Weekly Garbage Pick-up

 

• Weekly Rubbish disposalⁱ

i Weekly Rubbish Disposal in colonial Charleston

Before the advent of the technology of mass production and the rise of modern consumer culture, the people of early South Carolina produced very small quantities of what we would call “garbage.” Worn-out goods like clothing, furniture, vehicles, and buildings materials were either recycled or converted into fuel for cooking and heating. Food waste was fed to animals or composted in the household garden. Only “rubbish” that could not be recycled or consumed by animals or flames—such as broken ceramics and glass—was cast aside outside the home. Small quantities of such trash frequently ended up in earthen privies (outdoor bathrooms) within private yards. As a consequence of this common practice, much of what we know about the material culture of early South Carolina is derived from materials excavated by archaeologists from former privies and wells.

During Charleston’s early decades as an unincorporated town, the provincial government occasionally issued orders for public officers to keep the streets cleared of refuse and various forms of “filth.” Such ad-hoc prescriptions became a regular practice in 1750, when the provincial government created a board of street commissioners for urban Charleston.[1] The gentlemen commissioners were empowered to appoint scavengers, who in turn employed teams of enslaved men to drive horse-drawn carts through the streets each week to collect garbage, manure, and other refuse. The initial law for this weekly curb-side collection service did not specify what was to become of the garbage after it was collected, however. An amendment adopted in 1764 empowered the street commissioners to direct the scavengers “to remove all filth and rubbish to such proper place or places, in or near the said town, as they, the said commissioners, or a majority of them, shall allot and point out for the reception of the said filth and rubbish.

The precise location or locations of garbage dumping in eighteenth-century Charleston must have been abundantly obvious to local residents and visitors, but our knowledge of such waste disposal practices is now exceedingly sparse. Various archaeological digs and construction projects on the peninsula have uncovered historic trash deposits over the years, but few written descriptions of historic dumping sites and practices survive. Charleston’s City Council, incorporated in August 1783, inherited the duties of the street commissioners and no doubt wrestled with the practical details of dumping, but the disappearance of early city records in 1865 (see Episode No. 79) limits our knowledge of such conversations. Beginning in September 1836, however, the municipal government began printing the full text of all City Council meetings in the local newspapers. From that point forward, a great deal of information survives about the disposal of local garbage on the Charleston peninsula.

From the extant proceedings of antebellum City Council meetings, we know that the “street sweepings” collected in the scavengers’ carts included materials such as animal manure, animal carcasses, sawdust, wood shavings, broken bricks, scrap metal, food waste, and assorted household refuse. The enslaved trash collectors routinely carted such materials to the fringes of residential areas, predominantly on the northwest side of the Charleston peninsula, and dumped them on the salt marshes that were dry at low tide. This environmentally-unfriendly practice, which probably began in the early colonial era, contributed to a gradual but significant topographical evolution. Much of what we now identify as historic parts of the city, such as the area around Colonial Lake, the hospital district, Brittlebank Park, the Joe Riley Baseball Stadium, and Morrison Drive, were originally low-lying salt marshes that were filled with trash and transformed into buildable, drivable, taxable land.

I could regale you with innumerable details related to this trashy, marsh-filling activity, but instead I’ll defer to the real expert in this facet of local history. My wife, Christina Rae Butler, has just published a book that contains everything you might want to know about landfill and the topographic evolution of the peninsula: Lowcountry at High Tide: A History of Flooding, Drainage, and Reclamation in Charleston, South Carolina (University of South Carolina Press, 2020). For more information about this fascinating part of the city’s history, in encourage you to check out C-Rae’s new book