I must have been seven or eight years old at the time.
My paternal grandmother lived along the banks of the Ashley River in Charleston, South Carolina, in a small community called Ashleyville. Grandmama Lemon’s home was a small, four-bedroom, two-bathroom house that she and her husband, Samuel Lemon, purchased in 1972. He passed just two years later, five years before I was born, and she’s lived there alone ever since.
Although my family was spread across the Lowcountry, we were still within “a country mile” of Grandmama Lemon, making it easy to come by and check on her. When I was six years old, my father delegated the two of us as the unofficial landscapers of her yard. Even after being attacked by hornets in the backyard one evening, and aside from inhaling the clouds of sand gnats released from the low-hanging Spanish moss during the summer, I loved going to that house. My grandmother had one of the best views of Downtown Charleston—right outside her door, a few steps from the river.
Occasionally, I’d sneak to the end of her street to see how close I could get to the marsh to catch a crab. Once I got a little too close, and heard an elder yell out in a ringing, authoritative Gullah Geechee accent, Mind now!
Any child growing up in Charleston knows those two words for the warning they are. They alert you to be mindfully aware of your surroundings. I was free until ee fool, as the old folks would say—having fun, unaware of any consequences. Though I was a good swimmer, even at seven or eight, I was too close to the water in the eyes of that elder, who was watching the comings and goings of the neighborhood.
I stopped, turned around, looked back at the water, then returned to Grandmama’s house. Another parable was hurled my way as I went: Mind now, play with guns, knives, and water if you want!
Water holds more value than currency when you’re from Charleston, South Carolina, and you develop an intimate relationship with it from your earliest days. For generations, it has dictated what residents can grow and where they can live. It has long been the lifeblood of the city’s industries—fishing, tourism, brewing. And now, in its irrevocable rise, it has become “an intensifier of inequality,” a force that has sharpened racial and wealth divisions in the city, and which risks drowning the people and the traditions it once sustained.
For the Gullah Geechee people of the Lowcountry, the marshes are rich with stories. Generations have been brought up to practice oyster farming, crabbing, and searching for sweetgrass for basket-weaving and baptisms. Water flows through Charleston and other Lowcountry communities, carrying a weight and an opulence unfamiliar to outsiders. Part of the allure of my grandmother’s home was its proximity to water. Back then, I never saw flooding on her street, even though it was a wetland. I remember it as filled with life, giving off sulfuric whiffs of pluff mud. That marsh near Grandmama Lemon’s house was sacred and alive, left wild and able to function as it should.
But even in a region and within a community where water is intrinsic to every part of life, it is not a resource that is equally shared. Ask any of the Gullah Geechee people who are rooted like the oyster beds along the coast and sea islands, and they’ll tell you: Water don’t lie. It doesn’t lie when used for good—when universities divert wastewater to grow vegetables. It doesn’t lie when made into a commodity, out of reach for those who most need it as a refuge. It doesn’t lie when its rise risks deluging whole communities and cultures.
Water is the source of many of Charleston’s afflictions, which overdevelopment further compounds. Even as the seas rise—and here, they’ve risen one foot over the last 80 years—there are interests in the city inclined to ignore this incipient catastrophe, interests more concerned with profit, with building on wetlands and further ushering in gentrification, all while pushing longtime residents further into the water’s path. According to the Charleston County Economic Development Department, 30 new residents are moving to the Lowcountry every day. South Carolina is among the states that has experienced the most population growth since the pandemic, much of which is clustered around Charleston and the coast.
In the meantime, Charleston is investing in seawalls and $500 million drainage systems, but those developments address the symptoms of sea rise and ignore the root causes. That water don’t lie. For the bin yahs and come yahs, there’s disagreement about how best to address the city’s flooding. Newer denizens see no fault in building developments on existing wetlands that were once essential resources and habitats. For Charleston natives, the feeling of neglect—as the city systemically resists making meaningful flood resolutions, and ignores ongoing community displacement—is pervasive. For the water, neither of these perspectives carries enough weight to keep it at bay.
In Charleston, some say church begins on Friday evenings, Lowcountry gridirons serving as temporary chapels. The nights are humid, hurricanes roll in, and the scent of boiled peanuts fills the air. Growing up, the days after my high school football games were always spent in teammates’ and coaches’ backyards, watching Clemson games and devouring oysters.
