The Beef Market under Charleston's City Hall

For nearly a century before Charleston’s municipal headquarters moved to the northeast corner of Meeting and Broad Streets, residents gathered daily at this site to procure meat and other foodstuffs. The city abandoned this so-called “Beef Market” in 1789, following the construction of a new facility in Market Street, and the old market was briefly used for military purposes. Events associated with the Haitian Revolution triggered its reactivation in 1795, until fire consumed the old Beef Market in 1796 and cleared the site for the present bank building that became City Hall.

If you visit to the ground floor of Charleston’s City Hall today, you’ll see an attractive display that encapsulates the history of the site from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century. That installation was created in the recent past, following an extensive refurbishment of the building during the early years of the twenty-first century. While City Hall was closed and renovations commenced in the spring of 2004, a team of expert diggers scoured the soil both inside and outside the present building’s historic foundations. Led by famed archaeologist Martha Zierden of the Charleston Museum, the crew uncovered remnants of two market buildings that occupied the site during the eighteenth century, as well as a trove of animal bones and other artifacts that confirm the site’s colonial character.

The team’s archaeological report, published in 2005 by the Charleston Museum, and the current historical display on the ground floor of City Hall, opened in 2007, both contain a handful of relatively minor historical inaccuracies, but they also contain much new and valuable insight into the physical history of the site. In the course my archival research in recent years, I’ve uncovered a number of forgotten details about the markets that preceded City Hall, which weren’t available to the team excavating the site some twenty years ago. These facts, augmented by archaeological discoveries made in 2004, form a new and more complete picture of the old Beef Market under City Hall.

The site of Charleston’s City Hall forms the northeastern quadrant of Market Square, the central focus of the original plan or “Grand Model” of the town created ca. 1672 (see Episode No. 245). Although the early government of South Carolina reserved four lots at the intersection of Broad and Meeting Streets for public use, each measuring 120 feet by 134 feet, the northeastern quadrant remained vacant until the mid-1730s.[1] As I explained in Episode No. 254, the daily vending of meat, vegetables, and other comestibles in the earliest years of Charleston took place in the middle of Broad Street, slightly to the west of its intersection with East Bay Street. The town’s first market structure at the northeast quadrant of Market Square opened in the latter part of 1735, or perhaps the early days of 1736.[2] At that time, the remaining three quadrants were vacant. The first St. Philip’s Church, built at the southeast corner of Broad and Meeting Streets before 1700, was dismantled in the mid-1720s after the congregation moved to a new church at its present site on Church Street. The two quadrants on the west side of Meeting Street were obstructed by fortifications that were dismantled during the early 1730s (see Episode No 268).

The market building constructed in 1735 was a large rectangular structure built of brick, but no description of its architectural details survive. It was likely a tall single-story structure, the walls of which probably included a number of arched openings like those seen in the nineteenth-century market sheds standing in Market Street today. A map published in 1739, “The Ichnography of Charles Town,” shows this “New Market” (marked by the letter “N”) abutting the northeast corner of Broad and Meeting Streets, but a later description suggests the building actually encroached slightly into both streets.[3] That encroachment was confirmed during the excavations of 2004, when the team of archaeologists found part of the western wall of the 1735 market standing several feet to the south and west of the present City Hall.[4]

The first “market house,” as it was often called, did not occupy the entirety of the northeast quadrant of Market Square. Even if the building was as large as, say, fifty feet broad (north-south) and seventy-five feet long (east-west), it would have covered approximately one-quarter of that public lot. The remaining square footage to the north and east of the brick structure remained open for pedestrian passage and perhaps for the parking of carts bringing goods to market. Somewhere in this vacant space, probably to the east of the market building, the colonial government of South Carolina erected and maintained implements of punishment and public humiliation. Surviving market regulations and dozens of extant newspaper reports from the middle of the eighteenth century document the presence of a pillory and stocks at the market place. Malefactors convicted of petty crimes such as blaspheming, shoplifting, and assault were obliged to stand in the pillory or sit in the stocks for a few hours at a time while their neighbors pelted them with unsaleable provisions like rotten eggs and rancid fruit. A handful of reports also mention convicts being whipped “at the Market Square,” but such punishment might have taken place in the middle of the intersection rather than at a fixed whipping post standing near the market building.[5]

In May 1736, shortly after the construction of the first structure at Market Square, the South Carolina General Assembly ratified a statute to regulate activities at that public site. The law prescribed “that a market shall be held and kept in Charles-Town on every day of the week (except Sundays) at the place already appointed, established and laid out for a Market Place in the original plat or model of Charles-Town . . . for selling and exposing for sale beef, mutton, veal, lamb, pork and other butchery ware, poultry, fish, herbage, fruit and other good and wholesome provisions whatsoever, and for the resort of all or any [of] the inhabitants of this province, for buying and purchasing any the provisions sold or offered to sale therein.” The market was to be open “every day in the week (except Sundays) from the dawning of the day, all the year long,” but the law made a distinction between two types of customers. The 1736 act specified that the market was “principally intended for the benefit and advantage of house-keepers to buy for their own use at the first hand,” who were welcome to commence shopping at sunrise. Retailers who sought to purchase bulk commodities for resale, on the other hand, were prohibited from entering the market before nine o’clock in the morning.

