The City of Charleston, South Carolina, occupies a unique place in American history. As the first permanent English settlement in North America south of Virginia, Charleston was established on the frontier of contested territory—land occupied by Native Americans but coveted by Spain and France. From the arrival of the first English and West Indian settlers in 1670, Charles Town (as it was then known) was born into a hostile environment, and its inhabitants were required to live in a state of persistent vigilance. Shortly after the town was relocated from Albemarle Point, on the west bank of the Ashley River, to the present location in 1680, the early colonists began building defensive fortifications of wood, earth, brick, and stone to shield the town against potential invasion by the Spanish in St. Augustine or the French at Mobile. These fortifications waxed and waned as the population and physical dimensions of the town expanded, but for most of its first century—from the 1680s to the 1780s—the landscape of urban Charleston included such features as bastions, batteries, curtain walls, moats, drawbridges, and gates. In effect, early Charleston evolved like a European “walled city”—the only British settlement in North America of its kind.
The Mayor’s Walled City Task Force invites you to explore this website to learn more about the fortifications that once surrounded colonial Charleston. Although historians have neglected this important part of Charleston’s past for many generations, work is now underway to reconstruct the story of the colonial “walled city” and to share it with the public.
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Rediscovering Charleston's Colonial Fortifications 
4 January 2011 at 3:56 pm
I love the drawing of the “Walled City”. It really gives you a good idea of what Charles Town looked like.
I look forward to getting updates on the progress of your research and to visiting to see for myself.
10 June 2012 at 5:06 pm
Dear Mr. Butler: Is the website’s banner illustration a historic drawing or a modern reconstruction? Either way I’d be interested in learning more about it. If you could direct me to an online source of information that would be great. Thanks, Dan Pezzoni, Lexington VA
11 June 2012 at 3:27 pm
Dear Dan: The banner illustration is an extreme closeup of a small inset in a larger map published in London in 1777 by J. F. W. Des Barres, entitled
The Harbour of Charles Town in South Carolina from the Surveys of Sr. Jas. Wallace Captn. in his Majesty’s Navy & others with a view of the Town from the South Shore of the Ashley River
. The Charleston Library Society owns original copies of Des Barres’s
Atlantic Neptune
, and is now offering high-quality reproductions for sale. See http://logbook.heritagecharts.com/2012/03/13/heritage-charts-and-charleston-library-society-announce-new-fund-raising-initiative/.
26 January 2019 at 9:54 am
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