The College of Charleston bought land earlier this year near its downtown campus to build a dormitory knowing a centuries-old burial ground for poor and enslaved people surrounds the site, a college official said.
The remains of poor Whites, Africans newly arrived on slave ships, travelers and orphaned children in the soil raised immediate concerns, Paul Patrick, the college’s chief of staff, told the Charleston City Paper.
With that awareness, Patrick said, the college commissioned a study to validate that history and conduct ground penetrating radar to look for burials.
Radar scans last year were inconclusive on whether human remains are under a parking lot at 106 Coming St., the former headquarters for the YWCA of Greater Charleston, he said.
“We aren’t saying there aren’t human remains,” Patrick explained. “We are saying that we didn’t find them” because the parking lot’s asphalt surface interfered with the radar scans.
Meeting with the public
In January 2025, the college paid $28.7 million for slightly more than an acre for the YWCA land with plans to build Coming Street Commons, a multi-level residency hall for several hundred students to meet the college’s growing need for affordable on-campus housing, he said.
The YWCA site is part of the western edge of the block bounded by Calhoun, Vanderhorst and Coming streets that could contain thousands of late 18th– to early 19th–century graves, according to a 27-page report prepared by BVL Historic Preservation Research in Charleston.
“Based on vital records, death statistics, average grave dimensions, and varying interpretations of the site’s period of use, historians and cultural resource specialists estimate that between 4,600 and 12,000 individuals may be buried on the site,” according to the report.
Some are skeptical
The college’s plans, however, have received stiff objections from Charlestonians who want the college to do more study before construction begins or put the dorm on another site. Some say they wonder whether the college is concerned about historic preservation and respects the dead.
The college will hold its third public meeting at 6 p.m. Monday at the St. Julian Devine Community Center at 1 Cooper St. on Charleston’s east side.
The property’s previous owner, McAlister Development Group, bought the land from the YWCA with plans to build student housing on it and lease the building to the college, Patrick said. But the college decided it would be best to own the property and build housing for students who are struggling to find affordable off-campus options.
If the college gains approvals to build the dormitory, it will reflect the history of the potter’s field and the YWCA that “was without question one of the epicenters of the civil rights movement in our community,” Patrick said. “We are prepared to follow the law, and we want to engage the public.”
But Charleston civil rights activist and educator Millicent Brown is not convinced.
“This project is so out of line with the wishes of large segments of the community that it needs to be totally re-thought through,” she stressed.
Brown is part of Protect and Respect the Bodies, a coalition of individuals, organization and faith groups that opposes a dorm on the 18th century “Strangers and Negroes Burying Ground.” The coalition is planning to meet at 5 p.m. Sept. 29 at the Charleston County Public Library on Calhoun Street.
The coalition has asked the S.C. Department of Environmental Services (SCDES) to hold a separate public hearing on the college’s request to demolish the YWCA building, Brown said.
The city’s Board of Architectural Review earlier this summer approved the college’s request to tear down the 1960s-era building. But the college will need a series of other approvals before it can begin construction, Patrick said.
A SCDES spokesman said the agency is “currently planning to hold a public meeting and hearing based on the public comments we’ve received.” No date has been set.
With SCDES’s approval, Patrick said, the college plans to demolish the YWCA building, remove the parking lot and do more ground penetrating radar scans to look for human remains.
That work will proceed while the building is being designed, and the college obtains other approvals, he said.
The SCDES request includes approval to do soil testing for pilings into the ground, he said. “But none of that (piling) will be done until we have gone through the process to ensure that there are no human remains or if human remains are discovered then all of those human remains” can be reinterred at the site or elsewhere, he said.
The college will also need approval from the State Historic Preservation Office (SHIPO) to do archaeological investigations.
Unknowns in the ground
The BVL report says the site may hold “a higher degree of historic integrity and has the potential to yield” archaeological data and human remains left behind when it was a public burial ground from the 1790s through 1807.
Although much of the Charleston peninsula is built on forgotten burial sites, College of Charleston sophomore Marion Vujevich said the college should not continue that precedent.
“I think it is crazy that we are building a dormitory on a cemetery,” said Vugevich, a political science student from Pittsburgh. “It is inhuman and disrespectful in general to build on top of a historic gravesite that (holds) four thousand people.”
Charleston tour guide Ruth M. Miller is the co-author of Touring the Tombstones, guides to Charleston’s 18th century graveyards.
Miller said she’d prefer that the college and the city “let the bodies rest in peace. Demolish the building, place a memorial and create a park that commemorates the city’s poor and unknown of yesteryear.”
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