Brick in the Wall - Page 2

Having a few known spots on record as well as plats and other documentary sources to work from, they are gradually better defining the exact lines of the wall and its bastions. Cooperation and communication are a huge part of the success of their mission. “People are finding pieces of the wall all the time,” she says. “City engineers come across it during drainage projects, CPW and probably SCE&G encounter it as well. We certainly don’t want to stop their work, we just want to be able to photograph and map it when those sites happen to be opened.” What she’s discovered is that these agencies are more than happy to work with them once they understand the history involved.

In the summer of 2005, a special task force was appointed by Mayor Joseph P. Riley, Jr. to identify the boundaries and lines where the wall had stood, protect historic remnants of the wall when possible, and to interpret the wall and its significance to the public.

“One legacy of the walled city is that when you are walking where it had been, particularly around Tradd Street and Rainbow Row, you still have that feeling of density, like in an old European city,” says Katherine. “That’s a direct result of the city’s beginnings inside the wall. Even after fires and other disasters, people rebuild using the same lot lines and foundations, so the spatial legacy remains.”

Peter McGee, who co-chairs the Walled City Task Force with Katherine, would like to see an articulation of where the wall had stood in the pavement and sidewalks so that the public could ‘walk the wall’ and gain a better appreciation for the nascent city of bastions and military fortifications surrounded by marsh, wilderness, and water that was colonial Charleston. An additional interpretive possibility, finding a public space or two to reconstruct a portion of the wall, would allow people to gain a physical sense of how tall, how massive, the fortifications of the city had been long ago.

“People think of Charleston as an antebellum city,” Katherine says. “Especially when they first come to visit. This would add the sense of our colonial past as well.”

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