Originally published in Charleston Magazine, January-February 2006

Another Brick in the Wall:

A newly formed task force seeks to protect a hidden part of Charleston's past

Jason A. Zwiker 

Katherine Saunders was out the door and in the street as soon as she realized what the CPW bulldozer was about to do. A massive chunk of brickwork, exposed where they’d opened up East Bay Street near the Historic Charleston Foundation’s Missroon House headquarters, is what caught her eye. The crew leader thought it a common foundation wall, easy to blast through.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “This goes down ten to fourteen feet. You can’t blast through this. This goes back to the seventeenth century.”

What the crew had unearthed, exactly where Katherine had known it would be, was part of the Granville bastion, archaeological evidence from the days when colonial-era Charles Town was enclosed by walls to protect against naval and landward assaults alike.

Once she explained the significance of the find to the crew, they paused the work in progress and brought in their commissioners and an archaeologist to determine how to proceed with minimal impact to the wall. “They did the right thing,” Katherine says. “And we’ve had a great relationship with CPW ever since.”

For many years, Katherine and others at Historic Charleston Foundation have been actively working to identify exactly where the wall, a significant part of not only local but also national history, once stood. “The French had Quebec and the Spanish had St. Augustine,” Katherine says. “But Charleston was the only English walled city in North America.”

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