The wonderful Christina Rae Butler, author of the recently published book titled Lowcountry at High Tide: A History of Flooding, Drainage, and Reclamation in Charleston, South Carolina joins us. She spent close to a decade writing this first-ever book about the topographic evolution of Charleston.
In this episode of The Outfall, Christina explains how compacted material or fill physically transformed the peninsula. Wild stories and history hide under the streets and buildings of Charleston.
Transcript
Christina Rae Butler:
When I walk around the city of Charleston, I’m always thinking about what’s happening on a subterranean level, because we are very close to sea level. And so, I’m always thinking about which drains are below my feet. And occasionally, they will cave in. Because at this point, they’re 170 years old. And when one fails, it takes the street paving with it. And you can actually see almost like a Creek Tidewater moving through those drains.
Robert Osborne:
This is the wonderful Christina Ray Butler, author of the recently published book titled Low Country at High Tide, a history of flooding, drainage, and reclamation in Charleston, South Carolina. She spent close to a decade writing this first-ever book about the topographic evolution of travel.
Christina Rae Butler:
I’m always thinking about what’s under my feet. How dodgy was the fill in this part of the city? How rapidly is this area settling? And as a cyclist, I notice all of the high spots and low spots that you wouldn’t notice in a car. And they’re subtle because Charleston’s peak point is less than 20 foot above sea level. Pretty much everything that floods in this city today is the reclaimed areas that were done 200 years ago, in a very organic way.
Robert Osborne:
In this episode of the Outfall, Christina explains how compacted material, or fill, physically transformed the peninsula. Okay. I know what you’re thinking, but stay with us. Wild stories and history hide underneath the streets and buildings of Charleston.
Christina Rae Butler:
There’s a quote in the book that is a 1780s newspaper advertisement for several suburban residential lots for sale in Charleston village. It’s a nice residential district. And they advertise that they have basically filled these two suburban lots with the upwards of 800 bodies of wall decors, Hessians, and British soldiers who had died during the revolutionary war, and were thrown into a mass grave on the edge of town.
Christina Rae Butler:
And land is valuable. So, even though that’s kind of a makeshift cemetery, they go on to say that they carted in 1000 cartloads of dung, animal manure, put that on top of the cemetery, capped that with Marsh mud, and then sold those as a residential building. I’m a historian. I find a lot of weird things. And to me, the fact that they almost were proudly and patriotically stating that they had done it was pretty mind blowing.
Robert Osborne:
In early colonial Charleston, the garbage collection and the search for fill went hand-in-hand.
Christina Rae Butler:
Charleston is actually unique. Even before we had a city government, before we were incorporated, we had a pretty advanced scavenger department, even back in the colonial era. And the scavengers job was to either drive a carriage or a push cart, depending on the time period, through the city to collect garbage and debris. So, we actually had pretty advanced trash pickup, even in the 18th century. And in Charleston, because fill material is at a premium, the scavengers would collect all of that refuse. And they would dump it in low spots in the streets, or in areas that needed to be filled.
Christina Rae Butler:
So again, we’re using plough mud, sand, which you can’t compact, so it’s terrible fill. We’re using street sweepings. We’re using animal carcasses and dirt. But you have to remember, if you dig a trench to extract the dirt, now you’ve created another spot that floods, because we’re so low lying. So, in the early days, before you could railroad or truck materials in, our scavengers are diligently collecting storm debris, street sweepings, garbage, even construction debris, and using it for fill. They used mules until the 1930s. And they started introducing vehicles for efficiency, but there was actually still scavenger trash cart mules working in downtown Charleston until the late 1930s.
Christina Rae Butler:
The other offensive but interesting surprise was, again, the very unsanitary things that people used for fill, one key example being slaughterhouse remains. And so, any part of a carcass that you could use, people would, boil hooves for glue, or use bones for brushes. But oval and intestines and things that you can’t really eat, they would use for fill, which I found absolutely shocking, because how you could expect that to hold road pavement is beyond me. You can only compact that so much.
Robert Osborne:
I know you all love hearing these stories, and there are plenty more in her book, but we convinced Christina to be our tour guide for us, to help us all understand some of these land changes. Better yet, we’re going back in time.
Christina Rae Butler:
So, it’s 1706, and you’re sailing into Charlestown. And the first thing you would have encountered is a pretty robust half mile long brick seawall running down the Cooper River. And it would have been punctuated with gun emplacements and half-moon batteries. Because that seawall, which was begun in the 1690s, had a dual purpose. It was a fortification because the French and Spanish were close by, and always disputing who owned South Carolina. So, we fortified our town. And that wall also had the purpose of keeping the city from flooding. It was a seawall. And speaking of not having a comprehensive plan, when that wall was begun, the colonial government basically tasked anybody who got a land grant for a waterfront property with being in charge of constructing that section of the wall, which is impossible to expect it to get built right, and to expect that to work.
Christina Rae Butler:
And it’s expensive, so people didn’t do it. And so eventually, especially as we needed it for fortification reasons, the colonial government stepped in and constructed it properly. So, that wall would have run roughly from where the market area is today, Cumberland street southward. And it would have stopped before the high battery, because the battery is all filled area. So, if you’re walking around Charleston in 1706, you would be standing on a wall. That’s where East Bay street is. That’s literally what keeps the Harbor and the river from encroaching into the town. And fast forward to today, 350 years later, we have filled and expanded the peninsula in every direction.
