Trees in Urban Charleston

 

Trees in Urban Charlestonⁱ

i Trees in Urban Charleston

I know of no eighteenth-century sources that mention the number and varieties of trees planted in the streets of colonial-era Charleston. We might imagine that early citizens planted native trees that were readily available and well-adapted to the climate and soil, like the evergreen palmetto, live oak, and magnolia. The earliest documentary evidence related to this topic suggests, however, that Charleston’s early population of street trees was dominated by non-native species imported from Asia. The first tree (that I have found) positively identified as a common street tree in urban Charleston is the so-called “Pride of India” tree, also known as the “chinaberry” tree (Melia azedarach). This tree is a medium-sized deciduous member of the mahogany family that produces berries commonly eaten by birds and horses. In many respects, it’s similar to the Asian crepe myrtle tree that dominates the urban streetscape of modern Charleston.

Physician and historian David Ramsay, who settled in Charleston in 1773, later stated that Thomas Lamboll (1694–1774) was the first person in South Carolina to plant the “Pride of India” tree in his famous garden at the southwest end of King Street.[12] If that story is true—and we have no reason to doubt Dr. Ramsay—then Mr. Lamboll was cultivating Pride of India trees in Charleston during the third quarter of the eighteenth century, at the same time the Commissioners of Streets began supervising the urban streetscape. Thomas Lamboll might also have been responsible for introducing the second most common street tree of early Charleston, the so-called “male mulberry” or “paper mulberry” tree (Broussonetia papyrifera). This species is also a medium-sized deciduous tree imported from Asia, and, like the Pride of India, might have been introduced into the Charleston streetscape in the second half of the eighteenth century.[13]

Records documenting the activities of Charleston’s early Commissioners of Streets have long since disappeared, but a handful of other sources contain useful information about the city’s first street trees. The Pride of India tree, for example, was sufficiently common in Charleston by 1793 that specimens were offered for sale at the local garden center called Watson’s Garden (now under the Post and Courier building at the northeast corner of King and Columbus Streets). It was also available across the rural Lowcountry, as demonstrated by a 1793 newspaper story containing a country recipe for making a cathartic tea from Pride of India bark.[14] In 1826, local architect Robert Mills stated that the sidewalks of urban Charleston were “well paved with brick, and many of them ornamented with melia azedaracha, or pride of India.”[15] A municipal report published in 1848 stated that the street trees of Charleston, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, were dominated by just two species, the Pride of India and the paper mulberry.[16]

The street trees planted in Charleston before the American Revolution—whatever their number and variety—probably did not survive the war. There was no municipal government to protect or care for the trees, and wartime shortages of money and fuel probably compelled citizens to chop down street trees for firewood. When the unincorporated town of Charles Town was incorporated as the City of Charleston in August 1783, the South Carolina General Assembly specified that the new city council “shall also be vested with all the powers and authorities which, by law, are vested in the commissioners of the streets” and other quasi-government agencies.[17] From August 1783 onward, therefore, the street trees of the incorporated City of Charleston became the responsibility of our municipal government.

In the early years of post-war recovery, Charleston’s new City Council did little to encourage the planting of street trees. The local economy struggled for several years as war debts and broken infrastructure hampered the recovery. Some home owners apparently planted trees in front of their houses, however, just as the Commissioners of Streets had encouraged in the 1750s. In October 1788, the city ratified an ordinance to protect such trees planted by private citizens in the public right-of-way. That law, which was repeated and continued by various ordinances up to the present, made it a crime to “break down, destroy, injure or remove any of the trees planted and growing, or which shall hereafter be planted and growing on the edge of the pavement of the streets of this city, or any of the boxes encompassing the same.”[18]

Although there is no surviving evidence that Charleston’s municipal government actively planted any trees in the years after the city’s incorporation, a new spirt of passive encouragement commenced in the mid-1790s. The aesthetic value of trees and their contribution of cooling shade were well-known and accepted by that time, but the newest reason for cultivating urban trees was rooted in cutting-edge science. Starting in 1792 and continuing for many years, urban Charleston experienced a number of annual epidemics of yellow fever.[19] We now know that this often-fatal sickness is spread by mosquitos, but the leading scientific minds of the eighteenth century believed that yellow fever and other illnesses arose from breathing bad air; more specifically, air corrupted by the effluvia or miasma arising from rotting vegetative and animal matter and “excited” by the solar energy of the sun.[20] With citizens dying in large numbers every autumn, the City Council of Charleston turned to the Medical Society of South Carolina for advice.

In late April 1795, the intendant of Charleston asked the Medical Society of South Carolina to advise City Council on “the best modes of preventing the introduction of contagious diseases into the city during the ensuing summer, & autumn months.” The Medical Society immediately appointed a committee to make a list of recommendations, which they read and adopted on May 1st and forwarded to the intendant. Second among the society’s recommendations was this simple statement: “that trees should be planted before the houses of the citizens.”[21] City Council accepted and adopted the Medical Society’s advice on May 5th, 1795, but the loss of city records from this era precludes us from learning exactly what was done to improve the health of urban Charleston in the ensuing months and years.[22]