Anson's Landing to Gadsden’s Wharf: A Brief History

Charleston’s International African American Museum (IAAM) stands on ground formerly known as Gadsden’s Wharf, a man-made structure built along the Cooper River waterfront shortly before the American Revolution. During the previous century, the site was part of a plantation that passed through the hands of John Coming and Isaac Mazyck before Thomas Gadsden sold it to Captain George Anson of the Royal Navy. Anson’s tenure defined the property for decades, and the tidal beachfront known as Anson’s Landing served as the staging point for Christopher Gadsden’s famous wharf.

This program represents a sort of prequel to a brief history of Gadsden’s Wharf that I published in 2018 (Episode No. 51). Since that time, I’ve spent many hours investigating George Anson’s tenure in South Carolina and looking for clues relating to human activity on the plantation he called the Bowling Green, but which we now call Ansonborough. That research has transformed my understanding of the neighborhood and uncovered details overlooked or forgotten by generations of Charlestonians. While we might think of Gadsden’s Wharf as the beginning of the story of the present IAAM, Christopher Gadsden’s transformation of the landscape in the 1760s and 1770s was also the culmination of an earlier narrative. Humans inhabited and worked this waterfront site for at least a century before Mr. Gadsden reached farther into the water to create new land for new commerce.

Before Europeans arrived in 1670 to establish the colony now called South Carolina, the peninsula between the rivers Ashley and Cooper was occupied by a group of Native Americans that English immigrants identified as the Etiwan or Itiwan people. Almost nothing is known about their culture and language because the early colonists recorded no details about the indigenous people they viewed as inferior savages. The Etiwan, like other Native American tribes that once inhabited the Lowcountry, migrated seasonally between the coast and inland settlements, using dugout canoes to cross the myriad rivers and creeks that define the landscape. Three and a half centuries ago, they might have pulled their canoes onto a large tidal beach now covered by Gadsden’s Wharf, one of the few natural landing sites on the peninsula’s original topography. As I described in Episode No. 244, the Etiwan removed from the peninsula to Daniel Island in 1672 after receiving some form of payment from English colonists who sought to establish a town that we now call Charleston.

John Coming (died 1695), a mariner among the first group of English settlers in 1670, received a warrant in 1672 and formal grant in 1675 for a tract of 133 acres that stretched across the peninsula from the Ashley to the Cooper River, adjacent to the future site of Gadsden’s Wharf. He combined this property with a similar tract immediately to the south to create a rectangular block encompassing approximately 319 acres, immediately outside the original boundaries of Charles Town.[1] Coming and his heirs retained the western half of this property for a century before subdividing it to create a neighborhood known as Harleston (see Episode No. 136). The Coming family apparently made little use of the eastern half of their property, however, and disposed of all their land abutting the Cooper River before the end of the seventeenth century. Through a series conveyances around the turn of the eighteenth century, the southeastern part of Coming’s land became a small plantation known as Rhettsbury, which included a waterfront landing called Rhett’s Point or “The Hard” (see Episodes No. 53 and No. 256). At some point before October 1696, the northeastern portion of Coming’s land became the property of Isaac Mazyck (1661–1736), a Huguenot merchant who came to South Carolina in 1686. Monsieur Mazyck sold the western and southern fringes of this land to his neighbors, but retained a rectangular tract that later became the neighborhood called Ansonborough.[2]

The boundaries of Isaac Mazyck’s suburban plantation at the dawn of the eighteenth century are fairly easy to recognize on the landscape of modern Charleston. The “Broad Path” leading in and out of Charleston (now King Street) formed the western boundary, and the property stretched eastward to the banks of the Cooper River. The houses now standing on the south side of Society Street formed the southern boundary, adjacent to William Rhett’s plantation. Mazyck’s northern boundary was defined by a serpentine creek or inlet that once flowed from the Cooper River westward to modern Meeting Street and now forms the eastern half of Calhoun Street.

