Charleston Common: A Brief History of A Fractured Landscape

The place-name “Charleston Common” applies to a swath of land designated for public use since 1735. Conscious that the provincial capital lacked a traditional English common, South Carolina’s colonial government reserved more than seventy acres abutting the Ashley River for the perpetual use of all inhabitants. Municipal leaders violated that trust through a series of questionable sales, however, leaving just fifteen acres of the forgotten common encompassing the sites known as Colonial Lake, Moultrie Playground, and Horse Lot Park.

The ancient concept of reserving a parcel of suburban land for communal use came to South Carolina in 1670 with the first wave of English settlers. From that distant nation they carried memories of “common” spaces affiliated with nearly every manor and town in England, on which villagers and townsfolk grazed their livestock, indulged in recreational activities, and mustered for public events. Those who established Charles Towne on the west side of the Ashley River (now Charles Towne Landing State Historic Site) likely designated a common area shortly after their arrival, but the relatively cramped and swampy character of that location inspired many to explore the surrounding Lowcountry in search of healthier and more defensible lands.

The owners of the Carolina Colony, a group of eight Lords Proprietors in England, dispatched instructions in May 1671 for establishing a larger and more permanent capital town and port in the American wilderness. In addition to various requirements concerning the preferred topography and the arrangement of streets, the Proprietors directed the settlers to “set out a common of 200 acres” next to the town, where they might plant crops while building their houses. In future generations, inhabitants of the proposed community might use the common “for ye feeding of theire cattell, exercise of ye people . . . or any other conveniencys of ye sd towne as occasion shall require.”[1] Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, the most enthusiastic of the Proprietors, reiterated this advice in September 1671, opining that the common would “add conveniency, beauty and security to the place, and will afford roome to enlarge or better fortifye the town hereafter.”[2]

By the spring of 1672, civic leaders in South Carolina focused their aspirations for a capital town on the peninsula called Oyster Point, between the rivers called Ashley and Cooper. Here the provincial Surveyor General, John Culpeper, created a formal plan or “Grand Model” that encompassed all of the high land at the southern tip of the peninsula, bounded to the north by a straight line now running down the center of Beaufain Street. His three-hundred-acre plan included a perpendicular grid of a dozen streets and approximately three hundred half-acre lots, but it did not include a common. Water and tidal marshland surrounded the unnamed town to the east, west, and south. If there was going to be a functional common, it would have to be added to the town’s north side, where a number of recent immigrants had already staked large claims.  

As I described in an earlier episode focusing on the Grand Model (see Episode No. 245), three of the English settlers occupying the land immediately north of the nascent town—John Coming, his wife Affra Harleston, and Henry Hughes—offered to surrender 150 acres of their claim for use as a “common of pasture” in February 1672. The property in question formed a strip of high land immediately north of modern Beaufain Street, stretching across the peninsula from the Ashley to the Cooper—an ideal location for a communal greenspace. The pioneering trio evidently expected their several neighbors to the north to mirror their benevolent gesture by agreeing to shift each of their respective claims slightly to the north. When the neighbors refused to comply, Coming, Harleston, and Hughes withdrew their offer in September 1672.

Despite the lack of a common within the unnamed town at Oyster Point, the small number of immigrants who settled there during the 1670s enjoyed ample space for grazing and recreation. The population increased more rapidly after the spring of 1680, when the provincial government and the name “Charles Town” migrated across the Ashley River to Oyster Point. Some Charlestonians of the late seventeenth century might have grazed their animals in the northwest quadrant of the town, a swath of nearly forty acres now bounded by Beaufain, Smith, Broad, and Logan Streets, but the provincial government granted the bulk of that land to private parties in 1698.[3] As the town’s population increased during the early years of the eighteenth century, some urbanites paid to graze their animals on suburban plantations just north of the original town boundary, in the neighborhoods now known as Harleston Green, Ansonborough, Wraggborough, Newmarket, and others.