A clerk appointed by the provincial government was obliged to be present during daylight hours to manage the various activities taking place under the market roof. The building’s interior was divided into rows of stalls—small, fixed tables—and the clerk collected fees from the numerous vendors who rented a personal workspace by the day, month, or year.[6] He was also responsible for inspecting and regulating the weights and measures used by vendors in the market. Sellers were obliged to pay the clerk a small fee for weighing sides of beef and other meats, and for putting his seal of approval on implements used to measure specific quantities like bushels, pecks, and pints.[7] The market law of 1736 did not mention the presence of a bell, but a 1739 revision of the market statute directed the clerk to ring the market bell at sunrise, to announce the opening of the day’s trade to individual customers, and again at 9 a.m. to signal the beginning of bulk sales to retailers.[8]

The 1739 “Ichnography of Charles Town” identified the recently-built structure at the northeast corner of Meeting and Broad Streets as the “New Market,” but its name evolved over the years. As early as January 1736, for example, it was called a “Meat Market,” even though it also hosted the sale of fruits, vegetables, and fish.[9] During the 1740s and beyond, it was more commonly known as the “Upper Market” to distinguish it from a smaller auxiliary marketplace standing on a wharf extending from the east end of Elliott Street into the Cooper River.[10] That “Bay Market,” as it was identified in the 1739 “Ichnography,” moved to the east end of Tradd Street in 1750 and became known as the “Lower Market” (we’ll discuss its history in a future program). Finally, the market at the northeast corner of Meeting and Broad Streets became known as the “Beef Market” by 1755, if not earlier.[11] Bovine flesh was not the only commodity sold there, of course, but the vending of beef at the “Upper Market” distinguished it from the Lower Market at the east end of Tradd Street, which sold only “small meats” such as veal, mutton, lamb, pork, and kid in addition to fruits and vegetables. This distinction between the two markets was reinforced in the autumn of 1764, when the Commissioners of the Markets announced that henceforth “all kinds of grain, potatoes, pease and mellons brought to Charles-Town for sale, for the use and consumption of the inhabitants of said town, shall be exposed to open sale within the limits of the Public Market upon the Bay, commonly called the Lower-Market, and not otherwise.”[12] The opening of Charleston’s first fish market at the east end of Queen Street in 1770 further reduced variety of fare sold at the Broad Street market, which was called the Beef Market for the remainder of the eighteenth century.

By the spring of 1760, however, the decrepit state of the twenty-five-year-old market structure at the corner of Meeting and Broad Streets inspired the commissioners responsible for its maintenance to consider building a replacement. Their petition submitted to the provincial legislature that April provides a valuable snapshot of the long-forgotten 1735 structure. “The present Market House and it’s roof,” they wrote, “which was long since built and erected on the public ground in or near the square or cross of Broad Street and Meeting Street in Charles Town aforesaid, and establish’d by Act of Assembly as such for the public sale of beef, pork and other butchery wares, is now decayed, worn out and become insufficient for the said purposes.” They noted “that the butchers which occupy the stalls in the said Market-House are exposed with their meat to every shower of rain that falls in market-hours[,] insomuch that many of the stalls have been deserted and are left vacant, while the remaining tenants murmur at paying rent for places that do not shelter them in wet weather.” The commissioners had hired carpenters to inspect the structure, who opined “that it would be nearly as expensive to repair as to rebuild the same.”

Furthermore, the market commissioners of 1760 implied that the market house constructed in the mid-1730s encroached slightly into both Broad and Meeting Streets. Their petition stated “that the spot of ground whereon the present Market-House stands” was “too near and inconvenient” to a pair of nearly-finished public buildings—St. Michael’s Church at the southeast corner of Meeting and Broad Streets, and the new State House standing at the northwest corner. To address all of these negative characteristics, the commissioners proposed erecting a new, larger building on the vacant public space immediately to the north of the old market. The new structure would provide ample shelter to the vendors within, and the revenue generated by renting a greater number of interior stalls would be sufficient to recoup the cost of construction.[13]

