Nearly a decade after North Charleston jumped west of the Ashley River to try to snatch a tract of land near Magnolia Plantation along S.C. Highway 61, the state’s highest court swatted it down.
North Charleston, the state’s third-largest city, approved the annexation of about 113 acres along the highway in October 2017. The motion moved fast, skipping a public hearing due to 100% of the property owners requesting the annexation. But the land abutted a property under protection of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, leading to a drawn-out legal battle that also drew in the city of Charleston, which also filed to annex the land.
The final decision followed years of rejection from lower courts, upholding North Charleston’s annexation as it was first submitted. The high court, however, heard the case in April 2025, ruling against North Charleston due to the city’s attempt to annex property that was not physically adjacent to any other property within its limits.
“I think it’s high time that it was resolved,” former Charleston Mayor John Tecklenburg told the Charleston City Paper last week. “I am very pleased with the outcome, as it protects an area outside of the urban growth boundary from intense development.” Tecklenburg was serving as mayor when the lawsuit was first filed.
A race for the land
When Charleston leaders caught wind of North Charleston’s plans to drift into what it considered its territory by annexing the property in 2017, they quickly began to draft their own annexation plan to bring the 113 acres into their city.
“We were fearful of intense, cookie-cutter development that we felt was inappropriate for that historic, rural area of Charleston,” Tecklenburg said. “There was an intense effort right when the circumstances unfolded. We rushed to contact property owners to annex the land into the city in order to provide protection.”
If North Charleston had succeeded in its annexation, about 2,000 acres would have opened for future development, according to a source close to the situation who requested her name be withheld. The property is outside the urban growth boundary, but North Charleston is not bound by its restrictions. That means the rural area likely would have been up for rapid and dense development close to historic, protected areas.
National Trust lawyers argued that in North Charleston’s annexation bid, a small portion of the property included — about 62 square feet to be exact — was already North Charleston’s property. Lawyers hoped the redundancy would be enough to convince a court that the annexation was invalid when North Charleston rushed the complicated process.
“We had the best legal team for that issue that we could muster,” Tecklenburg said.
When a circuit court finally heard the case, however, a judge ruled that neither Charleston nor the National Trust had any standing. The case was thrown out, appealed and thrown out again. Finally, parties petitioned the state Supreme Court as a last-ditch effort.
Charleston also annexed a second property further up S.C. Highway 61, Millbrook Plantation, in a bid to prevent further development if North Charleston were to succeed in their annexation bid, the source said.
The court’s decision can now only be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but observers say that doesn’t seem likely to happen. At the time the litigation began, both cities were under different mayoral administrations. Neither Charleston nor North Charleston leaders have made public statements on plans to annex additional properties in the area, potentially bringing the turf war to a close.
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