The building of Charleston in the early 1700s

In Charleston the work of building went on. It seems
extraordinary that the colony should have been founded
for fourteen years before any attempt was made to erect
a church in Charleston. The uncertainty of occupation of Albemarle
Point was probably the cause of this delay, or perhaps the
small number of churchmen among the original Charleston settlers.
Old Governor Sayle had indeed selected and laid out a
graveyard, adjoining the old town o Charleston , of eighty acres (surely
a liberal provision), in which we may presume that he
himself was interred, but not until 1682 was St. Philip's
begun.
It was placed where St. Michael's now stands, at the
corner of Broad and Meeting streets just opposite the half
moon and drawbridge, and was built of the black cypress
which Mr. Maurice Mathews, correspondent of Lord
Shaftesbury, had strongly commended ten years before.
" The black cypress is wonderful large and tall and
soother, of a delicate grain, and smells. It will hereafter
be a good commodity to ye prying planter who looks
abroad." Its value as a building material was now
known. The foundation was of brick, and this mode of
building, namely a cypress house on a brick foundation,
was long esteemed and continued in the colony. For lime
they burnt the old Indian heaps of oyster shells, which
Sandford had described as piled thick along the river
banks near the coast of Charleston , where are many still to be seen.
This lime makes the strongest possible mortar. Walls
and whole buildings were often made of a concrete,
called "
tappy," or "
pise," — composed of these shells
mixed with the lime which becomes hard as stone. The
only building now standing in Charleston known to have
been erected in the seventeenth century, the old Powder
Magazine in Cumberland Street, which was attached to the
small fort at Carteret Bastion at the northwest corner of
the old wall, is built of this "
tappy."