A Trashy History of Charleston’s Dumps and Incinerators

Garbage disposal is an ancient part of human culture that grew exponentially in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. During the first half of the twentieth century, the City of Charleston addressed rising volumes of municipal waste by flip-flopping between traditional methods of open dumping and the new science of incineration. The advent of new landfill practices in the 1950s consigned the city’s trash burners to the proverbial dust bin, but creative recycling preserved the fabric of one important structure. The twin smokestacks towering over Charleston’s East Side anchor an important part of the city’s trashy history.

Waste Disposal in Early Charleston

Before the advent of the technology of mass production and the rise of modern consumer culture, the people of early South Carolina produced very small quantities of what we would call “garbage.” Worn-out goods like clothing, furniture, vehicles, and buildings materials were either recycled or converted into fuel for cooking and heating. Food waste was fed to animals or composted in the household garden. Only “rubbish” that could not be recycled or consumed by animals or flames—such as broken ceramics and glass—was cast aside outside the home. Small quantities of such trash frequently ended up in earthen privies (outdoor bathrooms) within private yards. As a consequence of this common practice, much of what we know about the material culture of early South Carolina is derived from materials excavated by archaeologists from former privies and wells.

During Charleston’s early decades as an unincorporated town, the provincial government occasionally issued orders for public officers to keep the streets cleared of refuse and various forms of “filth.” Such ad-hoc prescriptions became a regular practice in 1750, when the provincial government created a board of street commissioners for urban Charleston.[1] The gentlemen commissioners were empowered to appoint scavengers, who in turn employed teams of enslaved men to drive horse-drawn carts through the streets each week to collect garbage, manure, and other refuse. The initial law for this weekly curb-side collection service did not specify what was to become of the garbage after it was collected, however. An amendment adopted in 1764 empowered the street commissioners to direct the scavengers “to remove all filth and rubbish to such proper place or places, in or near the said town, as they, the said commissioners, or a majority of them, shall allot and point out for the reception of the said filth and rubbish.”[2]

The precise location or locations of garbage dumping in eighteenth-century Charleston must have been abundantly obvious to local residents and visitors, but our knowledge of such waste disposal practices is now exceedingly sparse. Various archaeological digs and construction projects on the peninsula have uncovered historic trash deposits over the years, but few written descriptions of historic dumping sites and practices survive. Charleston’s City Council, incorporated in August 1783, inherited the duties of the street commissioners and no doubt wrestled with the practical details of dumping, but the disappearance of early city records in 1865 (see Episode No. 79) limits our knowledge of such conversations. Beginning in September 1836, however, the municipal government began printing the full text of all City Council meetings in the local newspapers. From that point forward, a great deal of information survives about the disposal of local garbage on the Charleston peninsula.

From the extant proceedings of antebellum City Council meetings, we know that the “street sweepings” collected in the scavengers’ carts included materials such as animal manure, animal carcasses, sawdust, wood shavings, broken bricks, scrap metal, food waste, and assorted household refuse. The enslaved trash collectors routinely carted such materials to the fringes of residential areas, predominantly on the northwest side of the Charleston peninsula, and dumped them on the salt marshes that were dry at low tide. This environmentally-unfriendly practice, which probably began in the early colonial era, contributed to a gradual but significant topographical evolution. Much of what we now identify as historic parts of the city, such as the area around Colonial Lake, the hospital district, Brittlebank Park, the Joe Riley Baseball Stadium, and Morrison Drive, were originally low-lying salt marshes that were filled with trash and transformed into buildable, drivable, taxable land.

I could regale you with innumerable details related to this trashy, marsh-filling activity, but instead I’ll defer to the real expert in this facet of local history. My wife, Christina Rae Butler, has just published a book that contains everything you might want to know about landfill and the topographic evolution of the peninsula: Lowcountry at High Tide: A History of Flooding, Drainage, and Reclamation in Charleston, South Carolina (University of South Carolina Press, 2020). For more information about this fascinating part of the city’s history, in encourage you to check out C-Rae’s new book.

