Gadsden Creek

Gadsden Creek was included in an 1852 plat that subdivided Thomas Gadsden's extensive real estate for resale.

Gadsden Creek was shown on the 1872 Bird's Eye View of Charleston as a creek curving around the corner of "Chesnut" (now Hagood Ave.) and Allway Street. (North is to the right in this view.)

Gadsden Creek was a popular and undeveloped swimming spot throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It derives its name from Thomas Gadsden, the grandson of Christopher Gadsden, who once owned the land. Beginning in the late-nineteenth century, structures appeared nearby in an area which became known as Butcher Town. By the early-1920s, an African American neighborhood called Fiddler's Green was located where Butcher Town once stood near the upper portion of the creek. Many of the Fiddler's Green homes wear destroyed by a tornado in 1938 and the debris from their destruction filled a portion of the creek.[1] Fiddler's Creek later became known as Gadsden Green and from the 1930s to the 1970s, the city of Charleston seized land from African Americans in the neighborhood to build public housing.[2] In 1958, Charleston's mayor, William Morrison talking about that process of filling in the creek stated to the city's Ways and Means committee that:

"We [the city] are reclaiming more than 100 acres of marshland in the area between Spring Street and The Citadel on the Ashley River waterfront [the Gadsden Green neighborhood]. Numerous suggestions have been made as to the uses to which these properties should be put ... We are now producing through landfill development an average of 15 plus acres per year, when converted into cash means one-half-million dollars per year in city assets which, as I have said before, and I say again, is cash in the bank."[3]

Gadsden Creek was once one of many tidal creeks on the Charleston peninsula, the historic center of the city, but it is now the last creek remaining.[4] From the 1950s to the 1970s, the city filled the unlined 100-acre creek and the surrounding wetlands with an estimated 1.5 million pounds of garbage.[5][6] In 2020, the creek consisted of just four acres which are considered heavily-polluted.[7] But, the idea that Gadsden Creek is even a creek, much less the Gadsden Creek recorded in antebellum accounts, is disputed.[8][4]

In 2014, city officials and developers announced the plan for a mixed-use project consisting of apartments, parking garages, and biotechnical research facilities with the aim that it would become a "global hub for research."[9][10] At the time of the Horizon District's announcement (later renamed WestEdge), the future of Gadsden Creek was uncertain.[9] But, on April 15, 2015, the Horizon Project Foundation filed for a permit with the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control to fill the majority of the creek with concrete and to construct a drain to replace the creek's draining function.[5] In June 2021, DHEC approved the plan to fill the creek.[11] The Corps of Engineers has the final say on whether the creek will be filled.[11]