In 2005, a group of advocates including preservationists, archaeologists, historians, and educators convinced the City of Charleston to create the Mayor’s Walled City Task Force. Opportunities to study these remnants were at hand and would likely continue in coming years, so a call to arms was sounded. Few people in the nineteenth century harbored any nostalgic feelings for our early fortifications as the town expanded and became increasingly “modern.” That sentiment began to change at the turn of the twenty-first century, however, when some people in the community began to realize that the quickening pace of development in urban Charleston was literally churning up physical remnants the city’s militarized past.

The early works were effectively demolished and scraped off the face of the earth in the post-Revolutionary decade, after which even locals began to forget about Charleston’s former existence as a “walled city.” To some, those early defensive works might have seemed like quaint examples of our community’s naïve, colonial infancy. Since that time, visitors have found a civilian city, the landscape of which bears few visible remnants of the colonial-era fortifications. The colonial community of “Charles Town” was incorporated as “Charleston” in 1783, just after the conclusion of the American Revolution, and the new city and state governments worked together in the post-war years to accomplish a major undertaking-the demilitarization of urban Charleston. The town’s defensive works were expanded further during our War of Independence in the late 1770s, but they took a significant beating during the protracted and ultimately successful British siege in the spring of 1780. Charleston’s collective fortifications, which expanded dramatically between 1704 and the 1770s, served as an effective deterrent to anyone contemplating a hostile invasion of one of the richest seaports in colonial North America. These fortifications saw little action over the years, and very few of the town’s cannon were ever fired in its defense, but these facts demonstrate that they had fulfilled their purpose. If you were to travel back in time to visit downtown Charleston at any point between 17, you would find an urban landscape dominated by a network of walls, moats, drawbridges, and cannon that encircled the town-effectively creating what we might call a “walled city.” Because of ongoing tensions with our Spanish and French neighbors, and Charleston’s relative isolation within the broader landscape of British North America, South Carolina’s early government channeled the modern equivalent of billions of dollars into the construction and maintenance of defensive fortifications that were intended to protect our colonial capital in case of an attack launched by our enemy neighbors. Today we’ll focus on the present town’s first few years and ask-how prepared were Charlestonians of the 1680s to defend their little town? The answer just might surprise you. The government campaign to fortify Charleston commenced early in the town’s history, but precisely how early is a bit fuzzy. They accumulated over multiple decades and successive eras of warfare with our Spanish and French neighbors. The town’s urban defenses didn’t appear all at once, however. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Charleston was one of the most heavily fortified communities in North America.

Charleston port map