White Point Garden

White Point Garden is built on the gallows. The park at the tip of the Charleston peninsula — the Battery's green, the promenade between the Ashley and the Cooper — is on the ground where the city hanged its pirates: twenty-nine of Stede Bonnet's crew on November 8, 1718, nineteen of Richard Worley's men later that month, and Bonnet himself on December 10, the 'gentleman pirate' who'd been a Barbados planter before he took up the black flag. The hangings were at the water's edge where the whole harbor could see them — the warning the colony wanted to send, on the shoal that gave the point its name.

The point was the harbor's edge before it was the park — the oyster-shell beach that stayed above the tide, where Broughton's Battery was built in 1737 and where the seawall has been rebuilt every century since. The Confederates put earthworks in the park during the siege; the guns on the Battery faced Fort Sumter across the harbor. The park was made official in 1837, the bandstand and the monuments came after the war, and the cannons on the seawall are the ones the city points at the fort that started the war.

The dead are part of the ground — the oyster shells the point was named for, the gallows site under the lawns, the hangings that happened where the tourists walk. Charleston's pirate trials were the colony's biggest spectacle; the transcripts were published in 1719 as the official record, and the men who died on the point are the reason the place has the name it does.

White Point is the archive's gallows file — the park on the spot where Charleston hanged its pirates, the Battery that guarded the harbor and hosted the executions, the ground that has been a beach, a fort, a gallows, and a garden in three hundred years of the city's tides.