Vultures, Dogs and the Markets of Charleston

 Vultures, Dogs and the Markets of Charlestonⁱ

i Vultures and Dogs

More commonly found in the Lowcountry of South Carolina is the black-headed Black Vulture (Coragyps atratus), a large scavenging bird that has been a common sight in urban Charleston since colonial times.  They were once so common in the city that locals frequently referred to them, in a half-joking manner, as “Charleston eagles.”

Black Vultures are scavenging birds indigenous to the Lowcountry, so they witnessed the arrival of the first European settlers and enslaved Africans who arrived in South Carolina in the late 1600s.  As Charleston grew from a village to a town to a city, vultures lived on the fringes of the human settlement and feasted on our trash and leftovers.  A German physician, Johann Schoepf, visiting Charleston in the spring of 1784 made the following observation:

“Nowhere are buzzards to be seen in such numbers as in and about the City of Charleston.  Since they live only on carrion, no harm is done [to] them; they eat up what sloth has not removed out of the way, and so have a great part in maintaining cleanliness and keeping off unwholesome vapors from dead beasts and filth.  Their sense of smell is keen, as also is their sight; hence nothing goes unremarked of them, that may serve as food, and one sees them everywhere in the streets.  There are those who believe that if a buzzard lights upon a house in which an ill man lies, it is a fatal sign for they imagine the bird has wind of the corpse already.”

Dr. Schoepf observed that vultures performed a sort of civic service by removing trash and were therefore tolerated, or at least not molested or discouraged by the human population. In the eighteenth century, however, the vultures weren’t particularly associated with any of the marketplaces of urban Charleston.

Before the city government consolidated the sale of vegetables, seafood, and meat in Market Street in 1807, market waste was mostly thrown from the wharves at the east end of Tradd Street and the east end of Queen Street into the Cooper River.  From the late 1730s to 1796, the city’s official Beef Market was located away from the water, however, at the northeast corner of Meeting and Broad Streets.  Here butchers chopped up the carcasses of animals that had been slaughtered outside the city limits, before being brought by wagons to the Beef Market.  So what happened to their meat scraps—did the butchers toss them to the vultures?  Apparently not.  In all of my extensive reading of early Charleston newspapers, I haven’t come across any complaints or accounts of vultures at the Beef Market, or any other marketplace of eighteenth-century Charleston.  Instead, the butchers of early Charleston brought their dogs to the market every day, and the butchers’ dogs kept the market area free of unwanted meat scraps, or offal, as it was usually called.