Oysters are Charleston’s flagship food, as ubiquitous as chicken wings, served at sporting events, festivals, and family gatherings. No one buys just a few—they’re prepared by the bushel, enough to feed a living room full of friends and family. It’s common to see long wooden tables with large holes cut in the center for the disposal of shells at restaurants, festivals, or even in your favorite uncle’s backyard.
How you consume oysters in Charleston reveals a lot about your relationship to the region’s water. My father prefers them raw out of the mud because he grew up near tidal creeks and was able to pick oysters at his leisure. I grew up further inland, so I prefer them roasted, covered with a wet potato sack. Venture out to towns like Johns Island, McClellanville, or Awendaw, and you’ll see oysters everywhere: on the sides of roads, used as tabby. But oysters aren’t just a culinary staple, or coastal detritus, or building material—they’re also an essential ecological feature. “Oysters can be considered a keystone species in our marine ecosystems, which include us,” says Wildlife Biologist Steven “Stevie” Czwartacki, from the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources.
That’s been the case for thousands of years. As early as 4,000 years ago, Native American tribes in the region used shells to build oyster rings and middens. Although the function of these oyster rings is often debated, we do know they were central to Native communities, and that more oyster rings can be found in South Carolina than in any other state.
The oyster’s importance in South Carolina did not diminish in the colonial period. They were a vital food for people of all classes, and from the late 1880s to just after World War II, were the most valuable state fishery. In 2019, oyster farming contributed $8.7 million to the state’s economy, according to the S.C. Sea Grant Consortium, and supported 130 jobs. To ensure the future of the industry, the state operates a range of oyster restoration projects.
This work is essential, and not just for reasons of consumption. Oyster reefs anchor ecosystems, enhance water quality, and provide structures for other sea life. “Blue crab, shrimp, some of the grouper species—parts of their life’s stages depend on the oyster reef for food and structure,” says Czwartacki.
As the climate has warmed, coastal ecosystems face growing risk. Stronger, more intense storms unleash greater volumes of water, which flows over driveways, lawns, streets, and sidewalks and into storm drains, picking up pollutants on the way. Oysters, capable of filtering as many as 50 gallons of water per day, are a natural way of purifying that water. Crucially, they are also capable of stabilizing shorelines to prevent erosion and defend against storm surges. Their success in Charleston demonstrates that relationships to our food sources can be more than just extractive—that taking a communal approach to the food we eat is also something that allows coastal living to endure.
My first job after graduating from college was at the Charleston Development Academy, located at Gadsden Green Housing Projects (known as “Back da Green” to the locals). Gadsden Green is a predominantly Black community located near the intersection of Line Street and Hagood Avenue. It is just a stone’s throw from The Citadel, a university constructed by the state to defend white Charlestonians against possible uprisings of enslaved people following Denmark Vesey’s failed rebellion in 1822.
After just 20 minutes of rain, this intersection turns into a lake. The green 1995 Mazda 626 I drove was no match for the floodwaters; the water defeated each car that made the attempt to pass through it. We soon learned that if it rained, we had to park a half mile from the school and walk. Not that we weren’t used to it: I grew up knowing the city was below sea level, that countless other areas get inundated when the rain falls. In Charleston, the creek ’gon rise regardless.
Maybe we shouldn’t have gotten so accustomed to these inconveniences, because they are not meted out equally among the city’s residents.
Gadsden Creek, a once-100-acre wetland that has since been reduced to four acres, is a notorious source of flooding. The creek is located along the Ashley River, right across the street from Gadsden Green. It is heavily polluted, and it carries the lineage of climate change, of sea level rise, of the victimization of marginalized communities in its waters.
The tidal creek and the land that Gadsden Green housing now occupies were both named after, and owned by, Thomas N. Gadsden, a 19th-century auctioneer of enslaved people who inherited the land from his grandfather. After his death, the estate was subdivided. “From 1852 to the late 1800s, the lots were sold and subsequently developed,” says Cyrus Buffum, owner of Seaborn Oysters and a community activist with Friends of Gadsden Green.
“You see a community with tremendous amounts of assets,” Buffum says of the Gadsden Green of this era. Gadsden Creek was then an essential resource—a source of food, a buffer against storm surges, a place of recreation and of spirituality. Locals spent life near the creek fishing, crabbing, harvesting oysters, swimming, and hosting baptisms. Just opposite were the towns of Maryville and Ashleyville, where my grandmother lived.
