Here’s a conundrum I’ve been struggling to decipher for several years: how can we reconcile the fact that water once flowed from the Cooper River, across East Bay Street, into Dock Street (now Queen Street), with the fact that there was supposedly a solid brick “wharf wall” along the eastern line of East Bay Street? After a lot of head scratching and research, I think I’ve found the answer. Prior to the early 1740s, South Carolina’s colonial legislature made a special exception in the law empowering the brick “wharf wall,” which allowed a “breach” in the wall to exist at the east end of Dock Street, to permit the flow of water. This authorized exception is first mentioned in a 1714 law authorizing improvements to the wharf wall, and it seems to have continued until the “water course” in Dock Street (renamed Queen Street in 1734) was finally obliterated in the the 1740s.