A committee appointed by the legislature to consider the matter reported a few weeks later that they found the petition “reasonable, the said Old Market House gone to decay and the situation thereof incommodious, as it lies too near southward to the new church of St. Michael’s Parish, and westward to the State House, both which buildings were erected since the setting up of the said Old Market House.” The committee proposed funding the construction of a “New Market House, suitable for the purpose[,] with convenient stalls and accommodations thereto[,] on the north side of the said Market Square and of the said Old Market House; leaving a space of twenty nine feet or thereabouts in breadth, north and south, on the north side of the said Market Square[,] and of about twenty four feet in breadth east & west on the east end of the said square for passage. . . according to a plan thereof” annexed to the petition. The old market house could be “taken away” after the completion of the new building. The south wall of the proposed new market, said the commissioners, would be approximately 120 feet distant from the north wall of St. Michael’s Church.[14]

The South Carolina legislature considered this market proposal in early May 1760 and agreed to use public revenue to fund the construction of a new building “of the dimensions and according to a plan annexed to a petition of the said Commissioners.”[15] The new market was evidently completed during the latter part of 1760, but news of its progress was overshadowed by the commencement of a bloody war with the Cherokee Nation during the same year. Like its predecessor, the new building was a large one-story, rectangular structure oriented along an east-west axis. Charleston artist and lawyer Charles Fraser (1782–1860), who visited the Beef Market during the latter years of the eighteenth century, later described it as “a neat building, supported by brick arches, and surmounted by a belfry.”[16] A British solder arriving in Charleston in January 1761 described the “Markett Place” as being “good & kept very clean by means of a pump in it & it’s being floor’d with brick.”[17]

The archaeological excavations of 2004 in and around the basement of City Hall revealed significant remnants of the 1760 market building, including much of its foundations along the south and west façades. Martha Zierden estimated that it measured approximately forty-five to fifty feet wide (north-south) and slightly more than 100 feet long (east-west), give or take a few feet in either direction, covering approximately 5,000 square feet. Remnants of its southern wall now lie almost precisely under the central east-west axis of City Hall. Posts holes discovered along the central line of the market’s interior indicates that a row or rows of wooden pillars supported the broad roof trusses above. Zierden concluded that the remnants of a circular brick structure, found near the northeast corner of City Hall, probably represents a well that once occupied the central point of the 1760 market interior. That central well probably corresponds to the water pump mentioned by the British soldier who visited the site in 1761.[18]

The excavations of 2004 also revealed evidence of a shallow portico in the center of the south façade of the 1760 market, projecting approximately four feet southward and measuring approximately thirty-six feet long (east-west).[19] I suspect this feature represented a low entry porch that likely included a few steps leading from street level to a raised brick floor inside the market. Following the completion of the new Beef Market in 1760, the removal of the 1735 building exposed a large swath of vacant ground on the south side of the new structure, ground now occupied by the southern half of City Hall. This open area, measuring approximately forty feet wide and more than one hundred feet long, was likely used for the pillory, stocks, and whippings mentioned in newspaper reports published during the latter decades of the eighteenth century.

During the American Revolution, Charleston’s Beef Market remained open for the entirety of the British occupation of the town, which lasted from mid-May 1780 to mid-December 1782.[20] The incorporation of the city in August 1783 conveyed ownership of the Beef Market and other public sites from the State of South Carolina to the new City Council of Charleston.[21] For the first thirty-five years of its existence, City Council occupied the upstairs chambers of the Exchange Building, at the east end of Broad Street, as City Hall. The old Beef Market at the corner Broad and Meeting Streets, in the meantime, continued to supply provisions to residents and copious food scraps to swarms of hungry vultures.[22] The 1760 building was nearly destroyed by fire in July 1785, however, when a small, unmanned hot-air balloon landed on its roof and ignited the wooden shingles. Thanks to the timely assistance of a fire engine and “a mulatto fellow, who with the greatest resolution and presence of mind, climbed upon the house and cleared the roof of the balloon, then in flames, and also of the tin kettle which contained the burning spirits,” the market building survived.[23]

The South Carolina State House at the northwest corner of Meeting and Broad Streets caught fire in February 1788 and burned to a hollow shell, but the Beef Market across Meeting Street was apparently unharmed.[24] While state officials oversaw the repair of the old State House and its conversion into a courthouse for Charleston County, city officials contemplated moving the noisome Beef Market to a new location. One month after the fire, in late March 1788, the City of Charleston accepted the donation of a swath of land measuring one hundred feet wide, extending from Meeting Street to the Cooper River, for a public market place.[25] Weeks later, the city Commissioners of the Markets published a call for bids to construct a new market building on the donated property now called Market Street.[26] A new Beef Market at that site, measuring approximately two hundred feet long and twenty-six feet wide (covering approximately 5,000 square feet), was operational by the spring of 1789, after which time the old Beef Market at the corner of Meeting and Broad Streets closed.[27]