The Lords Proprietors of Carolina sold their two colonies to King George II in 1729, after which the people of Charleston witnessed a burst of civic and economic improvements. The return of Governor Robert Johnson in December 1730 inaugurated a period of increased investment, rapid population growth, and new construction, including the erasure of the town’s constricting fortifications and efforts to realize the full scope of the town plan created sixty years earlier. Governor Johnson might have also discussed with his neighbors the need for a public common in the capital of South Carolina, but he recorded no plans for that project before his untimely death. On 12 May 1735, one week after Johnson’s funeral, Lieutenant Governor Thomas Broughton issued an order requiring the Surveyor General of the province “to run out all the marsh” between the western edge of Charleston and the channel of the Ashley River. Broughton assigned the vacant, unclaimed land in question to two affluent members of his advisory Council, John Fenwick and Joseph Wragg, who evidently agreed to hold the land “for the use [of], and in trust for the inhabitants of Charles Town.”[4]

Fourteen months later, in July 1736, Surveyor General James St. John produced a plat illustrating “eighty four acres and two roods” (84.5 acres) of vacant marshland abutting the Ashley River on the western edge of Charleston. That total included several acres at the west end of a pasture belonging to the heirs of John Coming and Affra Harleston, which later became part of the Harleston neighborhood.[5] More precisely, the reservation platted in 1736 encompassed approximately seventy acres of unclaimed marshland forming an irregular triangle, bounded on the north by the town line (now Beaufain Street), on the east by modern Smith Street, part of Savage Street, and Council Street, and on the west by the Ashley River. The surveyor general noted that he had measured the land in question for John Fenwick and Joseph Wragg as “trustees for the use of the public,” but the provincial government did not execute a formal grant articulating the nature of the reservation.

Lieutenant Governor Broughton’s order evidently stemmed from conversations with local planters residing on both sides of the Ashley River and the adjacent islands to the south, who sought a public landing place for their boats on the west side of the Charleston peninsula. To accommodate their request, the provincial legislature ratified an act in February 1737 empowering a board of commissioners to extend Broad Street westwardly from the vicinity of present Savage Street to the channel of the Ashley River. The proposed extension was to bisect the marshland informally reserved in 1735, not as a solid roadway, but as a canal bounded to the north and south by a pair of earthen causeways.[6] For a host of political and economic reasons, the Broad Street canal project authorized in 1737 never materialized.[7] Growing tension between Britain and Spain discouraged colonial investment, and the formal declaration of war in October 1739 focused local resources on the defense of South Carolina’s capital.

A generation later, the provincial legislature re-visited the need for a public boat landing on the western edge of Charleston. On 12 April 1768, the General Assembly ratified a new act ordering the creation a canal at the west end of Broad Street, extending westwardly to the channel of the Ashley River. Much of its text echoed that of the 1737 statute, but the new law added a clause to confirm the government’s long-standing assumption about the adjacent marshland. Section five of the 1768 act stated “that all the vacant marsh land lying on each side of the said canal, hereby directed to be made . . . shall forever hereafter be reserved and kept for the use of a common for Charlestown; and any grant that may be made or obtained for the same, or any part thereof, is hereby declared to be absolutely null and void.”[8] This broad statement formalized the reservation of approximately seventy acres platted in 1736 as a public common.

As in the 1730s, however, the 1768 canal project never materialized. Planters hoping to ferry crops down the Ashley River to a projected market at that site continued to grumble, and in February 1771 lamented that “the canal to a market proposed to be built at the west end of Broad Street is now judged impracticable.”[9] The poorly-defined common in that vicinity remained undeveloped for the remainder of the eighteenth century, but later evidence suggests that generations of early Charlestonians dumped their refuse on the vacant common land to the west of modern Smith Street, stretching from Beaufain Street southward beyond the west end of Tradd Street.

