Between Two Rivers · Episode 7
Hard Times
After the Civil War, Charleston is a city in ruins. The Best Friend of Charleston and the railroad that lost its lead, a fortune in phosphate found in the Ashley River mud, the first visitors to Magnolia's gardens, and the cyclone of August 1885.
Now playing
Loading episodes…
Click any section or line to jump there in the audio.
Carol Charleston, the fall of 1865. A newspaperman from the North walks through the lower part of the city and writes down what he sees.
Shannon What does he see?
Carol Empty houses. Grass growing in the streets. A whole burned-out district, and wharves rotting into the harbor.
Shannon The city that started the war.
Carol The city that started the war, now one of the saddest places in the country.
Shannon Welcome back to Between Two Rivers. A history of Charleston, one era at a time.
Carol Last time, the first shots of the Civil War were fired over Charleston harbor, and the city spent four years under fire. This time, Charleston tries to pick itself back up. And it finds a little help in a very strange place.
Shannon In the mud.
Carol Episode seven. Hard Times.
Shannon So let's be clear about how bad it was. The great fire of 1861 had burned a path right across the peninsula, and nobody had money to rebuild it. Then a year and a half of shelling had wrecked much of the lower city.
Carol And the money was gone too.
Shannon Gone. Confederate money was worthless. Banks had failed. The war had ended slavery, and with it, the old plantation economy that had made the city rich.
Carol So what was left?
Shannon The harbor. The railroad. And the people, who were stubborn.
Carol Let's talk about that railroad, because Charleston had a head start.
Shannon A big head start. Back in 1830, a little steam engine called the Best Friend of Charleston made its first run here. It was the first steam locomotive built in America for regular service on a railroad.
Carol The Best Friend. I love that name.
Shannon Everybody does. And a few years later, the line ran all the way to Hamburg, on the Savannah River. More than a hundred and thirty miles. For a short time, it was the longest railroad in the world.
Carol And what happened to the Best Friend?
Shannon (laughs) Its boiler blew up. In 1831. A fireman got tired of the hissing from the safety valve and tied it shut.
Carol Oh no.
Shannon Oh yes. But the railroad survived, and after the Civil War, the tracks were rebuilt. The trouble was, by then, other cities had railroads too. Cotton that used to come to Charleston could go to Savannah, or Wilmington, or straight north.
Carol So the head start was gone.
Shannon The head start was gone.
Carol So, the strange place where Charleston found help.
Shannon The riverbanks. In 1867, a couple of scientists in Charleston took a hard look at some dark, knobby rocks along the Ashley River.
Carol Rocks people had been walking past forever.
Shannon Forever. Planters had always thought of them as a nuisance. Worthless rocks. But a geologist named Francis Holmes and a chemist named Nathaniel Pratt, along with a doctor named St. Julien Ravenel, worked out what they were. Phosphate.
Carol And phosphate is what, exactly?
Shannon Fertilizer. Ground up and treated with acid, it makes some of the best fertilizer there is. And farmers all over the South had worn-out soil after years of growing cotton.
Carol So it's worth money.
Shannon A lot of money. Within a few years, there were mining companies digging along the Ashley and the other rivers, and dredges scooping the rock out of the riverbeds. And fertilizer factories went up along the edges of town, on the Neck, north of the city.
Carol The Neck?
Shannon That's what Charlestonians call the narrow upper part of the peninsula. Where the two rivers squeeze in close together.
Carol And how big did this get?
Shannon By the 1880s, South Carolina was the biggest producer of phosphate in the world. It was the city's biggest new industry.
Carol Did it last?
Shannon No. In the 1890s, even bigger deposits turned up in Florida, and a big hurricane in 1893 wrecked a lot of the South Carolina operations. The industry faded. But for about twenty years, the mud of the Lowcountry kept Charleston afloat.
Carol And there was another thing Charleston discovered in these years.
Shannon Visitors.
Carol People who'd pay just to look around.
Shannon Exactly. Up the Ashley River, at a place called Magnolia Plantation, the family opened its gardens to the public around 1870. People came up the river by steamboat to see the azaleas in bloom.
Carol So a garden became a tourist attraction.
Shannon It's often called the oldest public garden in America. And it's still open. Charleston didn't know it yet, but it had found the business that would carry it into the next century. People wanting to see the old city.
Carol So by the 1880s, was the city coming back?
Shannon Slowly. The burned district was finally being filled in. There was a new mayor, William Ashmead Courtenay, elected in 1879, who wanted to modernize everything. Cleaner streets, better fire protection, new parks.
Carol Things were looking up.
Shannon Things were looking up. And then came August 1885.
Carol The cyclone.
Shannon That's what they called it at the time. A hurricane, coming straight in off the ocean, on August 25th, 1885.
Carol How bad?
Shannon The winds were around a hundred miles an hour. The storm surge pushed the harbor up into the streets of the lower city. The wharves were smashed. Boats were thrown up onto land.
Carol And the houses?
Shannon The wind tore the roofs off a huge share of the buildings in town. Chimneys came down. Steeples were damaged. When people came out the next morning, the streets were full of slate, tin, broken trees and bricks.
Carol Were people killed?
Shannon Some were. Around twenty died in the city itself, and more drowned along the rivers and the coast.
Carol And after twenty years of rebuilding.
Shannon After twenty years of rebuilding. It was a terrible blow. But Charleston did what Charleston does. It cleaned up, put the roofs back on, and started over.
Carol For about a year.
Shannon For about a year.
Carol So, if you're in Charleston today, where do you find this episode?
Shannon Start at the Best Friend of Charleston Railway Museum, near the visitor center on Ann Street. There's a full-size replica of that first little engine.
Carol The one with the boiler.
Shannon The one with the boiler. Then drive up the Ashley River Road to Magnolia Plantation and Gardens, and walk the same gardens those first visitors came to see in the 1870s.
Carol And as you drive along the river, remember that its banks were once full of phosphate mines.
Shannon And when you're back downtown, look up at the old roofs and chimneys south of Broad. A lot of what you're looking at was repaired after the cyclone of 1885, and again after what came next.
Carol That's Charleston after the war. A city in ruins, a railroad that lost its lead, a fortune in the mud, the first tourists, and a cyclone.
Shannon Twenty hard years. And they weren't over yet.
Carol Next time, it's August 31st, 1886. One year after the cyclone, the ground under Charleston starts to shake.
Shannon The Earthquake. That's next time, on Between Two Rivers.