Mazyck’s rectangular plantation encompassed approximately sixty-four acres of high land, but his title included neither the creek nor the marshland adjacent to the Cooper River. After applying for permission to claim the wetlands abutting his property at the turn of the eighteenth century, Mazyck received a formal grant from South Carolina’s provincial government in May 1707. A small, rudimentary plat annexed to this marsh grant illustrates an irregular swath of seventy-one acres that includes the easternmost third of modern-day Calhoun Street, the site of the South Carolina Aquarium, and the waterfront site of the International African American Museum.[3]

The 1707 plat of Mazyck’s marsh grant also includes an important clue to understanding the use of the property in question. At a point just north of the modern intersection of East Bay and Society Streets, the plat depicts a long, narrow wharf extending eastward several hundred feet to the channel of the Cooper River. The presence of this significant wooden structure, which Mazyck likely built at the turn of the eighteenth century, suggests that he was conducting some sort of enterprise on the plantation that involved the loading and unloading of goods and people. Commercial wharves were exceedingly rare in South Carolina at that time because their construction required a significant investment of labor and capital. The so-called “Crisp Map” of 1711, for example, depicts only two small wharves within urban Charleston. It appears, therefore, that Isaac Mazyck’s suburban property, located just a few hundred feet north of the town boundary, was a working plantation hosting agricultural or industrial endeavors for which no records survive. Despite the paucity of evidence, we can conclude that the property’s waterfront location and its direct access to Charleston Harbor added value to Mazyck’s plantation and shaped the cultural activities taking place thereon.

Isaac Mazyck became a prosperous merchant in colonial Charleston and amassed numerous properties across the Lowcountry of South Carolina. In October 1720, at what must have been the end of his professional career, the fifty-nine-year-old Huguenot sold his sixty-four acre suburban plantation, with approximately forty acres of adjacent marshland, to Thomas Gadsden (1688–1741). Gadsden was the son of an English merchant mariner, and, after serving briefly in the Royal Navy, he too followed a career as a trans-Atlantic ship captain. His purchase of Mazyck’s plantation in 1720 represents the beginning of his full-time residency in South Carolina, where he became Collector of His Majesty’s Customs for the Port of Charleston in 1722. That position endowed the thirty-four-year-old captain with prestige within the community, but its small salary and light duties enabled him to pursue other commercial ventures at his suburban home. In 1725, for example, he accepted an invitation from the Royal Navy to provide naval stores to warships in Jamaica, and in 1726 raised a crop of hemp to encourage his neighbors to produce marine cordage rather than rice.

The property Thomas Gadsden purchased from Isaac Mazyck in 1720 included several features besides the aforementioned wharf. A hundred yards to the north of the foot of that structure, a natural spring and well provided ample volumes of fresh water sought by mariners filling casks for oceanic voyages. A further hundred yards to the north of the well stood a house on a waterfront bluff, now identified as the northeast corner of East Bay and Vernon Streets. This wooden residence, likely constructed by Isaac Mazyck at the beginning of the eighteenth century, sheltered the family and was likely the birthplace of Christopher Gadsden in February 1724. Details of other structures, other features, and other inhabitants do not survive from the 1720s, but a clearer picture of the landscape emerges after the spring of 1727, when Thomas Gadsden sold the plantation to George Anson of the Royal Navy.

Captain Anson arrived in Charleston in July 1724 as commander of His Majesty’s ship Scarborough, assigned by the British Admiralty to protect the Carolina coastline. He transferred to the warship Garland in July 1728 and continued on this station until departing for England in May 1730. Returning with the twenty-gun Squirrel from June 1732 through May 1735, Anson visited Charleston briefly for the last time in June 1739, on his way home from Africa to Barbados to England in HMS Centurion. Although he served on the “Carolina Station” for nine full years, details recorded within Anson’s daily logbooks demonstrate that he spent three-quarters of every year ashore in Charleston. Terrestrial activity, therefore, occupied the bulk of his time in the colony and on the plantation he purchased from Thomas Gadsden in 1727.

During Anson’s tenure in Charleston, the plantation he called the “Bowling Green” was divided into several distinct zones devoted to different types of activity. The western half of the plantation, for example, served as a pasture and recreational greenspace (see Episode No. 195). In the southeastern quarter, the captain operated a large brewery adjacent to an orange grove (see Episode No. 234). A square of approximately fifteen acres, now occupied by the Gaillard Center, served as a farm for raising unknown crops. Immediately to the east of the farm, Anson resided in the wooden house formerly belonging to the Gadsden family. A footpath leading from his house to urban Charleston officially became a winding stretch of East Bay Street in 1728.

