Urban Dialectics, Misrememberings, and Memory-Work: The Halsey Map of Charleston, South Carolina
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Urban Dialectics, Misrememberings, and Memory-Work: The Halsey Map of Charleston, South Carolina Sarah E. Platt 1 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract In 1949, a lumber executive and city alderman in Charleston, South Carolina, named Alfred O. Halsey produced a visually unique map of the Charleston peninsula. The map highlights the fluctuations and changes of the urban landscape through time and traces the contours of historic events in the city. Although his depiction is compelling, tapping into a dialectical understanding of the city landscape, there are distinct cultural forgettings and silences in the map particularly in terms of the city’s long historical trajectory of racial inequality and systemic violence. The following discussion both unpacks Halsey’s dialectical vision of the peninsula, and indicate a space where archaeology can intervene in the gaps and silences in an act of memory-work. Keywords Urban heritage . Historic preservation . Memory . Mapping . South Carolina
In 1949, a Charleston, South Carolina lumber executive and city alderman named Alfred O. Halsey produced a large map of the Charleston peninsula by hand (Fig. 1) and presented copies to several heritage institutions around the city. This map was not a typical representation of Charleston. Rather than depicting the physical landmass of the peninsula as it appeared in 1949, Halsey only faintly outlined its modern waterline. Basing his map on geological profiles of the peninsula, the Halsey map describes the space as it likely appeared when English and Barbadian colonists first sailed into Charleston harbor in 1670. It is a landmass much narrower than it is today – consisting of as much water as solid ground. Midcentury streets are faintly outlined over these waterways. The map is both framed by text lists of facts and figures that document significant and often catastrophic events in the city and visually composed of those events. Bold lines in red estimate the path of historic fires. A long arrow nearly bisects
* Sarah E. Platt [email protected]
1
The Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS), Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc, P.O. Box 316, Charlottesville, VA 22902, USA
International Journal of Historical Archaeology
the peninsula, describing the trajectory of an 1838 tornado. Blocky shapes suggest the location of the original city walls and wartime fortifications, all now invisible on the modern landscape. The map is used to great effect in a project by the Preservation Society of Charleston where individual elements are contextualized with historical descriptions and photos.
Fig. 1 The Halsey Map (1949). This copy was presented to the South Carolina Historical Society. Image courtesy of the South Carolina Historical Society (Halsey 1949)
International Journal of Historical Archaeology
The Halsey map is a pre-computer Geographic Information System. His archived papers included packets of maps carefully removed from books and documents and taped together in layer
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