In 1938, several tornadoes swept through the city, one of which touched down in Gadsden Green. The community mobilized, and launched fundraising efforts to restore the neighborhood. A local newspaper reported events such as “tap dancing, acrobatic stunts, dancing, singing and original sketches” were all performed with the intent to raise funds to support neighbors who accumulated damage from the storm.
But community members weren’t the only ones raising funds. Charleston took out a $2 million grant from the U.S. Housing Administration to help tornado victims, some 20 days after the tornado; the Gadsden Green community only became aware of the city’s plan for the grant a year and a half later. “The city took advantage of a slush-fund of resources,” says Buffum, and with those funds, looked to execute a preexisting plan.
That plan would be the Knowles Report of 1931. This document outlined a comprehensive vision for Charleston’s future, focused on the residents living on the peninsula. It contained demographic statistics for different neighborhoods, and forecasted how those figures would change once city planning policies were put into place. Those policies “ultimately [fell] directly in line with a long history of redlining, a long history of slum clearance, and a long history of ‘urban renewal,’” says Buffum.
Essentially, Gadsden Green was deemed “underdeveloped.” The intended vision for the “ultimate distribution” of the city would be to have the area’s 100 acres of wetland reallocated as a white residential area developed through deed restrictions. “Cleaning our existing slum areas will be helpful in promoting the desirable types of residential developments in these sections for which the zoning ordinance and city plans are designed,” says the 1931 document, as quoted by Buffum.
The city followed through on its plans to displace the Gadsden Green community after the tornadoes by officially labeling the area a slum, which enabled it to demolish and seize private property, building segregated public housing in its place. At the time, Gadsden Green was home to the largest group of Black property owners in the city (some 75% of the community owned their homes). In pursuing this brutal plan, Charleston set up Back da Green for generational struggle and inequity. “In total, 71 homes were demolished. Overnight, you had a dynamic where residents of Gadsden Green went from owning their own properties and creating generational wealth, to residents now in a tenant-landlord dynamic,” says Buffum.
Yet, the Gadsden Green that we know of today—one marked by near-uncontrollable levels of flooding—can trace that legacy back to a specific decision in 1954. Despite the city’s aggressive development, the Gadsden Creek still remained—all 100 acres of it. What’s the best way to uphold an unprincipled vision by any means necessary, and create more land for white residents?
Garbage.
In 1954, Charleston began dumping refuse into Gadsden Creek. “Garbage is a very cheap resource used to create real estate,” says Buffum. The city justified this policy as a form of urban regeneration: “We are reclaiming more than 100 acres of marsh land,” read a statement from Charleston’s mayor in the 1950s. By the 1970s, a large portion of the creek had been “channelized and relocated,” Buffum says—furthering the plans laid out in the 1931 Knowles Report.
By 1970, the Department of Justice and the Army Corps of Engineers made clear to the city that they were in violation for the dumping. Later, the Army Corps of Engineers issued a retroactive permit to the City of Charleston, after initially threatening legal action. Residents complained of rats and the stench from the garbage, but to no avail. Instead, the city continued to dump trash in the community’s tidal creek.
“The city of Charleston chose in the mid-20th century to place that landfill in a predominantly Black neighborhood, a decision that has been endangering the health and safety of area residents for decades,” says the Coastal Conservation League. “There is no debate that this is a question of environmental racism that degrades the physical environment of Black and Brown communities, which are far more likely to be made sick by contaminated soil, polluted air, and poisoned water.”
Only in 1974 did Mayor Gaillard acknowledge that flooding in Gadsden Green resulted from the landfill. “The result of settlement of the street as all of the area is filled land, and the homes are on pilings—constant flooding which occurs with each spring tide,” he said. In 1981, the Army Corp of Engineers “explicitly” categorized Gadsden Creek as a wetland, and not a drainage ditch.
More recently, government agencies ranging from the Fish and Wildlife Service to the National Marine Fisheries Service have continued to discourage development in the area. “We recommend the project as currently proposed not be permitted and the applicant pursue less damaging alternatives that further avoid and minimize tidal wetland impacts,” said the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources referring to future developments in the area. Even so, Joseph P. Riley, Jr. Park, Brittlebank Park, and a DMV (which later closed due to flooding) have all been constructed since the 1970s, taking up further acreage on the creek.