While it might seem odd for a naval officer to spend so much time ashore pursuing private endeavors, Anson was likely drawn to the Bowling Green plantation by the property’s easy access to the Cooper River and Charleston Harbor. In the several logbooks he compiled in South Carolina, now archived in London, the captain recorded numerous compass bearings indicating the location of anchorage sites he used during the 1720s and 1730s. By triangulating these bearings on a map of the harbor, we learn that the Scarborough, Garland, and Squirrel (in succession) frequently anchored in the Cooper River opposite the suburban Bowling Green plantation, both before and after Anson purchased the property from Thomas Gadsden in 1727. On some occasions, Anson’s ship anchored at or near the head the long wooden wharf built by Isaac Mazyck, located between Society and Laurens Streets. On other occasions, Anson’s ships anchored near the east end of the creek or inlet that we now call Calhoun Street. The captain did not articulate the rationale behind this second anchorage site in his logbooks, but later records reveal the presence of a beachhead exposed at low tide approximately one hundred yards north of Anson’s house, which became known as Anson’s Landing.

In the years after Anson’s departure from Charleston in 1735, local agents working for the captain rented his house and suburban plantation to a succession of short-term occupants. An assignment to harass Spanish interests in the Pacific Ocean during the early 1740s rendered Anson out of touch for several years, but he returned to London in June 1744 with a valuable cargo of Spanish treasure that changed the course of his life. Promoted to admiral and elected to Parliament, Anson instructed his attorney in Charleston to subdivide and sell the western half of the Bowling Green plantation, containing approximately forty acres. The sale of twenty-five lots forming a new subdivision called “Ansonborough” commenced in February 1745, but Admiral Anson continued to possess the eastern, waterfront portion of the plantation, containing approximately twenty-three acres of high land and forty acres of marsh that included his house, farm, brewery, wharf, and private landing place.[4]

The earliest deeds for the subdivision of Ansonborough contain an important clue to the location and purpose of Anson’s Landing. The texts of nine deeds-of-sale executed in 1745–46, all concerning lots along the northern edge of Ansonborough between King Street and modern Anson Street, include an identical phrase endowing the purchaser with “the right of passage through the most convenient street to and from the landing place [i.e., Anson’s Landing] on a creek running through the marsh on Cooper River.”[5] These references suggest that the landing place in question was located near the northeastern corner of the high land of Anson’s property, to the north of Anson’s house and immediately south of the creek that is now Calhoun Street. For investors preparing to build the first houses in Ansonborough, the ability to land construction materials and laborers from boats nearby would have been a valuable selling point. The landing in question appears more clearly in several plats and maps created in the second half of the eighteenth century. On the modern streetscape of Charleston, we can identify the site as a spit of land now bounded by East Bay, Calhoun, and Washington Streets.

In the decade between 1747 and 1757, the remaining eastern half of Anson’s Bowling Green passed through a succession of hands in a convoluted series of speculative investments that ended with the admiral holding the property again. His local attorney, Richard Lambton, sold the same twenty-three acres of highland and forty acres of marsh to Charleston attorney John Rattray in April 1757. One year later, in April 1758, Rattray sold the bulk of his purchase to Christopher Gadsden, son of Thomas. Their deed-of-sale described the property rather accurately as “fifteen acres of high land and about twenty-nine acres of marsh land,” and named the owners of the surrounding properties. Although the sellers did not articulate any distinguishing landmarks, they did include a small but helpful plan of the nearly-rectangular parcel. By overlaying this material on the modern landscape, we can see that Gadsden purchased all of the land bounded by Laurens Street to the south, Calhoun Street to the north, the Cooper River to the east, and to the west by a brick wall that once ran through the middle of the present Gaillard Center, slightly west of Wall Street. The edge of the high land, adjacent to the Cooper River, was a line roughly equivalent with modern Washington Street. At the north end of that line stood a point of high land representing Anson’s Landing.[6]  

Christopher Gadsden’s 1758 purchase included Anson’s house (formerly the Gadsden family residence), most of the adjacent farm land, and the spring and well that provided ample fresh water. He did not purchase Anson’s brewery, then owned by the Shubrick brothers, nor Anson’s orange grove or Anson’s Wharf, which Gadsden’s frenemy Henry Laurens (1724–1792) purchased in the early 1760s. Nevertheless, the suburban property provided a reasonable investment for a young merchant with a growing family. It is possible that Gadsden purchased the waterfront site with the dream of developing a commercial wharf and expanding his business on his own terms. Captain Anson had long maintained good relations with the Gadsden family, and Christopher might have remembered playing at the waterfront site called Anson’s Landing before, during, and after the captain’s tenure in Charleston. In the several years after buying his boyhood home, Gadsden refined his vision for a massive commercial structure projecting boldly into the Cooper River, using the ancient landing site as a point of departure.