Following the War of American Independence, the 1783 charter for the incorporation of the City of Charleston conveyed several parcels of public land to the new City Council, including “the market at the western end of Broad street, with the buildings respectively thereon, and . . . the marshlands appropriated by law for a common.”[10] The market did not yet exist, of course, but the prospect “of a market being established at the head of Broad-street, [and] the damming in of the marsh land adjoining,” was sufficient promise to raise property values in the adjacent neighborhood.[11] Members of the Mazyck family, heirs to the 1698 grant of high ground abutting the east side of modern Smith Street, asserted the right to claim the marshland to the west of their property. Their allegation led to a 1794 lawsuit with City Council questioning the validity of the colonial reservation inherited by the municipal government. The case was resolved in June 1800 in favor of City Council, but the tidal marsh abutting the Ashley River remained a vacant dumping ground well into the nineteenth century.[12]

A new era of debate about the common commenced in 1814, when a merchant named Joshua Brown (1774–1824) purchased Savage’s Green, the western-most parcel of high land at the southwest end of Broad Street, abutting the west side of Savage Street.[13] During a period of economic optimism following the War of 1812, Brown planned the construction of a large sawmill fronting the Ashley River, flanked by a series of millponds to receive rafts of timber floated downriver from inland forests. Because his project required waterfront access and plenty of storage space, Brown negotiated with members of City Council to gain possession of most of the colonial common. In August 1817, the city sold to Brown the large expanse of vacant marshland between Savage’s Green and the Ashley River, a rectangle containing approximately twenty-four acres between the projected lines of Tradd and Broad Streets.[14] Six months later, in February 1818, Brown acquired a twenty-five year lease of the vacant marshland to the west of Smith Street, encompassing thirty-six acres between the projected lines of Beaufain and Broad Streets.[15] The city’s rationale for disposing of this public land is now unclear, owing to the loss of city records during the “Great Memory Loss of 1865.” If any citizens protested the private sale of public lands at that time, their voices have been obscured.

Within this fifty-acre tidal landscape, Joshua Brown deployed white artisans and gangs of enslaved laborers to build a steam-powered sawmill and wharf fronting the Ashley River, a site now occupied as a U.S. Coast Guard Station.[16] To the east and northeast of the mill, enslaved men constructed earthen dykes with flood-gates—like those found on rice plantations of that era—to create several large millponds for the reception of floating timber from the river.[17] Although Brown’s lease prohibited him from permanently obstructing the flow of tidewater across the common, the city empowered him to build “strong & sufficient flood gates” to manage the water and to charge a toll for the passage of private boats to and from the Ashley River.

Brown financed this ambitious venture with credit obtained from numerous investors, but the optimistic post-war boom did not last. The international financial depression known as the Panic of 1819 destroyed Brown’s credit and devastated the local economy. He immediately conveyed both the mill property and the lease of city marshlands to another merchant named John Duncan (died 1828), who subsequently experienced a similar financial collapse.[18] Brown’s sawmill, briefly known as Duncan’s sawmill, became the property of William Hasell Gibbes in 1828, and the lease of public marshland between Beaufain and Broad Streets evidently lapsed as the new proprietors trimmed expenses.[19] Between 1829 and 1832, Gibbes conveyed the mill and twenty-four acres of marsh to members of the Chisolm family, who later diversified the business by adding a steam-powered rice mill.[20]

By the time the dust settled in the mid-1830s, the public common reserved a century earlier had been divided into a pair of disjointed parcels—thirty-six acres of marsh at the northwest end of Broad Street and fifteen to twenty watery acres at the southwest end of Tradd Street. Neither the daily newspapers nor the incomplete extant records of Charleston’s City Council from that era contain any hint of municipal improvements to the public common, but that situation changed in the autumn of 1836.[21] In mid-September of that year, City Council began publishing the full text of its bi-weekly meetings as part of a new policy of increased public transparency. From that point forward, the city’s management (or mismanagement) of the colonial common became a matter of public record.

