East Side History Series: The East Side and the Railroads

by Susan Millar Williams, Ph. D. 

Approaching the Palmer Campus from East Bay Street, you can’t help but notice the railroad line along the Cooper River. In fact, most of the time you can’t see the river at all because the tracks are crowded with auto transport cars tagged with graffiti.

Ruins of the Northeastern Railroad station.

You may have seen articles recently about the Lowcountry Low Line, a proposed linear park that will run along one of those old railroad right-of-ways, between King and Meeting Streets. That long, narrow strip was once the path of the South Carolina Railroad. Other railroad lines also came through the East Side, including the Northeastern Railroad and the Charleston and Savannah Railroad.

When the Charleston Museum published a history of the East Side in 1987, they titled it Between the Tracks.  The area grew up around railroads that carried goods and people in and out of the city. There was one passenger depot on Line Street, one on Mary, and another on East Bay. The Northeastern had a terminal on Chapel Street, which burned during the evacuation of Charleston in 1865. 

In the early twentieth century Union Station was built at the foot of Columbus Street, more or less where we now see all those outgoing BMWs.

There were also lots of buildings on the East Side where railroad workers performed repair and maintenance. Other businesses, like Eason Iron, which once stood at the corner of Columbus and Nassau Streets, produced parts and engines for the railroads. Boarding houses and rental properties in the area catered to the hundreds of railroad workers who shoveled coal, greased engines, handled baggage, loaded freight, and did whatever else it took to keep Charleston and its port connected with the nation’s interior. A company called Wharton and Petsch produced boxcars and platform cars, employing machinists, carpenters, finishers, and blacksmiths who made good wages.  

Robert Smalls

In order to ship those goods in and out, the railroads had to connect with the ships docked at wharves further south. But then as now, people who lived and worked downtown were wary of noise and pollution, including, in the early years, sparks thrown off by the steam driven engines. They fought to keep the rail lines north of what is now Calhoun Street. That meant that in order to transfer freight from  ships to trains, or from trains to ships, the goods had to be unloaded, loaded onto drays (horse-drawn wagons), driven several miles, unloaded, and reloaded.

Enterprise Railroad, as depicted on its letterhead.

In 1870, South Carolina representative Robert Smalls joined with three other black legislators, Joseph Rainey, Richard Cain, and Alonzo Ransier, and other investors to form a company called the Enterprise Railroad, which would move goods between the wharves and the railroad depots in horse-drawn cars that ran, like trolleys, on tracks. The Enterprise is said to have been the only United States railroad ever under black ownership. 

The East Side is still a major hub of rail and sea transport, though shipping containers now dominate the landscape and the steam and horse power of earlier years have given way to fossil fuels.