Rediscovering Charleston's Colonial Fortifications

Beginning Monday, June 1st 2009, the ground will again be opened near South Adger’s Wharf in downtown Charleston in search of the city’s colonial fortifications. Charleston Musuem Archaeologist Martha Zierden will be leading a “field school” for archaeology students who will excavate the site over four weeks in the month of June. Like all efforts of the Mayor’s Walled City Task Force, this project is a cooperative venture involving a number of agencies, including the City of Charleston, the Historic Charleston Foundation, the Charleston Museum, and the College of Charleston.

The dig site at the southeast corner of East Bay Street and South Adger's Wharf

The upcoming work represents a continuation of the productive dig at South Adger’s Wharf in January 2008. During that ten-day excavation, the Walled City Task Force uncovered approximately 24 feet of the northern wall of the old redan at the east end of Tradd Street (see the images elsewhere on this blog). The June 2009 dig will explore the southern portion of the redan, which is under a city-owned asphalt parking lot adjacent to last year’s dig site. We hope to uncover the apex and a significant portion of the southern wall of the redan, and to explore the foundations of these brick fortifications that were begun in the late 1690s and leveled in the mid-1780s.

The asphalt surface of the parking lot was removed on 28 May 2009

The public is invited to come view the work in progress on weekdays between 8:00 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. Educational posters will be displayed at the dig site for the duration, and volunteer will be on hand to answer questions during work hours. In addition, I will be blogging about the excavation as it unflolds, and hosting a wrap-up program at the Charleston County Public Library on Tuesday, June 30th, at 6:30 p.m. Stay tuned for information about the latest discoveries!

Wednesday was an overcast, chilly day at South Adger’s Wharf, and in the late afternoon we all said a bittersweet goodbye to the redan wall that we’ve come to know so well over the past two weeks. Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. paid another visit to the site today and expressed to Katherine Saunders his great satisfaction with our discoveries and the enthusiastic public attention the dig has garnered. Beyond this executive visit, most of the day was spent wrapping up loose ends—measuring, surveying, sketching, and photographing. Nevertheless, we still managed to make a few very exciting discoveries.

Several of us took turns shoveling out the slurry of mud in front of the redan’s northeastern face. Despite working right at the water table, we were determined to get a better view of the point where the outer face of the wall makes a transition from five feet wide with a sloped face to three and a half feet wide with no slope. After a couple of hours, we had removed enough of the ballast stones and brick rubble to reveal the outline of the transition, which you can clearly see in the photos here. Although the grey brick drain slices right through the middle of our exposed redan wall, you can see that the five-foot wide wall makes a ninety degree turn, then goes west for 1.5 feet, then makes another ninety degree turn towards the northwest. The lowest courses of this brick transition are still present, but unfortunately the upper courses have been demolished. Although it’s not visible here, the wall continues downward, with an outward slope, for several more feet below the water line in these photos. We weren’t able to get all the way to the foundation, but we have enough data to create some good three-dimensional images in the future.

Thanks to the well-skilled backhoe crew from Charleston Water System, several large fragments of the redan’s uppermost or parapet walls were pulled out of the dirt for safekeeping. These fragments, which were knocked into the mud during the redan’s demolition ca. 1785, can be useful teaching tools in the future, and they will certainly help us to create a visual reconstruction of Charleston colonial fortifications. The Charleston Museum will receive one or two large pieces for potential display, and one will be at the Historic Charleston Foundation.

Until today, two of the large fragments of the redan wall were lodged in the earth just in front of the redan’s northern flank, blocking our view of that five-feet-wide sloping face. Once they were removed, however, we finally had a chance to trowel away the dirt from the exposed brick face. Within a few minutes, we discovered another small square cavity in the outer face, almost identical to the two cavities found earlier in the northwestern-most part of the exposed redan. Doug Scott, a master mason visiting the site, said he’s encountered these sorts of cavities in other colonial-era buildings in Charleston. He confirmed what we’ve suspected all along–that these cavities are mortises for wooden scaffolding used by bricklayers during the construction of the redan’s upper walls. After their completion, the wooden timbers inserted into the cavities would have been sawed off flush with the surface of the wall. Suspecting, then, that we might find another square cavity at the extreme southern edge of the exposed redan, we dug for a few minutes and found a fourth cavity in the wall’s outer face. The exposed portion of the redan is so small in that corner, however, that I couldn’t get a good photograph. Measuring along the exposed outer face of the redan, these square mortises are almost exactly six feet apart and roughly on the same horizontal level. The crew from Brockington and Associates recorded this and other data for their “total station” digital mapping of the site, which will help us create three-dimensional representations of all of these features in the future.

