The College of Charleston is welcoming the pushback it is receiving over plans to build a new multi-story dormitory at 106 Coming St., site of a centuries-old burial ground, the chairwoman of the college’s board of trustees said.
“The opposition … shows a level of passion for the community,” said Renee Romberger, a retired Spartanburg health care executive who lives on St. Helena Island.
“We all have the same goals in mind,” she said in an exclusive interview with the Charleston City Paper. “All of us love Charleston, and we want to honor it and respect it. People are willing to share their concerns, and we need to make sure that we listen.”
The college’s board of trustees voted unanimously in June 2024 to purchase the property for the dormitory, Romberger said. The minutes from that meeting, however, show that board member Brian J. Stern, a Columbia commercial real estate developer, voted no. Board member Derrick L. Williams, a Columbia attorney, abstained.
Stern declined to comment. “Unfortunately, I can’t provide any comment, sir,” said Stern, son of Bill Stern, chairman of the S.C. Ports Authority. “I am not comfortable commenting on something like that.” Williams could not be reached for comment.
The college lacks on-campus housing, Romberger said. “This housing project is extremely important, especially for freshmen and sophomores. We have learned that kids perform better when they are living on campus. Students do better as a community that is working, playing and studying together.”
Community objections
The Charleston community’s response to the dorm, however, has led to the formation of Protect and Respect the Bodies, a coalition of individuals, organizations and faith groups that opposes construction on the 18th century “Strangers and Negroes Burying Ground.”
The group believes the college didn’t do enough to inform the community of its plans, and it doesn’t want the human remains at the site to be disturbed. Members of the group said the college should do more study before construction begins or put the dorm at another location. Some also say they wonder whether the college is concerned about historic preservation and respects the dead.
On Nov. 12, the college’s president Andrew Hsu met with Charlestonians who volunteered to serve on the newly formed Community Engagement Council. The meeting occurred after the City Paper’s printing deadline.
Meanwhile, the S.C. Department of Environmental Services (SCDES) has scheduled a combination public meeting and public hearing on the project at 6 p.m. Nov. 18 in the auditorium at the Charleston Museum on Meeting Street. SCDES also has set Nov. 28 as the deadline to submit comments on the project.
Looking for remains
The college has not set a date for a second round of ground-penetrating radar scans to determine whether human remains were under a parking lot at 106 Coming St., the former headquarters for the YWCA of Greater Charleston. Radar scans last year were inconclusive.
It is estimated between 4,600 and 12,000 individuals may be interred in the burial ground, according to a report prepared for the college. The deceased include poor Whites, Africans newly arrived on slave ships, travelers and orphaned children.
The city of Charleston’s Board of Architectural Review (BAR) has approved the college’s request to demolish the one-story YWCA building, but the college also needs SCDES approval before demolition can begin, a college spokesman said.
It is highly likely that a second scan of the ground after the parking lot is removed will yield evidence of human remains, predicted forensic historian Grant Mishoe of Summerville.
A yellow fever epidemic struck Charleston in 1792, the year the city-owned cemetery opened, he said. It is not immediately known how many people died, but they were buried in the cemetery, said Mishoe, who maps cemeteries on the Charleston peninsula. He said 106 Coming St. is within the old cemetery, bounded by Coming, Calhoun, Vanderhorst and St. Philip streets.
Romberger said if remains are found it will create for the first time “an opportunity to really honor and respect the people who are in the ground. If we find remains, then moving them to a place where they can be permanently respected and honored (creates) a better way to honor the dead than they’ve been in the past 200 years.”
Modern-day awareness
When the YWCA purchased 106 Coming St. in the early part of the 20th century, the old cemetery was not mentioned in a description of the property or the organization’s records.
As the city has grown, more forgotten burial grounds have been found, and attitudes about building on the bones of the dead have changed with it.
Organizers are planning a Dec. 14 dedication for the Anson Street African Burial Memorial at the Charleston Gaillard Center where the remains of 36 people of African and Native American descent were discovered in 2013 during an expansion of the building.
And this past May, 74 gravesites were found at 635 King St., the construction site for Courier Square, a mixed-use development on land previously owned by Evening Post Industries, the former parent company of The Post and Courier. The site was once the St. James Methodist Church, founded in the late 1700s, and a likely cemetery. The remains will soon be relocated to Bethany Cemetery, officials said.
Charlestonians have advocated for the protection of forgotten private burial sites, but far more people are buried in public cemeteries, said Charleston County Public Library historian Nic Butler, host of the award-winning podcast Charleston Time Machine.
Butler said he did two podcasts on public burial sites in 2020 “because this is going to keep coming up,” he said. “I needed to put some information out there so people will have some resources” to use as more bodies are discovered.
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