the town. In the summer of 1751, Charles Pinckney complained to the provincial government about the earthen bastion standing on his property at the western edge of Colleton Square. Pinckney, a patriotic British subject, did not complain about the bastion when he purchased the ground on which it stood, but he objected to his neighbors stealing his mud from the abandoned fortifications. After measuring the bastion in question, calculating the volume of earth contained therein, and pricing the labor necessary to cart that volume of earth across town, Pinkney submitted an invoice to the provincial government for the cost of replenishing his marshland in Colleton Square.[18]

In May 1766, eighteen years after the end of the War of Jenkins’ Ear, the South Carolina General Assembly authorized the demolition of the remnants of the earthen fortifications erected around Charleston in 1745.[19] That act undoubtedly brought relief to the residents of Colleton Square, who must have been overjoyed by news of the government’s next neighborhood improvement. In April 1767, the provincial legislature ratified an act to fund the construction of a larger and more permanent bridge over the mouth of Daniel’s Creek, adjacent to Craven Bastion. The text of the law even specified its dimensions and materials: “a substantial brick bridge and causey [i.e., causeway], to be cased on each side with brick or stone, and filled up with earth, of the width of twenty-two feet in the clear, with a sufficient and secure foot path, well posted in, on one side thereof, and having a proper brick arch under the same.”[20]

Bricklayers Anthony Toomer and Timothy Crosby won the contract for building the new bridge, which teams of enslaved masons completed within a year’s time.[21] Soon after its construction, the 1768 bridge became known as “Governor’s Bridge.” At first glance that name might seem like a stately tribute to South Carolina’s penultimate royally-appointed governor, twenty-seven-year-old Lord Charles Greville Montagu, but the name probably represents an ironic jibe at the man. The mighty bridge, like the popularity of the young governor, rested atop a weak foundation, and sank by degrees, month after month. In August 1770, for example, Colleton-Square resident Robert Raper advertised to sell a “sailing-boat” that he could no longer use, “as he can no longer get her through the Arch of the Bridge commonly called the Governor’s, both sides whereof are considerably sunk, but especially the westernmost, which is already two feet two inches lower than the easternmost.”[22] Like the governor’s declining career in South Carolina, the expensive bridge was, at best, a disappointment.

Despite their shortcomings, Governor’s Bridge and the landscape of Colleton Square survived the ravages of the American Revolution. The state government ratified the incorporation of the City of Charleston in August 1783, at which time the new City Council assumed responsibility for all the bridges, streets, and public spaces within the capital. To create a more commodious market place for residents, members of City Council negotiated with the heirs of Charles Pinckney, Thomas and Ann Ellery, George Hunter, Robert Raper, and their neighbors on both sides of the canal formerly known as Daniel’s Creek. Their conversations bore fruit in March 1788, when six property owners donated to the public a swath of Colleton Square measuring one hundred feet wide and extending nearly half a mile in length, from Meeting Street to the channel of the Cooper River.

The creation of Market Street in 1788 signaled both the culmination of a century-long narrative and the beginning of a new era of change. City Council immediately began filling the canal through Colleton Square, proceeding from west to east, and eventually covered the former creek bed with a succession of sheds to house vendors selling perishable foodstuffs. We’ll explore all of that development in future episodes. In the meantime, I encourage you to explore the bustling area surrounding modern Market Street and try to visualize the early landscape of a forgotten neighborhood once called Colleton Square.

NEXT: Charleston’s Forgotten First Orphan House, 1790–94
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