If old walls could talk

The first hint that the wall behind Second Presbyterian Church is something unique is the sight of headstones poking above the top.

The second clue is the adjoining Charlotte Street sidewalk, which stands a few feet above the street level and is built of brick, just like the wall.

A third clue can be found across Elizabeth Street, where a white stucco wall holds back the ground immediately outside the New Tabernacle Fourth Baptist Church.

These aren't walls built for privacy or to keep folks out. They were built to retain the earth near the 19th-century churches.

They were built because someone, at some point, dug up and hauled off a significant quantity of dirt where the streets run today.

Pat Mellen, an elder with Second Presbyterian, says the dirt apparently was removed during the Civil War to fortify either the peninsular city or possibly even barged from the foot of Charlotte Street to Fort Sumter.

"When they did, we had an exposed graveyard," he says. "The city built the wall around our graveyard except for the parking lot."

Mellen says he has seen old copies of The Mercury newspaper showing the dirt was taken, but other historians are less aware of any direct link between this dirt removal and the war.

Civil War historian Warren Ripley says the dirt could have been removed beforehand, and it strikes him as unlikely the city would have built a brick retaining wall during the Civil War. "They were too damn busy," he says.

"There's a lot of stuff around that nobody knows what it is," he adds.

Mellen says the original brick wall failed, and a surviving record shows a city engineer ordering that it be taken down and rebuilt shortly after the war.

"The problem is the city and the church lost a lot of records in the burning of Columbia," Mellen says.

The history of the wall is more than an academic issue.

That's because before long, someone is going to have to pay to fix it. The eastern portion of the wall along Charlotte Street noticeably leans over the sidewalk. Some cracks in the mortar can be seen from across the street.

Mellen says rebuilding the wall could run into the six figures, though less costly fixes --such as adding buttresses and new drainage in the cemetery -- could cost a good bit less.

But that's not the only attention the wall needs. The city cited the church in December 2008, after some vandal tagged the wall with graffiti.

Attorneys for both the city and the church are talking about the problem -- and who owns the wall and who is responsible for its care -- and both sides say they're confident it will be resolved.

Kurt Taylor, president of the corporation of the Second Presbyterian Church Charleston and Its Suburbs, is not conceding that the city owns the wall. And he says fortunately, there seems to be time to work things out.

"We've looked at the whole thing from time to time. We haven't gotten any indication that there's any imminent failure," he says, "but old things do need help from time to time."