No longer are there 100 acres of wetland. No longer is there a natural sponge that protects residents of the community. With only four acres of wetland currently left, you would think there was no way that the city could continue to build on what remained—but the WestEdge Project is proof that the seemingly endless appetite to develop the area hasn’t disappeared.
Against the backdrop of all of this development, climate change is still happening. We know that water levels in the Charleston Harbor have risen one foot over the past 80 years. And we know now that that pace is speeding up.
“Instead of it being another 100 years before you see the next foot, that next foot could come in the next 20-30 years,” says Albert George, the carbon removal program manager on the Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives team at Apple. “The trajectory that we’re on, by 2045 Charleston could experience at least 180 days of flooding without rain.”
I still remember the chaos when Hurricane Hugo hit in 1989. Few gas stations were open, and when they were, waits at the pump lasted five or six hours. Ditches in my neighborhood overflowed. We’d lost power for a few weeks as fallen trees blocked roads. Water was everywhere. My mom and I used rainwater to flush toilets and bathe, and we put a small grill in our fireplace so we could cook. But even then, Charleston didn’t get hit directly, and my mom and I lived in a suburb 20 minutes off the peninsula. If that same storm—which had a storm surge of 12.5 feet above the king tide—came today, it would be 21 feet above the king tide. And many of the solutions being proposed would make outcomes even worse.
“Building a seawall would increase the ability of the hurricane. Think of the physics of a water hose—you squeeze it if you want water to shoot out faster, or create a narrow waterway,” says George. In this case, the city’s narrow inlets would be those hoses. It’s a nightmarish reality, especially when you consider that ongoing development on the city’s marshes and wetlands further hastens coastal erosion. And communities like Gadsden Green—neighborhoods that are home to marginalized people, long discriminated against on racial and economic lines—are among the most exposed.
While the developers capitalize off that trauma, hope exists in small ways: in the promise of oysters, in the efforts of community organizations and activists to push back against these policies. And even in the act of brewing beer.
Brewing has long been an important industry in Charleston. Early South Carolinians did not, as Butler notes, produce enough grain for brewing initially—in the 17th century, most agricultural cultivation was devoted to rice, indigo, and cotton. “As the town matured and ship traffic through the port increased during the first quarter of the eighteenth century, however, local entrepreneurs began investing in the creation of brewing facilities to supply the growing market,” writes Butler. “That incentive increased in 1720, when the British Admiralty established a permanent post in Charleston for a warship assigned to guard the coastline of South Carolina.”
Since then, over the course of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, the city has blossomed into a major hub of brewing—although throughout its development, the industry has been marred by the same patterns of racism and segregation that are visible all over the city. Even so, I have a devoted relationship with beer, and my education was partly formed in the city’s many breweries and taprooms. They are important within my own life, important to the city’s rhythms—and may even have an unexpected role in protecting the city’s waterways.
On March 6, 2017, Holy City Brewing Company partnered with the SynTerra Corporation (a Greenville, South Carolina-based engineering firm), the College of Charleston, and the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control to perform a pilot study. The study, led by Dr. Matt Huddleston, used cattails, marsh grass, and other plant life to filter wastewater. “I was introduced to the idea of using wetlands as [sort of] Mother Nature’s kidneys,” Huddleston says. “Before you can use wetlands to treat wastewater, you really need to understand the chemistry of the water. You need to understand the wetland vegetation, how you’re going to move water through the wetland and how long it will stay there.”
Huddleston, a biologist, came up with the idea over a beer with a friend, and he believes the beer industry is the perfect place to put ideas like this into action. “That’s the kind of community, that’s the kind of culture, that will embrace more sustainable, green technologies,” he says. Holy City was an ideal partner; given its size (it is the fifth-largest brewery in the state), it had the space and resources to dedicate to the study.
The study began with six 100-gallon Rubbermaid watering troughs, which each held a foot of soil planted with vegetation and between 6-12 inches of water to recreate a wetland environment. From there, the troughs were connected, and hooked up to tanks that held wastewater, and water samples were taken daily.