As I mentioned in my earlier essay about this topic (see Episode No. 51), Christopher Gadsden began developing his eponymous wharf in January 1767. The audacity of this “stupendous work,” as it was described in a 1774 newspaper, is difficult for modern visitors to comprehend because of its sheer scale.[7] Gadsden’s Wharf, a rectangular structure 840 feet long, is really a quay running parallel to the Cooper River. Its outer edge stands approximately one thousand feet to the east of the shoreline in Gadsden’s day, and he eventually filled of all the intervening acreage to create the present landscape. His primary goal was to provide ample dock space accessible by several ships of large burthen at the same time. The construction of such a maritime facility required the delivery of a large amount of materials from other locations, including pine piles, cordwood, lumber, and oyster shells. To facilitate the delivery and temporary storage of such stuff at the beginning of the project, Gadsden needed a landing site that was easily accessible by flatboats plying up and down the Cooper River. Fortunately, he owned such a site just a hundred yards from his house.

The northern edge of Christopher Gadsden’s property was described in 1758 as bounding “partly on marsh lands belonging to Mr. Mazyck and partly on a small serpentine creek running out of Cooper River.” As a prelude to the construction of his wharf, Gadsden first sought to alter the path of the bendy creek and transform it into a straight canal of a regular width. Soon after commencing that muddy work in 1767, however, Gadsden became involved in a dispute with his neighbor to the north, Alexander Mazyck (1736–1786), concerning the watery boundary between their respective properties. The two men signed an agreement in April 1768 that established a boundary line roughly equivalent with the center line of modern Calhoun Street, extending from present-day Elizabeth Street eastward to the Cooper River.

The text of their agreement articulated a slight bend near the center of the long boundary line—a bend that hinged at Anson’s Landing. From a wooden post representing the northwest corner of Gadsden’s property, says the 1768 agreement, the line extended eastwardly approximately one thousand feet “to the end of the landing commonly called Anson’s Landing in the creek at low water, in a course of fifty-nine degrees and fifty minutes east of north.” From that landmark beach, the boundary line turned slightly to the east and continued approximately one thousand feet further to the Cooper River, “in a course of sixty degrees and twenty five minutes east of north.”

Furthermore, Mr. Mazyck acknowledged that “Christopher Gadsden . . . intends to finish at his own cost and charge a navigable creek or canal, thirty feet wide from the [eastern] end of Anson’s Landing aforesaid in the said creek straight into Cooper River[, a] great part of which he has already cut, so that the said northern boundary between the marshes of the said Christopher Gadsden and Alexander Mazyck may[,] in this last mentioned part thereof[,] run thro [sic] the center of the said creek or canal[,] which when finished will be equally beneficial to both the said parties.”[8]

Gadsden’s Wharf was a massive construction project that took approximately eight years to complete. Numerous newspaper advertisements published in Charleston between 1767 and 1774 demonstrate that Gadsden solicited the delivery of voluminous quantities of building materials to his wharf site, most of which was underwater during the earliest months of the work. Using Anson’s Landing as a stage for both materials and laborers, he commenced building the wharf at the southern end of his waterfront property—now Laurens Street—and continued the work northward to modern Calhoun Street. By the end of the project, the landing that perhaps inspired and certainly facilitated the construction of Gadsden’s Wharf was partially enclosed by pilings and landfill. After the American Revolution, Gadsden continued to fill the marshland between his wharf and Anson’s Landing, and in the 1790s began marketing the man-made acreage as a residential subdivision. That marketing campaign did not garner much success during the final decade of Gadsden’s life, but he persevered to the end. Ships carrying African captives did not land at Gadsden’s Wharf during his lifetime because he was trying to capitalize on the real estate venture that defined the pinnacle of his commercial career.

Now that you’ve heard the backstory of Christopher Gadsden’s folly, I invite you to re-visit my 2018 podcast about “The Story of Gadsden’s Wharf,” and then visit the International African American Museum. While you’re there, don’t forget to walk less than a thousand feet to the west and stand at the southwest corner of Calhoun and Washington Streets. Look eastward over the Cooper River and towards the rising sun—that’s the view enjoyed by generations of Charlestonians in centuries past, from a vantage point once known as Anson’s Landing.

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