Paving the Way to Early America: Cobblestones as Colonial Revival

Taylor Rossini, WPAMC ’24

A picturesque historic street is hardly complete without its requisite cobbled paving stones. Evocatively pre-industrial, charmingly challenging to navigate, we encountered cobblestone streets in numerous site visits throughout both Southern and Northern field studies. While today the historic downtowns of many a colonial city include cobblestone streets, these pleasingly “original” features are subject to dubious mythologies of creation and originate within an aesthetic of “early America” created during a much more recent century. 

Cobblestone streets are embedded in oft-perpetuated mythologies of colonial-era construction. Anyone who frequents eighteenth-century tourist sites will likely have heard the story that many houses and roads in early America were built with bricks and stones carried to the East Coast as ballast in the holds of ships from Europe. In Charleston, as the story goes, for a time they were simply thrown into the harbor as unnecessary waste, no longer needed when the ships left the harbor well-ballasted with cargoes of Carolina timber, rice and cotton. Quickly, however, those ingenious colonists realized that these byproducts of the shipping industry could be repurposed as paving stones to combat the muck of early dirt streets. This narrative is appealing as an example of early American ingenuity and effectively positions colonial port cities within a web of trade without requiring much consideration of the realities of cargo. One might be surprised to learn, however, that Charleston’s streets remained unpaved until well into the nineteenth century. In 1791, George Washington noted “streets of sand,” and in fact the first street to be paved in Charleston was East Bay Street in 1819. 

A large portion of historic Charleston’s charm is the narrow and winding cobblestone streets, flanked by remarkably intact architecture from the city’s colonial period. While only a few of the original cobblestone streets remain today, a concession to modern development, it is those blocks that have become emblematic of the city’s colonial identity and are indeed a driving force of tourism in the city. It is, more than anything, the aesthetic value of cobbled streets that have allowed them, despite the potential hazard of their uneven surfaces, to survive and even thrive into the twenty-first century. The centrality of cobblestones in our contemporary vision of early America speaks more to a Colonial Revival aesthetic, born in the nineteenth century and crystallized in the twentieth, than the realities of eighteenth-century American cities. 

When Colonial Williamsburg faced a repaving project for the iconic Duke of Gloucester Street, declared by FDR to be the “most historic street in America,” cobblestones were not even under consideration. According to Ron Hurst, at the time Colonial Williamsburg’s Vice President for Museums, Preservation and Historic Resources, cobblestones came along later in the American colonies than the 1775-6 period that the organization interprets and only in larger cities. In fact, the residents of Williamsburg never had the money for such a luxury, especially after the state capital moved to Richmond in 1780. According to Hurst, “This was always just a sandy, dusty street,” which inevitably became a muddy mess after any precipitation. The cobblestones that currently line the newly asphalted DOG Street, as it’s affectionately known, are far from original to the Revolutionary period, and were installed sometime after the 1920s campaign to restore the historic town to its eighteenth-century glory. 

In everything from postcards to touristic materials, cobblestones have become interchangeable with the United States’ colonial identity. As this post has suggested, however, the centrality of cobblestones to an enduring aesthetic of early America was cemented in relatively recent history. Indeed, cobblestone streets today are one of many forms of what amounts to Colonial Revival set dressing, offering a visual shorthand for early America that is both charming and temptingly photographable.