The Ashley River wharves were convenient landing places for small craft belonging to farms and plantations on Charleston Neck and St. Andrews Parish. In addition to lumber, naval stores, and other commercial shipping, the area was busy with livestock and produce unloaded for sale in town. The waterfront traffic supported merchants along South Bay, lower Legare Street and lower King Street. While grocers could sell packaged and dry goods almost anywhere in Charleston, vendors of meat and produce were restricted to three city-owned markets: the beef market, the fish market, and the “lower market.”
If you were looking to purchase fresh beef, for example, you visited the Beef Market, which had stood at the northeast corner of Broad and Meeting Streets since the late 1730s. If you wanted to purchase “small meats” such as lamb or pork, you went to the Lower Market at the east end of Tradd Street. Fish, fruits, and vegetables, as you now know, were being sold at the east end of Queen Street. The city’s desire to consolidate these activities was hampered by the lack of sufficient public space, however, so a public-private partnership was required. In the spring of 1788 Charleston’s City Council received a deed of gift from six property owners around a creek or tidal inlet on the northeast side of town, the site we now call Market Street. In exchange for the free land, the city agreed to fill the muddy site and to build sheds for the sales of all sorts of foodstuffs. This was a great bargain for the city, but there was a reversion clause. If the city ever ceased to use the land as a market place, the property would revert to its original six owners.
Vendue Range is a short street that runs eastward about 450 feet from the east side of East Bay Street to Concord Street, at the edge of the Cooper River waterfront. The east end of Vendue Range terminates at a large fountain that forms one of the most popular features of Charleston’s Waterfront Park. In the early days of Charleston—actually for the first 130 years of the city, from 1680 to 1810—this street did not have a name because there was no street here. Originally it was a small tidal inlet that flowed west of East Bay Street at high tide. By the 1720s the western part of this inlet had been filled and the resulting thoroughfare was called Dock Street. Dock Street was officially renamed Queen Street in April of 1734, becoming the first of Charleston’s streets to have a legally sanctioned name. We could talk for hours about the muddy origins of Queen Street, but we’ll save that for a future program.
After 1734, the site we now call Vendue Range was commonly called “the east end of Queen Street.” It was simply a vacant mud flat that was underwater at high tide. By the middle of the eighteenth century, there were wharves on the north and south sides of this open mudflat, and the Prioleau family came to own all of the property in question. In 1770, the South Carolina legislature ratified an act to create an official fish market for Charles Town and funded the construction of a relatively small shed at the east end of Queen Street. The shed was set back a sufficient distance eastward from East Bay Street so that small, undecked boats could deliver fresh fish directly to the shed at high tide.
In 1787, a few years after the end of the American Revolution, the new city government of Charleston negotiated with the Prioleau family to use part of this property as a vegetable market for the city’s rapidly expanding population. During the 1787 landscaping project to create a broad open space for the vegetable market, the city also created a slip for the landing of Mr. Hibben’s ferry that connected Charleston with Christ Church Parish, the area on the east side of the Cooper River we now call Mt. Pleasant. When President George Washington paid a visit to Charleston in May of 1791, he arrived from Christ Church Parish by water at Prioleau’s wharf, at the southeast end of Queen Street. According to the newspapers of that time, it was a triumphal moment with thousands of spectators, music, and banners waving, but President Washington had to step from the ferry slip past the city’s fish market and through a dusty, open area with tables selling fruits and vegetables. Perhaps the president didn’t get the best first impression of Charleston.
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