The dumping of garbage on the marshlands surrounding the Charleston peninsula continued into the early years of the twentieth century. To expedite the process of natural decomposition, the city even employed hogs to root through the open-air dumps. Few, if any, local residents expressed concern about the environmental ramifications of such practices, but their effects on humans began to garner attention at the dawn of the new century. The relatively new fields of bacteriology and epidemiology identified open garbage dumps as noxious breeding grounds for vermin and disease. Low-lying areas filled with trash invariably hosted legions of flies, cockroaches, rats, and vultures. Charleston’s resident health officer, Dr. J. Mercier Green, noted that local cases of typhoid, diarrhea, enteritis, and other fly-borne disease were always higher in neighborhoods near the city’s sprawling marshland dumps. As early as 1912, Dr. Green and the Charleston Department of Health began advocating the adoption of an improved system of municipal waste-disposal. Their recommendation was the new practice of industrial incineration.[3]

The First Charleston Incinerator

In December 1912, after reviewing the progressive garbage-disposal methods used by larger cities to the north and west, the Charleston Department of Health heartily recommended that the city government invest in a large-scale garbage incinerator as “the proper method of disposal of all waste products.” The budget-conscious City Council ignored this plea for several years, during which time Dr. J. Mercier Green continued to pressure the local government about the health dangers of salt marshes filled with “night soil, dead animals, and garbage.” “We are badly in need of an incinerator,” he said the spring of 1914, “where all of these effete products can be destroyed and done away with and not be a menace to the public health.”[4]

Charleston’s City Council finally endorsed the concept of destroying municipal garbage by incineration in late 1916. In January 1917, Council’s street committee recommended the construction of an incineration plant and smokestack on the site of the former Cannonsboro Mill Pond, to the northwest of Roper Hospital. Heat produced by the combustion of garbage might be piped over to the nearby hospital, said city officials, thereby saving the expense of heating that large building. Residents in the Cannonsboro neighborhood soon objected to the idea of increased truck traffic and bad odors, however. In addition, the low-lying situation of the old mill pond would require much filling and a system of new streets to facilitate the construction. When the city could not guarantee vehicular silence within the hospital’s vicinity and refused to raise the smokestack to a height of 150 feet, the directors of the Roper Hospital squashed the notion of a westside incinerator.[5]

When the City of Charleston began negotiations to purchase the “old baseball lot” at the northwest corner of Meeting and Sheppard Streets in the spring of 1917, some council members floated the idea of erecting both an incinerator and municipal horse stables on the property. A petition from residents on Meeting Street objected to the incinerator (but not the horses), and so the city continued to search for a suitable site. In early August, the city negotiated with the Charleston Light and Water Company (now Charleston Water System) to purchase a vacant lot at the northwest corner of America and Lee Streets. The surrounding area was sparsely populated at that time, and the city had been dumping garbage on the neighboring salt marshes for many years.[6]

The city government secured the construction site in August 1917, by which time it had already received plans for a small incinerator plant from the Griscom-Russell Company of New York. The blueprints for the “garbage destructor,” as the engineers called it, specified a two-story brick structure, measuring twenty-eight feet square, capable of burning forty tons of solid waste material within a twenty-four-hour period. Mule-drawn trucks carrying the garbage ascended a long, straight ramp leading from the west to a broad platform attached to the top of the building’s south side. Waste material was dumped directly into gravity hoppers that funneled the garbage into the furnace below. Gas and smoke produced by the combustion was fed to a free-standing brick chimney or smokestack, measuring just fifty feet tall and located near the northeast corner of the plant.[7]

In September 1917, the  city contracted with a local firm, Simons-Mayrant Company, to build the concrete foundations for the incinerator plant. Piling driving began at the end of the month, but subsequent work was delayed by the general shortage of materials and labor as the United States geared up for entry into the Great War then raging in Europe. The project was nearly derailed by the arrival of a cold snap in January 1918, in which the final concrete pour likely froze before it cured. The chimney was completed by the first of February, by which time the brickwork forming the first story of the main plant was already complete. The corrugated steel roof was added in mid-April and attention turned to the installation of the furnace. Combustion testing commenced on June 24th, and the long-anticipated destructor was fully operational by the first week of July.[8]

