Volunteer researcher Julie Bowling of Charleston has created a website that lists some of the estimated 26,000 people whose remains still lie today under Harmon Field and The Citadel’s football stadium on the city’s west side.
A year ago, Bowling began a one-person effort to honor the people interred in the Tower Hill Cemetery, a 22-acre burial ground that was used from 1841 until 1927. Orphans, the poor, free and enslaved people, immigrants, seamen and Confederate soldiers were interred at the site bounded by President, Congress and Line streets.
“Under Harmon Field, Hagood Stadium, and several parking lots lie so many of Charleston’s forgotten dead — not a few hundred or a few thousand, but tens of thousands,” said Bowling, a former Louisville, Ky., middle school teacher.
“This public burial ground served Charleston’s most marginalized people,” she said. “Today, there is not even a sign to commemorate [them]. Benjamin Franklin once said, ‘Show me your cemeteries, and I will tell you what kind of people you have.’
“These people mattered, their lives were precious, and their final resting place should be preserved and protected at long last.”
For a year, Bowling has turned the pages of the Returns of Deaths within the City of Charleston to enter the names of the dead into the website she created. From the books that are on file in the Charleston County Public Library’s South Carolina Room, she has gleaned the record of 5,453 burials at the site from 1841 to 1868. Most of the records identify the deceased by name, but many of them are nameless. Bowling said she will add more entries from the city’s death registry this summer to the website, Friends of Tower Hill Cemetery.
Bowling apologizes for the website’s awkwardness. “I am still pretty new at website design,” she said with a laugh. Nevertheless, she offers perhaps the first online access to the identities of some of Tower Hill’s forgotten dead.
The stories of the dead
Most of the online records in Bowling’s burial database is a list of first and last names, the week or date of death, gender, birthplace and the cause of death. But some information is also incomplete, due to what was available.
Stono, 121, appears to be the oldest enslaved person who Bowling has entered on the website, so far. Born in Charleston, Stono died around the last week of October 1846 from marasmus, a deficiency of nutrients such as carbohydrates, fats and protein. At least 43 of the enslaved people listed on the website were born in Africa.
Marasmus also claimed the life of Robert Hutchinson, 3, who lived at 129 Calhoun St. He died in June 1865, two months after the Civil War ended. The death record does not list whether he was free or enslaved. Of those people who were enslaved, the death record also includes the name of the people who enslaved them.
Rebecca Donnohue, 35, was born in Ireland. On Jan. 21, 1868, she was murdered. She is one of 11 murder victims listed on the website and one of about 234 people born in Ireland who were buried at Tower Hill. Other people buried at the site came to Charleston from France, England, Scotland, Germany, Greece and Norway.
Bowling has demands
Bowling said she has asked the city of Charleston and The Citadel “to correct a long-standing wrong by recognizing and honoring these tens of thousands of men, women, and children.”
She wants the city and the college to:
- Conduct ground penetrating radar analysis of the area.
- Help her document the names of the deceased.
- Convert the Fishburne Street parking area near the football stadium into a memorial garden.
- Reconnect Gadsden Creek with Harmon Field and convert the field into a memorial park.
A Citadel spokesman said, “The Citadel has worked to help identify and memorialize those who were buried in the city of Charleston’s municipal cemetery more than a century ago. Recently, The Citadel used ground-penetrating radar on the football field and surrounding structures.
“No graves were located during a 2018 scan of the east-side stands and, while replacing the west-side stands in the early 2000s, the college located, exhumed and reburied more than 300 remains. At that time, The Citadel put up a plaque at Johnson Hagood Stadium to memorialize those who were buried in the municipal cemetery.”
The city of Charleston had not responded by press time to Charleston City Paper’s request for a comment.
The forgotten dead
Nic Butler, historian-in-residence at the Charleston County Public Library, describes Tower Hill in The Forgotten Dead: Charleston’s Public Cemeteries, 1794-2021, an article on the library’s website.
“There have always been other burial grounds on the Charleston peninsula besides the public cemeteries … belonging to a large number of churches and private societies from the beginning of the town in the late seventeenth century to the present,” Butler wrote.
“Most of those churchyards and graveyards are well-marked and remembered, however, the legacy of the city’s successive potter’s fields has faded from our collective memory.”
He wrote that he thought it was important now to acknowledge the breadth of burial traditions across Charleston “in this era of heightened awareness about the cultural value of burial sites belonging to all citizens, regardless of race, creed or net worth.”
“The forgotten dead of Charleston’s public cemeteries no longer have a voice, but they all deserve to be acknowledged.”
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