The Most Rev. Jacques Fabre-Jeune, bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charleston, will perform a rosary service at Harmon Field on July 9 for Irish immigrants who were buried at a potter’s field between 1841 and 1927 on Charleston’s west side.
Bagpipe melodies will fill the air during the 5:30 p.m. service at Line Street and Hagood Avenue. People attending the hour-long service will be asked to recite the names of 214 people of Irish descent who were buried at the site, said Julie Bowling, a volunteer researcher.
Bowling has led an effort to honor the men and women interred in the Tower Hill Cemetery, a 22-acre burial ground. It is estimated that about 23,000 to 26,000 orphans, the poor, free and enslaved people, immigrants, seamen and Confederate soldiers were interred in unmarked graves at the site bounded by President, Congress and Line streets.
Bowling said American humorist Evan Esar once said that ‘ “the only place where you can find equality is in the cemetery.’ That, of course, is utter nonsense.”
While old Charleston’s elite lie in marble mausoleums or under carved angels many of “those who actually built our city — the enslaved, the immigrants, the workers — lie under buildings, bleachers and parking lots,” she stressed.
The Irish in Charleston
The website CharlestonIrish.com tells the story of the Irish in the city and explains why they came to the Lowcountry.
Catholics dominated the Irish migration to the city between 1845 and 1855 when more than one million people left Ireland for North America to escape the Great Famine.
By the 1850s, the Irish had established communities throughout the city especially in the Anson and Radcliffe boroughs.
The 1860 census lists 4,996 native-born Irish in Charleston, primarily as poor unskilled and semiskilled workers, according to the website. They made up 8% of the city’s population and 14% of the White residents.
Earlier this year, the Haitian-born Fabre-Jeune expressed gratitude for the immigrants in the Diocese of Charleston. In a letter to the diocese, he wrote that immigrants “through their goodness and faithfulness, contribute so much to our Church and to our country.
“Over several generations, immigrants have settled within the diocese from many foreign nations,” he wrote. “Catholics from different continents have enriched our diocese with their great faith and devotion.”
Land repurposed
In 1927, Charleston used the Tower Hill burial grounds for a football stadium and a park, but did not relocate the bodies, Bowling said. The Citadel relocated the remains of 341 Confederate sailors in 2005, but every few years, human remains are found and relocated, she said. “In other words, the bodies are still there,” she added.
The city made a mistake to use the land for a football stadium and park, she said.
“I am not suggesting that any structures should be torn down or any bodies be relocated,” she pledged. “Nor am I implying that (the city or college) are in any way culpable for decisions that were made nearly one hundred years ago.”
The college and the city, she said, should not build on the site again and stop parking cars over the graves. Bowling said the college and the city should collaborate with the community to create a memorial garden or gardens at the site.
In July 2022, a Citadel spokesman told the Charleston City Paper the college has helped identify and memorialize those who were buried at the site more than a century ago. The college used ground-penetrating radar on the Johnson Hagood Stadium and surrounding structures, but no graves were detected, the spokesman said.
The college said it has installed a plaque at the stadium to memorialize those who were buried in the city’s cemetery.
A list of the dead
Bowling created a Friends of Tower Hill Cemetery website that lists some of the names of the interred. The descendants of the dead should know where their ancestors were laid to rest, she stressed.
From the pages of the Returns of Deaths within the City of Charleston Bowling has compiled more than 5,000 burials at the site from 1841 to 1868. Most of the records identify the deceased by name, but many of them are nameless.
More: friendsoftowerhillcemetery.org
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(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