From the beginning of its career in the summer of 1918, the $25,000 destructor or incinerator burned slightly more than the promised forty tons of waste in a twenty-four-hour period. Owing to labor shortages and poor finances, however, the city could not keep the plant in continuous operation. A crew of three men stoked the fires tirelessly for nine hours a day, but they could not keep up with the volume of daily garbage collection. Because the facility included no storage capacity, all trash collected but not burned in the course of a nine-hour shift was dumped on the nearby salt marshes, as it had been in years past. By the early months of 1919, the city was forced to admit that the incinerator design was insufficient for the intended purposes. To make matters worse, a series of mechanical failures closed the facility for months at a time. At best, the incinerator consumed just fifteen to twenty-five percent of the city’s garbage. The rest was dumped on nearby marshes. Chief Health Officer J. Mercier Green was so frustrated by the situation that he advised the city to increase the number of hogs kept at the traditional dump sites. “The disagreeable and nauseating odors of decomposition and putrefaction,” said Dr. Green, “at present out-weigh those of a hog pen, and are a much greater nuisance. . . . The insanitary [sic] condition in which they live and which invests the surrounding area, being created not by the hogs, but by the city’s unfortunate condition which forces it to dispose of its garbage and refuse in this crude and insanitary method.”[9]

Charleston’s first municipal incinerator operated during the second half of 1918, for ten months in 1919, just seventy-nine days in 1920, and not at all in 1921. The plant burned some garbage during the period 1922 through 1925, but city officials acknowledged defeat by 1926 and abandoned the costly plant. Meanwhile, the sanitation department was collecting and dumping approximately eighty tons of urban garbage per day by 1927, and the volume was rising steadily. The continued use of open-air dumps on the city’s northern fringes was a “bad advertisement,” said Dr. Green of the City Health Department. “The first thing visitors saw upon arriving in Charleston by rail [or by automobile] was a dump.” The failure of the incinerator called for drastic measures to suppress the spread of diseases carried by flies and rats. In addition to the work performed by municipal hogs, the health department periodically poured kerosene over the trash-filled marshes and burned everything to ashes. Combustible materials scattered among the garbage occasionally exploded during such episodes or ignited on their own, requiring emergency assistance from the fire department.[10]

The brick shell of the failed incinerator plant found a new purpose in the summer of 1929, shortly before the completion of the first steel bridge across the Cooper River. The western end of the new bridge, which was started in 1928, touched down in the vacant area between Cooper and Lee Streets (formerly Vardell’s Creek but filled by decades-worth of garbage). To create a staging ground for the celebrations connected to the opening of the bridge in August 1929, the city government beautified the block on the north side of Lee Street, between Hanover and America Street, and named it Bridge Square. Rows of freshly-planted palmetto trees greeted visitors beneath a flag pole erected on top of the old smokestack. The two-story incinerator itself was converted into a “comfort station” with public restrooms inside and wooden verandas added to the south and west sides of the exterior.[11]

After the 1929 bridge festivities, the city government transformed its new Bridge Square into a public park. In October 1930, City Council officially renamed the park to honor a former Charleston alderman, police chief, and sheriff, John Elmore Martin (1859–1921). The fifty-foot-tall chimney stack in Martin Park was dismantled in the final weeks of 1935, while the interior of the old incinerator was converted into a “community service center.” In the summer of 1937, the city used Federal matching funds to operate a woodworking shop for the education of boys, and in 1942 turned it over to the Salvation Army for a boy’s club. The brick building was gone by 1973, when the Parks and Recreation Department built an asphalt basketball court on the former site of Charleston’s first incinerator.[12]

Charleston’s Second Incinerator

Despite the brief and disappointing career of Charleston’s 1918 garbage incinerator, the city’s new Health Officer, Dr. Leon Banov, and Mayor Thomas P. Stoney continued to emphasize the need to improve the city’s waste disposal practices throughout the 1920s. Both men and their colleagues agreed that incineration was the best method to pursue, and a large monetary investment would pay valuable dividends in terms of improved public health. When Andrew Buist Murray died in 1928 and left a fortune to the city, it seemed that some Charlestonians might favor an extension of Murray Boulevard to Hampton Park rather than an incinerator. An editorial in the Charleston News and Courier explained the choice in plain terms: “The ‘dump’ is unpleasant, unsightly and unhealthy, it spreads disease, thereby causing death, and while an effort is being made to get new citizens to Charleston, some that we have are being lost unnecessarily. . . . If there is a decision between the two, the extension should be a dream of the future and the purchasing of adequate incinerators the reality of the present.”[13]

