Diane Hamilton, a retired Charleston County Schools history teacher asked what seemed like a simple question, “What did Maryville look like before St. Andrews Boulevard?” The answer was a lot more complicated than she imagined, leading her down winding paths and webs of stories of her neighbors, friends and family.
“I lived here my entire life,” Hamilton said of Ashleyville-Maryville, the historic neighborhood called a successful example of American self-governance by the Avery Research Center. “Of course, I didn’t know until about 10 years ago how historic the neighborhood was. The information was just never taught in schools, and I don’t remember my parents talking about the past in that way.
“But when I started finding answers to my original question, that’s when I found out, there was a pound, there were mayors, a post office — a complete organization.”
Maryville was a primarily Black town after the land was divided and sold cheap to Black residents. It was incorporated with its own elections, town council and more in 1886, Hamilton found. And while the charter was short-lived — lost 50 years later in 1936 — the vibrant history of the people who lived there and still remain is palpable.
Hamilton’s explorations led her to her latest book project, Maryville: The Audacity of a People, detailing the accounts of her neighbors in Ashleyville-Maryville and their own family histories, memories and her own findings at home of what the town was like before it was absorbed by Charleston.
“I started finding all this material, and I started thinking, ‘What am I going to do with all this? When I pass, they’ll just throw all this in the trash.’ Then, the idea came to put it all in a book,” she said.
Archives from the then-newly established News and Courier was one of Hamilton’s primary sources of information in the writing of Maryville, alongside local organizations like the College of Charleston’s Avery Research Center.
“The information is out there, it just takes someone with an interest in it to pull it all together,” she said. “You have to have time to go back and read the old newspaper stories — to interview some of the older members of the community.”
The whole process took her on a journey of memory, she said, as she listened to tales from neighbors whose parents owned a corner store in Maryville or went to church down the road about a hundred years ago.
After selling just a couple-hundred copies in the first week of the book’s publication, she’s found a staggering amount of support and interest from other longtime residents of the historical neighborhood and others.
“I am delighted by the interest, and a little surprised. But mostly very happy,” Hamilton said. “I just wanted to preserve the history and share it, but people from all different walks of life, not just African Americans, have reached out to me for a copy of the book.”
Many who’ve picked it up have approached Hamilton with new stories and information, tugging her toward a second volume, she said. And there’s more than enough information to fill it, as Ashleyville-Maryville continues evolving, moving from a mostly Black town to a more diverse neighborhood feeling the impact of suburban gentrification.
“The demographics of Ashleyville-Maryville have changed drastically,” Hamilton said. “The town was always majority Black, but now Maryville is almost one-third caucasian; it’s common for me to look through my sunroom and see white people walking their dogs or their children riding around on bikes.”
With that change comes the loss of much of what made the neighborhood historically unique.
“There’s been quite a lot of construction as property changes hands from those who’ve lived here for generations, to people and developers with no interest in the neighborhood,” Hamilton said. “They don’t want to stay here — they go off to big cities and they don’t come back; they buy property here and then just sell it off.”
But some local advocacy groups are at work to preserve historical plots of land in the area and keep housing costs down for those who have spent their lives there. The St. Andrews Preservation Society, for example, last year moved a historic home in its entirety from its original plot in West Ashley to a protected space in Maryville.
As president of the Maryville/Ashleyville Neighborhood Association, Hamilton has plenty of opportunities now and still ahead of her to make noticeable improvement in the area.
But, Hamilton said, the most important thing for the people who live in Ashleyville-Maryville, both longtime residents and newcomers alike, is to know and understand their own history. And just moving in makes you a part of the history of your home.
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