Christina Rae Butler:
And we always took the path of least resistance first, fill creeks. And as we ran out of land again, then we started doing bigger planned city land reclamation projects. And as we slowly grew, sometimes by accidental accretion on the waterfront, sometimes with proper city civil engineered endeavors, we basically built over and engulfed all of those original waterfront fortifications. So today, if you’re ever visiting Charleston, and you go to the old exchange in Provost Dungeon, which is over on Broad and East Bay, it seems odd to have an exchange building in the middle of a city block. But it was a waterfront building that had this beautiful neoclassical facade that opened out onto the Cooper River.
Christina Rae Butler:
And it’s three blocks from the river today, because we have filled around it. But when you go in the Dungeon, as they call it, in the basement of that building, you can actually see an original 1690s brick masonry, half moon battery. And still, even though the river is now three blocks away, that basement will still periodically fill up with water, because the water table is so bad here in the city. So, when you go into that basement, you can see this brick fortification. And it’s sitting in salt water. And periodically, they have to pump the basement out, because water always remembers where it used to be. And water takes the path of least resistance, which is into those filled areas that’ll start to settle over time. And there’s examples of people who go to dig a new foundation, and you hit all of this brick work. And sometimes, it’s an 1830s brick title drain, and you don’t want to blow through it because it’s still operable. And sometimes, it’s a chunk of what used to be a waterfront seawall that’s now just landlocked.
Christina Rae Butler:
Going a couple blocks down the street and jumping forward a hundred years, you’re standing in downtown Charleston in 1818. And you’re down at the newly completed high battery, which today is one of the most iconic parts of our city, probably one of the most photographed areas of Charleston, for the beautiful antebellum mansions, which literally would not have been possible without the big, for the time, over spec’d and very expensive seawall that we now call the high battery. And interestingly, Charleston has always, like all cities, tried to do things quickly and cheaply. So, when we became a city, incorporated in the 1780s, now we have a mayor and a city council. They started thinking about beautifying the city and creating more buildable land. And one of their first projects was what we now call The Battery. And they tried to do it on the cheap. And they used wooden crib works filled with earth.
Christina Rae Butler:
And we had hurricane in 1804. And it swept most of that away. And they had to start over again. And they learned their lesson. And in their rebuilding, which was completed in 1818, they used stone. And it cost a lot of money. And it had to be shipped from the Northern States. But they have learned their lesson. So, when they built the high battery seawall, they built proper footers under it and real underpinnings. And they battered the wall on a careful angle to make sure it could withstand the action of the waves. And sea level has risen. But even still, that seawall, most of the time, is enough to prevent water from coming into that part of the city.
Christina Rae Butler:
So, when you walk on that high battery wall today, most of it is from 1818. Part of it is post 1854 hurricane repairs. But by and large, you’re walking on a 200 year old man-made feature that really has withstood the test of time pretty effectively, considering we’ve had about a dozen hurricanes in the time since it has been built. And as soon as that seawall is finished, boom, now you have about 20 beautiful, expensive waterfront lots. And that’s why, when you walk around this city, if you know the filling backstory, you can pretty quickly say, “Oh, that’s why this whole neighborhood is antebellum. There was no land here before the seawall.” Or you walk around the East side, “Oh, everything’s 1890s because that’s when they filled in a title pond to create this part of the neighborhood.”
Robert Osborne:
In closing, we asked Christina, what was one of her most significant takeaways after studying 350 years of Charleston history.
Christina Rae Butler:
I think some of the biggest takeaways are that a lot of our issues today stem from not really having a comprehensive overarching plan for the city. So frequently, there would be a private developer who would purchase a tract of land that was low line. And if it’s the 1770s, there is no city government to hold you accountable. And so, you might have a private owner using slaughterhouse remains and sand for fill, which happened all the time. And gee, it’s a wonder we still flood. And then, as the city grew and started annexing some of these earlier subdivisions, the new city government would inherit a lot of really dodgy and unthought out earlier fill endeavors. And so, over time, as the city grew and we hired city civil engineers, and we got better about taxation processes, we slowly but surely had to try and fix a lot of these piecemeal repairs.
Christina Rae Butler:
And I think one thing we can learn from Charleston is that addressing flooding in one area does not mean you can drive to and from that area. And it does not mean that your improvement isn’t going to cause worse problems for another part of the city. And so, I think people who are doing development on the surrounding sea islands should look at the book and realize that it’s not a new thing for a developer to buy a chunk of land, and just one track mind think about that piece of property. But it’s part of a bigger ecosystem. And it’s part of a bigger drainage picture. And you have to think about how that community relates to the next. So, we can learn a lot, I think, from Charleston’s 350 years of trial and error.
Robert Osborne:
Thanks again to Christina for joining us. And make sure you check out the show notes for more information about her book. As always, thank you for joining us, and listening to us, and sending us notes along the way. That means the world to us. We’ve got some great shows coming up in the season three pipeline. If you want to stay connected, make sure you join our newsletter, Cabinet of Curiosities. Anyway, go to our website, the outfall.com and sign up.