The first incinerator had cost the city approximately $25,000, all of which came directly from the Charleston municipal treasury. The cost of a larger, more efficient facility in the early 1930s was estimated to be at least $90,000, and the city was simply too poor to make such an investment. For better or for worse, the collapse of the stock market in 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression set in motion a series of events that enabled Charleston’s city government to realize its dream of a bigger and better incinerator. Labor was cheap and readily available, and public works projects seemed to be the answer to the nation’s economic woes. As Dr. Leon Banov continued to beat the drum in 1932 for a municipal incinerator to replace the vermin-filled dump at the east end of Lee Street (formerly part of Vardell’s Creek), City Council and Mayor Burnet R. Maybank listened.[14]

In November 1932, the City of Charleston adopted an ambitious plan to borrow funds to build a modern incinerator plant for a total cost of $75,000. Mayor Maybank defended the expense as a wise investment in the city’s public health. “Why, I believe we will be able to save $10,000 a year in the operation of the health department through the elimination of flies and mosquitoes which come from the dump,” he told the local newspaper. “The dump is a disgrace to the city now. The property, however, can be transformed into fine residential tracts in the future.”[15]

The site for the new incinerator, announced in January 1933, was a city-owned lot bounded by Cooper, Drake, and East Bay Streets. Besides being approximately in the middle of the north-south length of the city, this location also had the advantage of being adjacent to the active municipal dump at the foot of the Cooper River Bridge. A number of residents in the surrounding Hampstead neighborhood complained about the prospect of a constant stream of mule-drawn trash trucks and the production of foul odors, but the city defended its selection. Motorized trucks would soon replace the old mule carts and access the plant via the north end of East Bay Street, and a smokestack rising more than a hundred feet above ground would eliminate odors.[16]

The initial estimate of $75,000 doubled in the spring of 1933 after the city government brought in outside experts to consult on the capacity and design of the new incinerator plant. In response to this dramatic increase, some local entrepreneurs offered to haul Charleston’s municipal garbage out to sea for a fraction of the cost. After a summer lobbying campaign to secure outside funds, however, the city incinerator was successfully integrated into a slate of county-wide construction projects to be funded by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). Washington approved most of that slate of projects by the end of the year, but the incinerator, as well as a proposed municipal aquarium, were set aside. Mayor Maybank applied political pressure to revive the garbage destructor project, and in early January 1934 the city secured the necessary funds from the Civil Works Administration. In the opinion of Dr. Leon Banov, the contract represented the dawning of a “new day” for disease prevention in the city of Charleston.[17]

Excavation for the foundation of the new plant commenced in mid-January 1934 before engineers from Metcalf & Eddy of Boston had finished the building’s design. Earth was removed to a depth of fourteen feet, and pile driving commenced before the end of the month. Inclement weather slowed progress in February, but concrete began to flow in the second week of March to form the incinerator’s base. The end of the Civil Works Administration and the rise of the Works Progress Administration caused a slight delay at the end of March, and the occasional curtailment of Federal relief funds led to periodic stoppages throughout the summer. Despite these interruptions, the large labor force worked quickly. Contractors from the N. W. Kellogg Company of New York commenced the lone brick smokestack in early May and completed its exterior to a height of approximately 135 feet by first of July. The entire plant was finished by late October, and the city government invited the public to inspect the facility in early November before combustion commenced. Furnace testing began on December 10th, and the incinerator officially went into operation on Monday, January 7th, 1935.[18]

Charleston’s second municipal incinerator, built at a cost of approximately $185,000, boasted a handling capacity of 190 tons of garbage daily, if operated on a twenty-four-hour cycle. Within five years, however, the city’s expanding population and increased trash production rendered the new plant inadequate. Excess garbage was again dumped in the marshlands on the northeast and northwest fringes of the city. City Council successfully applied for federal assistance to expand the incinerator in late 1941, but the rise of a second World War delayed the project for more than a year. While Charleston waited for the red tape to clear in early 1943, the city engineer reported that the marsh dumps were more offensive than ever, “even in the days before any incinerator was in operation.”[19]

