Episode 268: Demolition by Neglect in the 1720s: Forsaking Charleston's Earthen Fortifications

Charleston Time Machine

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, South Carolina’s colonial government raised a fortified trace of earthen walls and moats around the nucleus of urban Charleston. These defensive works constrained the town’s growth for more than twenty years, but then quietly vanished before a burst of civic expansion in the mid-1730s. Questions of when and why the earthworks were dismantled have baffled generations of historians and inspired competing theories. On the next episode of Charleston Time Machine, we’ll unpack the forgotten story of government neglect that gradually erased the “Walled City” during the late 1720s.