Brewery wastewater can wreak havoc if not properly treated. Its acidity—and the presence of caustic, sugars, and bacteria—prevents it from being discharged into municipal sewage systems because it puts the aquaculture at risk. What was learned from the pilot study at Holy City, however, was that a properly scaled wetland could allow breweries to hold wastewater for days to naturally remove biological solids and stabilize pH, providing a solution for breweries’ wastewater issues.
Beyond the ability of wetlands to help breweries, I wanted to know if the opposite was also true. “Could brewery wastewater restore existing wetlands?” I asked Huddleston. “Optimistically speaking, yes,” he told me.
What we know now about wetlands is that they not only work as a sponge against storm water surge, but they also filter water, giving them an important role in curbing flooding in Charleston. I can envision a future where brewing offers an incentive to expand Charleston’s wetlands, where more oysters are recycled and utilized to bolster its shoreline, where the city’s food systems can also contribute to its salvation.
That breweries could help prompt the revitalization of Charleston’s wetlands, however, is complicated by the fact that those same breweries often play a role in the “redevelopment” of minority neighborhoods. Take a look at any gentrified neighborhood in America and you can be assured that a few craft breweries are likely nearby.
Some of the justifications that lead to an area needing that “redevelopment” are closely related to city officials’ racial and economic biases and neglect—the same circumstances and motivations that prompted what happened in Gadsden Green. Because craft breweries often act as harbingers of those forces—in part because they seek out industrial areas with low rents that are predominantly home to Black and Latinx people—it’s easy to see breweries as agents of displacement. In their wake follow food trucks, trivia nights, Oktoberfest block parties, and bluegrass bands, all while original neighborhood residents are priced out.
I know what the human cost of that “redevelopment” looks like. When I speak with old friends who grew up in Back da Green, they tell me about what it was like to experience the city’s dumping first-hand. “The sewage used to come up out of the showers, and the toilets used to back up,” says my friend Donavan Moten.
Moten lugged along the early trauma of living in the Gadsden Green Housing Projects as a kid. He talks of cleaning the sewage that flooded his bathtub, finding dead rats in his sneakers, and wearing trash bags to navigate the neighborhood’s regular floods, all while living under the same roof with seven aunts and uncles, a grandmother, and a few cousins. Knowing that the city forcibly consolidated families after the 1938 tornadoes, and knowing that it was aware that dumping trash in a creek welcomed flooding and rodents, makes it all the more galling.
I ask Moten how those days still affect him. “Everybody who was in that environment is clean as a whistle now—everyone is like a clean freak now,” he says. These psychological tolls are rarely spoken about in city council meetings, are barely considered at all.
I will always be a champion of the craft beer industry, but I will also hold it to account. In Charleston, I think it’s imperative that breweries that find themselves in neighborhoods where residents don’t look like their customers take deliberate steps to foster community. With only four acres of Gadsden Creek left, and new development on the horizon, it’s a safe bet to assume a brewery or taproom may arrive to anchor the new revitalization.
Water in the Lowcountry is worth more than religion. My grandmother’s home still stands in Ashleyville. She passed in 2020 due to COVID, at the youthful age of 100. There’s still never been any flooding on her street, and no developments have yet emerged. But the fact that her home is an heirs property has caused a wedge within my family. It will only take one natural disaster to demolish it, and no federal aid can be administered to rebuild it. But things are starting to change for the better. Hope is visible in small details—like the Charleston jetties that have halted erosion on Sullivan’s Island, the breweries that provide a future vision for the wetlands, the oyster industry that may be pivotal in strengthening the coastline.
I’ve always had a toxic relationship with my hometown. I love it, and I hate being there. The frustration lies in the city’s anachronisms, its tight hold on old bigotries. The joy is in the strength of the community throughout the city, as any neighborhood oyster roast demonstrates. I’d like to see those community members brought into talks on climate change and sustainability and city planning, because right now, they’re not given much opportunity to participate. If they were, maybe Donavan wouldn’t have had to grow up like he did. Maybe the Friends of Gadsden Creek would have a different mission, and efforts to build multi-million-dollar developments on wetlands would be cast aside without a second thought.
For now, just as the tides have risen to meet the porches of those community members, so the city is still awash in these old histories, and alive to new threats as well as new potential. You know what they say—that water don’t lie.
Words by Jamaal LemonAdditional research by Michael Stein