The Federal Works Administration promised $147,000 to the City of Charleston in the spring of 1943, to which the local government contributed an additional $5,000, to expand the municipal incinerator by approximately fifty percent. New foundations had been excavated and poured in the summer of 1942, and the work progressed quickly after the arrival of structural steel components in April 1943. The three-story brick plant was extended to the north using a matching design, and a second smokestack, nearly identical to the first, was likewise erected to the north of its mate. Delays caused by war-time material shortages slowed the work, but the expanded plant was completed and fully operational by the end of March 1944.[20]

Twenty-two years after the construction of Charleston’s second incinerator, and twelve years after its expansion, the city closed the plant and deployed its staff to other projects. The motivation behind this change was not dissatisfaction with the capacity or efficiency of the incinerator, but rather a desire to return to the practice of using garbage as landfill. Rather than simply dumping waste on the marshes and letting it fester, as was done in previous generations, the city sought to follow the post-war trend of sanitary landfill. Using excavation machinery to create successive layers of garbage and earth, buildable land could be reclaimed from the marshes with minimal investment and little offense to the senses. The city government purchased a dragline excavator in late 1954 and immediately started filling the western edge of the peninsula, between Fishburne and Spring Streets, with a churlish mix of earth and garbage. Although such work destroyed natural riverine habitats, it fulfilled the city’s expectations and undermined the role of the incinerator. With minimal public notice, the city announced the imminent closure of the municipal garbage-burning plant. The flames of its once-voracious furnace flicked out for the last time on Monday, August 27th, 1956.[21]

The Community Center

The brick shell of Charleston’s second incinerator was shuttered in 1956 and ignored for more than twenty years. Mayor Morrison’s campaign to create buildable land through sanitary landfill continued into the 1960s but soon lost momentum. The growth of suburbs west of the Ashley and east of the Cooper reduced the demand for peninsular landfill, and the rise of environmental restrictions sharply curtailed the destruction of the city’s remaining wetlands. Larger landfills located farther inland and operated by Charleston County absorbed ever increasing volumes of garbage from the City of Charleston and the swelling suburbs. Meanwhile, the city’s economy continued to shrink through the 1970s as both residents and jobs left the peninsula. Charleston was in need of a helping hand from higher up the political ladder.[22]

In the autumn of 1977, the City of Charleston received a Federal stimulus package of $2.4 million earmarked for the construction or renovation of public buildings that would serve areas of high unemployment and low income. Among the six projects designated within Charleston, the city proposed to convert the incinerator into a community center. After a year of hard work that cost more than $600,000, the new East Side Community Center formally opened to the public on Saturday, June 30th, 1979. In November 1992, the center was officially renamed the St. Julian F. Devine Community Center, in honor of the man elected to represent the neighborhood in 1967 as the first black City Council member since Reconstruction.[23]

The twin smokestacks associated with the present community center, erected in 1934 and 1943, haven’t served any practical function since 1956, but they stand tall against Charleston’s skyline as a testament to the city’s municipal evolution. The practice of garbage incineration, while a marked improvement over earlier methods of waste disposal, was soon eclipsed by advancements in both civil engineering and environmental protection. The incinerator’s brick shell survived as an adapted structure that continues to play a vital role in the city’s life. Residents and visitors often admire the curious vertical icons on Charleston’s horizon. So too did chief engineer Harrison Prescott Eddy when the incinerator’s furnaces first roared to life in dark days of December 1934. “The building reflects remarkable workmanship by FERA forces,” he told a local reporter, and praised the local workmen who had executed his designs.

My purpose in narrating this brief history of garbage disposal in urban Charleston was to help the public understand the context surrounding the brick vestiges of this industrial facet of the city’s long history. Similar but more compact stories of waste management exist for other local municipalities, such as Sullivan’s Island, Mount Pleasant, North Charleston, and Charleston County in general, but I hesitate to belabor the point. The idea of burning trash on an industrial scale once seemed like a wise solution to an ever-increasing problem. Our relationship with the natural environment has evolved over the centuries, however, as has our understanding of the long-term impact of human activity.

Perhaps the twin smokestacks of the old incinerator remind us to be mindful of our habits of material consumption. Too often we buy, use, and discard items with little thought to the fate of our casual trash. Recycling—including the adaptive use of old buildings—is an important part of our present and future. And it’s a Charleston tradition.