Details surrounding the opening of the new facility in Market Street and the closure of the old market in Broad Street are obscured by the paucity of archival sources from that era. Only a handful of Charleston newspapers survive from the years 1789 through 1794, and all of City Council’s early records disappeared at the conclusion of the American Civil War (see Episode No. 79). Despite this archival loss, sufficient clues remain to reconstruct an outline of the last years of the old Beef Market. Following the arrival of refugees from the French island colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), the City of Charleston launched a campaign during the second half of 1793 to convert at least part of the new Beef Market in Market Street into a sort of dormitory.[28] Part of that building must have remained in operation as a market throughout the year 1794, but the lack of extant records impairs our ability to understand the logistics of city market activities during an era of increasing international tension.

When France and Britain declared war against each other in the spring of 1793, many citizens of the United States feared that one or both of the belligerents would harass seaports along the Atlantic coastline of North America. During the remainder of 1793 and 1794, there was a rush to augment Charleston’s waterfront fortifications and to stockpile arms and ammunition in case of invasion. In May 1794, Governor William Moultrie informed the South Carolina legislature that he had ordered various repairs to the public arsenal in Charleston, standing near the southwest corner of Meeting and Broad Streets, but that fifty-year-old structure was not sufficient to house the latest acquisitions of artillery and other military stores. Moultrie then “applied to the Corporation of Charleston for the use of the Market near the Court House [that is, the old Beef Market], and they readily agreed to let the public have it.” The governor recommended that the old 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.”[29] The legislature concurred with Moultrie’s proposal, and the old Beef Market was quickly converted into a military facility.[30]

The perceived danger of a French or British invasion fizzled by the summer of 1795, after which the state removed its military stores from the old market building at the northeast corner of Meeting and Broad Streets. Coincidentally, it appears that the city had also expended more money to accommodate more French refugees in the new Beef Market in Market Street. To facilitate the sale of beef and other comestibles, the City of Charleston decided to reactivate the old structure built for that purpose. In late August 1795, the city’s Commissioners of the Markets published a call for bids to rehabilitate “the old Beef Market in Broad Street,” including new shingles for the roof, new stalls for the interior, new plaster for the ceiling, and repairs to the brick pavement within. That work was completed by early December 1795, at which time the commissioners announced “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.”[31]

Seven months after the reopening of the refurbished Beef Market, a major fire on 13 June 1796 burned a zig-zag swath of property from the intersection of East Bay and Queen Streets to the corner of Broad and Meeting Streets. The conflagration charred hundreds of private residences and shops before citizens arrested the blaze at the site of old Beef Market, which was completely destroyed.[32] Four years later, in June 1800, Charleston’s City Council sold the vacant lot at the northeast corner of Meeting and Broad Streets to representatives of the First Bank of the United States. A plat annexed to the deed of sale depicts a parcel of land measuring 86 feet by 113 feet, formerly occupied by the Beef Market and including the open space directly south of that structure. To the north and east of the former market site, the plat illustrates an L-shaped public thoroughfare called “Market Alley,” the dimensions of which match those suggested by the Commissioners of the Markets in the spring of 1760 (that is, a space twenty-nine feet wide to the north and twenty-four feet wide to the east).[33]

Officers of the Charleston branch of the First Bank of the United States acquired a plan for a massive and elegant structure during the summer of 1800 and laid its cornerstone on the seventh of November.[34] The prestigious bank opened its doors several years later, but its charter expired in 1811. For several subsequent years, the United States government leased the edifice to the State Bank of South Carolina before selling it to Charleston’s City Council in February 1818. At the same time, city leaders sold to the federal government the Old Exchange Building at the east end of Broad Street, the upper floor of which had served as City Hall since 1783. By mid-May of 1818, the elegant bank at the northeast corner of Meeting and Broad Streets was operating as the headquarters of Charleston’s municipal government.[35]

More than two centuries have passed since City Council purchased and converted the U.S. Bank into Charleston’s City Hall, and no trace of the earlier Beef Market remains on that historic landscape. The attractive display in the basement of City Hall provides an excellent overview of the site’s market history, however, and serves a sort of time machine for curious minds. If you’ve never visited that public facility, open free of charge during business hours, I encourage you to stroll through the exhibit and then around the perimeter of City Hall. This site was the epicenter of culinary culture during the height of Charleston’s late-colonial “golden age.” By excavating the soil, digging through archives, and exercising our imaginations, we can appreciate City Hall as a portal into the deep history of our community.

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