The most notable revelation within the improved city records of the mid-1830s is the existence of two millponds stretching between Beaufain and Broad Streets. The easternmost pond, abutting modern Smith Street, was bound to the west by an earthen dyke or causeway fitted with two bridges—evidently built in 1818–19 by enslaved men belonging to Joshua Brown. That causeway became part of Rutledge Avenue in 1832, but the bridges and the pond to the east persisted well into the 1840s.[22] A second, parallel causeway, synonymous with the present block of Ashley Avenue between Beaufain and Broad Streets, enclosed a larger millpond now called Colonial Lake. Men employed by Brown likely created those features as well, but records confirming this hypothesis do not survive. The municipal government did not build them, but in September 1836 City Council briefly considered leasing “the extensive tidal water pond, situate west of Rutledge-st. and bounded to the south by Broad-st,” which the aldermen complained “has been used heretofore indiscriminately, by those accustomed to receive rafts of timber from Edisto Island saw mills, and by others for various purposes, for which the city derives no revenue.”[23]

From the autumn of 1836 onward, a relatively robust paper trail records the gradual transformation of the remaining acres of the colonial common into the landscape we see today. Rather than narrate every step of that process, which could fill several hours, I’d like to focus on the key decisions pertaining to the public trust. As my talented wife, Christina Rae Butler, described in her book, Lowcountry at High Tide, Charleston’s first full-time, salaried mayor, Robert Young Hayne, initiated in November 1836 a sustained campaign of dumping municipal garbage on the public marshland at the west end of Broad and Beaufain Streets. His plan was to raise the level of the earth and “establish a parade ground for the militia and a public walk for the citizens.”[24] That goal of gradually filling the mudflat and transforming it into a “public mall,” as Hayne described it in 1837, might have originated with the initial reservation made a century earlier.

City Attorney George B. Eckhard submitted a significant legal opinion on the public marshland to City Council in the summer of 1840. The muddy acreage at the west end of Broad Street was indeed reserved for public use in 1768, but he opined that the city charter of 1783 empowered City Council “to lease, sell, improve on, or otherwise dispose of all that marsh land, as they may deem conducive to the welfare and advantage of the city.”[25] As the dumping of garbage continued, a committee considering “the future of the marsh lands at the west end of Broad Street” advised City Council in 1844 to extend neighboring streets through the vacant marsh, subdivide the landscape into lots surrounding a “public square,” and then “sell or lease out the lots” for some length of time.[26] That work commenced in the spring of 1847 when the city surveyor divided the thirty-six acres between Beaufain and Broad Streets into five large lots and began selling one-year leases.[27] Two years later, in August 1849, the city sold at auction all of the public marshland between Rutledge and Smith Streets to private developers. Mayor T. Leger Hutchinson explained that the city’s goal was to finance the creation of a much smaller, nine-and-a-half acre “public common or mall” on the mill pond bound by Beaufain, Rutledge, Broad, and Lynch (now Ashley) Streets—the block now called Colonial Lake—by filling the landscape with garbage and selling the surrounding lands.[28]

A group of citizens residing nearby complained to the state legislature in 1851 that the city government had violated the trust established by the act of 1768.[29] When the state took no action on the matter, the plaintiffs filed an equity suit against the city. The court judgment rendered on 15 July 1853 contained two important features. It ordered the city to stop dumping garbage on the colonial common, and decreed “that so much of the city marsh land at the west end of Broad-street,” bounded by Beaufain, Rutledge, Broad and Lynch Streets, “be and the same is hereby dedicated and set apart as a common for the city of Charleston, and that the same be forever hereafter reserved and kept as a common for the use of the inhabitants of the said city.”[30]

Between the autumn of 1856 and the summer of 1857, the muddy “Rutledge Street Pond,” as it was then known, acquired several familiar features, including a floodgate to control the tidewater, oyster shell sidewalks, shrubbery and trees along the perimeter, and a surrounding picket fence.[31] Meanwhile, the city government continued its practice of selling short-term leases of the tidal mudflats to the west of the public pond, enabling merchants in the vicinity to float rafts of timber from the Ashley River to their saw mills.

