Ashley River South Carolina: History From Swamp to Harbor

The Ashley River is a blackwater, tidal river of about sixty miles that rises in the Wassamassaw and Cypress Swamps of Berkeley and Dorchester Counties and joins the Cooper River at the tip of the Charleston peninsula to form Charleston Harbor. It was named for Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first Earl of Shaftesbury and the chief of the Lords Proprietors of Carolina. Before that it was the Kiawah River, after the people who lived on it. Most of what Charleston became was built on the Ashley first.

Where does the Ashley River start and end?

The river comes out of swamp. Its headwaters are the Wassamassaw and Great Cypress Swamps, and the main channel pulls itself together about five miles west of Summerville. From there it runs southeast through Dorchester County as a narrow blackwater stream, turns into a freshwater tidal river, and widens into a brackish estuary just below the old town of Dorchester. Dorchester was the head of navigation. Above it, the river is not a road. Below it, for two hundred years, it was the main one.

The lower seventeen miles run along North Charleston and the west side of the peninsula to the Battery, where the Ashley meets the Cooper. The channel is only six to eight feet deep. The whole basin covers about 232,000 acres and takes in most of the Charleston metropolitan area, including Summerville and North Charleston.

Who was the river named for?

The explorer Robert Sandford gave the river its English name in honor of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Ashley, the most active of the eight Lords Proprietors to whom Charles II granted Carolina. The Cooper River across the peninsula got the other half of his name. In 1670 the colony’s first permanent English settlement went in at Albemarle Point on the Ashley’s west bank, the site now called Charles Towne Landing. In 1675 Cooper himself was granted 12,000 acres along the river. About ten years after the first landing, the settlement moved across the water to the peninsula between the two rivers, and that became Charleston.

The plantations on the Ashley

Through the eighteenth century the riverbanks were parceled into plantations growing rice, indigo, and later cotton, worked by enslaved people. The surviving great houses on the west bank are the ones tourists know: Drayton Hall, Magnolia Plantation, and Middleton Place, the last built around 1738 to 1755 and named for Henry Middleton, who later presided over the First Continental Congress. Rice barges moved down the river to Charleston. The Ashley River Road, laid out in 1691, ran parallel to the water on the west side and is still in use.

Upriver, on the east bank, the Congregationalists from Dorchester, Massachusetts, laid out their trading town in 1697 (sources differ; some give 1695 or 1696). Dorchester was the market for the upper Ashley, with a parish church, a free school, a fair, and by 1757 a tabby-walled powder magazine. The British occupied the plantations and the town from 1780 to 1782. Dorchester never came back from the war, and its people moved inland to Summerville. The fort and the church tower are what is left.

Rice, then phosphate

After the Civil War the rice economy collapsed and the river found a new trade. In late 1867 mining began on plantation lands along the Ashley after Charleston scientists identified the local “stinking stones” as rock rich in bone phosphate of lime. The Charleston Mining and Manufacturing Company bought rights along the river, and individual planters, among them C. H. Drayton and Williams Middleton, dug their own land. Barge docks lined both banks. In the 1880s South Carolina led the world in phosphate production, and in 1889 it held about 95 percent of the national market. Most of the miners were young Black men, many of them freedmen, paid about $1.75 a day in 1880.

Florida rock was richer, and a hurricane in 1893 wrecked the river operations. Florida passed South Carolina in 1894. River mining on the Ashley ended in 1909 and land mining in 1925. After that the old plantation lands went to hunting preserves and timber, and then to tourism.

When was the Charleston earthquake, and what did it do here?

The earthquake struck at about 9:50 p.m. on August 31, 1886, with an estimated magnitude of 6.9 to 7.3. The epicenter was northwest of Charleston, in the direction of Summerville, where the damage was extreme and the South Carolina Railroad track was heaved and offset. About sixty people died. Along the Ashley, the quake toppled the walls of the burned-out main house and north flanker at Middleton Place, leaving the south flanker that visitors see today. At Dorchester it split the brick bell tower of St. George’s Church from top to bottom; iron straps held it together until repairs in the early 1960s. The Old White Meeting House near Summerville was reduced to ruins.

The Ashley River Historic District and the Scenic River

Two designations now cover the river. The Ashley River Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 12, 1994, and enlarged on October 22, 2010, from about 7,000 acres to 23,828 acres split almost evenly between Charleston and Dorchester Counties. It takes in Drayton Hall, Magnolia, Middleton Place, Old Dorchester, Fort Bull, the Runnymede schoolhouse, and the rice fields, phosphate pits, and hunting lands in between.

The state designated 22 miles of the Ashley a State Scenic River in 1998, from the US 17-A bridge near Summerville down to the I-526 bridge. Some sources give 1999, which is when residential owners joined the advisory council. Twenty-six National Register sites sit along that stretch. The land around the river was still mostly undeveloped as of 2012, though sprawl, pollution, and boat traffic are the standing concerns.

Visiting the Ashley River

The plantations are off Ashley River Road on the west bank; Middleton Place is about 15 miles northwest of downtown Charleston. Colonial Dorchester State Historic Site, at 300 State Park Road in Summerville, is about 25 miles from the city and costs $3 for adults. The water is dark, which is the tannin from the swamp and not anything else.

The river keeps what falls into it. The British threw their guns in at Dorchester in 1781, and as far as anyone knows they are still down there.

The dispatches treat the county’s rivers as characters. The Edisto has its own story in The Edisto Keeps Its Own, and the Ashley and its ruined town appear in The Tower With No Bell. Both are placed on the county map.

The Ashley River: Sixty Miles From the Cypress Swamp to Charleston Harbor