As the winter sun sank in the sky, the call came to cease work and evacuate the trenches. The shovels and other equipment were gathered up and the crew stood back to take one last admiring look at the results of our two-week dig. Moments later, the backhoe lurched into action and began pushing recently-removed soil back into the trenches. In what seemed like an instant (but really more like a bone-chilling couple of hours), the western end of South Adger’s Wharf began to resemble the street on which we first gathered on January 3d. The old redan is now out of sight, but for those of us who had the opportunity to witness its brief appearance, it will never be out of mind.

Fear not, the work of the Mayor’s Walled City Task Force—and this blog—will continue into the future. If you’d like to volunteer at a future event, or to contribute towards sustaining the work of the Task Force, please contact Katherine Saunders at (843) 723-3646, or email her at ksaunders[at]historiccharleston.org.

It was picture day at South Adger’s Wharf today. That is, the archaeologists did their best trowel and brush work this morning to make the exposed brickwork look as neat as possible for their “official” photographic record. This careful, detail-oriented work took most of the day, and despite deep shadows created by the low winter sun, they got some good images. My photos here aren’t the greatest, but I spent most of the day swinging a shovel and trying to stay out of their way!

This is my favorite shot—a view of the outer face of the north flank of the brick redan, looking southeast. In the foreground you see the exposed brickwork (facing the Cooper River) with a small square cavity, the purpose of which is yet unknown. In the mid-ground you see the mid-nineteenth-century arched brick drain running east-west through the remnants of the redan. Also in the mid-ground, and continuing into the background, you see the face of the redan make a curving transition to a wider and sloping dimension just before the drain, a profile that is more clearly seen on the far side of the drain. The intersection of the 300-year-old redan and the 150-year-old drain is complicated, but here’s another photo of the cleaned-up intersection of those two features, looking in the opposite or northwest direction, that may help clarify their juncture.

While troweling a newly-exposed part of the outer face of the redan, at the northernmost edge of Trench 3, Ron Anthony discovered another small, shallow, square cavity in the face of the wall. This one closely resembles the cavity described a few days ago (and pictured above), but is almost exactly six feet on center to the northwest of the first cavity. I reported the other day that the first cavity appears to have been chiseled out of the brick, but the base of this second cavity appears to have been purposely left open when the bricks were laid. Like the first cavity, the northern or right face of the second is angled so as to make the void wider in the back than the front. You’ll notice in these pictures that the bricks above the once-square cavity have been cut out, leaving a cone-shaped void. This work was probably done ca. 1786, when the Lower Market, a shed structure with wooden piers, was extended over the remnants of the old redan.

Damon Jackson of Brockington and Associates continued the careful excavation of Unit 4, at the easternmost end of Trench 2. Damon was also on site most of yesterday, too, when he did most of the “total station” mapping for the entire dig site. This careful surveying of the site and its historical features will later be compiled into a comprehensive map of the site that will be invaluable once the redan is covered over.

Doug Scott, a masonry expert from the American College of the Building Arts, visited the site today and offered some very interesting insight into the redan brickwork. He noticed that there is sand impregnated deep into the mortar of the lowest exposed courses of brickwork on the back (land side) of the redan, suggesting that this area was being backfilled almost immediately after the bricks were laid some three hundred years ago. We’re definitely going to be picking Doug’s brain further about this historical brickwork!

Last but not least, here’s a photo of a brick fragment of the redan wall that I dug out of the backhoe fill today. I noticed that it appears to have two finished faces, forming about a 100-degree angle, as you can see in the photo at left. I suspect that this is part of one of the embrasures from the redan—that is, one of the openings in the redan wall through which the cannon protruded. In this photo, the outer face of the brick is face down in the wheelbarrow, and the inside of the embrasure is at the far left. Imagine that a cannon might have once pointed from the top left of this picture towards the bottom left.

This fragment of the redan (a remnant of the 1785 demolition) is headed to the Charleston Museum, where it will hopefully be on display one day. The cleaning, curating, and interpreting of these and other artifacts requires money, of course. Your tax-deductible contributions for this project can directed to the Historic Charleston Foundation, with the specification that the funds are to be applied to the Walled City Task Force. For more information, please contact Katherine Saunders at (843) 723-3646, or email her at ksaunders[at]historiccharleston.org.

Tomorrow (Wednesday) is the last full day of work on this dig. Stay tuned for more details!