That custom changed in 1875, when the city sold a forty-year lease to Patrick Toale, who operated a waterfront lumber yard on the west side of Ashley Avenue, at the present site of Moultrie Playground.[32] Toale’s long-term lease angered some local residents, who feared that the city planned to sell the remaining thirteen acres of common marshland extending westward from Ashley Avenue to the river. Their lawsuit against the city in the Court of Common Pleas for neglect of the public common was resolved in the summer of 1881 with several important orders. First, the court decreed that the lands designated as a public common in 1768, not already sold, “shall forever hereafter be held, used, and kept as and for a common for the use of the people of Charleston.” Second, it required the City of Charleston to appoint a board of commissioners drawn from the surrounding neighborhood to administer the common. Third, it obliged the city to apply the money from Patrick Toale’s lease to the maintenance of the Rutledge Street Pond, and perhaps to repurchase, “if that be possible,” parts of the colonial common sold decades earlier to Joshua Brown, to facilitate the creation of a grand boulevard connecting Ashley and Rutledge Avenues to the fifteen-to-twenty acres of public marshlands on the south side of Tradd Street that had been reserved in the mid-1730s.

City Council ratified an ordinance in July 1881 to effect the court orders, creating a board known to this day as the “Commissioners of the Colonial Common and Ashley River Embankment.”[33] The embankment in question was the abovementioned dream of a grand boulevard, part of which was realized by the creation of Murray Boulevard in the early twentieth century. The phrase “Colonial Common” officially became part of the local lexicon at that time, as did a new name for the old Rutledge Street Pond, formally known as “Colonial Lake” since the summer of 1881.

Patrick Toale’s forty-year lease of the marshland to the west of Colonial Lake was transferred to a succession of proprietors, and then extended for the Anderson Spool and Bobbin Company to the end of 1929. The four-acre site was cleared in the spring of 1930, filled with tons of topsoil, planted with grass, and designated General William Moultrie Playground in November 1931.[34] Following the suggestion from the 1881 court order, City Council in 1935 repurchased a two-acre lot south of Broad Street that had been sold to Joshua Brown in 1817, on which the Anderson Lumber Company had long stabled horses used to drag timber from the river to their sawmill. City workers dumped topsoil on the lot to raise the level of the marshland nearly two feet before naming it Murray Park in May 1937. Despite that official moniker, the more generic name “Horse Lot Park” has persisted to the present.[35]

By the mid-1930s, two centuries after the historic order of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Broughton, Charleston’s City Council maintained nearly twenty-four acres of the approximately seventy acres initially reserved as a public common. That total was further diminished in 1949 by the sale of 7.4 acres to Council member J. C. Long. A prosperous real-estate developer, Long sought to capitalize on a post-war federal incentive program to build high-density affordable housing, and he set his sights on the vacant, westernmost marshland of the Colonial Common, fronting the Ashley River. The commissioners charged with the preservation of the Common opposed Long’s plan, and Mayor Thomas P. Stoney described it as “progress in reverse.” A petition signed by 450 residents of the surrounding neighborhood described Long’s plan as “unreasonable, arbitrary, discriminatory, and illegal.” Nevertheless, Alderman Long stepped from his official seat and “appeared before Council solely as a citizen” to endorse his personal project. He told colleagues that “only two things would stop [him] from seeing that the apartment house was built—the law and God.” A state law prohibited the sale of any part of the Colonial Common without the consent of the Commissioners of the Colonial Common, but Mr. Long went to Columbia and convinced his friends in the state legislature to amend the law in his favor, allowing him to override the commissioners with a two-third vote of City Council. Back in Charleston in July 1949, a poorly-advertised public auction of the westernmost, riverfront acres of the Common, west of Moultrie Playground, was sold to Long for $5,000. Seven of the ten Commissioners of the Colonial Common opposed the sale, but City Council ignored their protest and quietly conveyed the public land to Mr. Long. His fourteen-story tower, called the Sergeant Jasper Apartments, was demolished in 2018 and replaced with an upscale edifice simply called “The Jasper.”[36]

Charleston Common, once a sprawling mudflat larger than the more-famous Boston Common, shrunk over the course of three centuries to a fragmented landscape with a convoluted history. Nevertheless, the remaining acreage forms an important part of the city’s cultural landscape, and the story of its survival embodies a valuable lesson in civic responsibility.

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