Who Owns Charleston? Tracing Property through an African American Family’s Memory

Arriving at the DeCosta family grave at the Unity and Friendship Society cemetery in Charleston in November 2025, the first thing I noticed was fresh flowers and a bottle of insect repellent. This struck me as odd at first, but I soon came to understand why when I was attacked by swarms of mosquitoes. The flowers and the repellent revealed the cemetery not only as a historical site for African American burials in the city of Charleston but also as a place still visited by family members whose interaction with their own family history entails care that challenges the public histories of the city.

The cemetery had been the first stop on a bus tour organized by family members during a DeCosta family reunion in Charleston in 1995. The tour program, preserved in the archives of the Avery Research Center in Charleston, announced the “departure for a tour of the grave sites of many DeCosta family members, home sites and homes of family members and places of historical interest.” I retraced this route thirty years later as part of my research on property and class dynamics of Black families after emancipation.

The tour showed how property carries significance beyond formal ownership. “Who owns Charleston?” cannot be answered by deeds, titles, and real estate alone, but by looking at the intertwining of properties and the city’s Black residents. The houses, offices, schools, churches, and cemeteries along the route reveal a family history shaped by care, loss, ambition, continuity and disruption, a dedicated work ethic, and educational aspirations in a city and country that has long made African American histories invisible.

Building Blocks of an African American Family History

The DeCosta family history begins, as many African American family histories do, with fragments. The family surname shifts across records, and includes versions such as Costa, Coster, DaCosta, DeCoster, and ultimately DeCosta, a spelling the family came to use consistently from approximately 1902 onwards. Inconsistency in the documents, or the lack of documents entirely, impacts the ability of Black people in the US to trace their ancestry back through the Jim Crow era marked by segregation, Reconstruction, emancipation, and slavery. In this context, the DeCosta family’s sustained effort to remember is historically significant.

In a booklet accompanying the reunion, Herbert A. DeCosta Jr. gathered information about the family’s history. The earliest documented male ancestor is Benjamin Costa or Coster, who was born in Charleston in 1835 and died there in 1870. Originally buried in Zion Cemetery, he and other family members were later reinterred at Unity and Friendship Society’s cemetery by family members after Zion “had deteriorated into a terrible state” as the booklet explains. The cemetery belonged to a wider network of African American benevolent societies, founded by free people of color, which provided burial grounds and mutual aid, like financial relief to widows and orphans. Thus, the family’s connection to this site isn’t rooted in private ownership of the cemetery but in the ongoing engagement, maintenance, labor, and emotional care work for the plot, as the flowers, repellent, and the endeavor to intellectually preserve property sites by way of the reunion program and genealogy work powerfully demonstrate.

Property and Precarity in Black Middle-Class Experiences

After the cemetery, the tour moved through largely residential neighborhoods in the Charleston peninsula, visiting the sites of family homes, like the house at 4 Ashe St. There, Benjamin and Martha Coster’s son, Benjamin DeCosta, welcomed his first and third child by his wife Anna Harrenburg, as the tour program discloses. Two stops before that, the tour passed 5 Rosemont St, the “site of the ‘New Home’ that Grandfather Benjamin DeCosta built for his family in 1899.” where five of Benjamin and Anna's children were born, according to the program. Anna’s mother also lived with them and “every morning [she] got up at 5:00 a.m. and went downstairs to put the grits to soak, then she would go upstairs, sit in her rocking chair, and read the Bible,” as Frank Augustus DeCosta learned in an interview with his aunt, Miriam DeCosta Seabrook. This shows that the importance of property isn’t found merely in the sense of legal ownership, which especially Black families were often barred from, but in the stories inscribed in them, which are recognized by generation after generation as part of their shared history and act as signifiers of their belonging in the spatial material of the city.

The home at 5 Rosemont St illustrates this emotional attachment while also speaking to the material importance of home ownership. Benjamin, who signed his letters to Anna as “Bennie,” worked as a carpenter, and the house, built through his skilled labor, represented Black achievement and craftsmanship in a city shaped by the afterlives of slavery and segregation. The house also served as important financial resource: after Benjamin’s death in 1911, his wife Anna was left with nine children to support as well as debts from his business. According to family history records, she mortgaged the home at 5 Rosemont Street to settle her husband’s debts and paid off the mortgage within a year through her work as an expert seamstress and with help from her older children – a remarkable feat.

Racism, however, often turned material assets into an economic vulnerability for Black Americans since access to credits and home ownership were severely limited through, for example the practice of redlining, which reduced property values in predominantly Black neighborhoods. Moreover, covenants and racial discrimination excluded African Americans from many neighborhoods, schools, and occupations. The discriminatory system made any degree of financial stability Black people worked towards fragile, impacting their own lives and their ability to pass on intergenerational wealth. The house at 5 Rosemont St exemplifies the tensions at the heart of the Black middle-class experience in the United States, as owning property did and does not automatically translate into security in a society in which racial discrimination can turn an asset into a risk.

Racial biases also resulted in a divergence of class and property as cultural status, education, and respectability, often associated with middle- or upper-class lifestyles in White society, often coexisted with material precarity in African American communities. Anna, for example, had graduated from Avery Institute in 1885, a school established by the American Missionary Association to educate freed persons after emancipation. Despite her financial strain after her husband’s death, she insisted that her son Herbert stay in school instead of finding work to support her, demonstrating the commitment to education. Education, respectability, discipline, and family obligations were central to Black middle-class aspirations, even when material security remained uncertain.

While the original house at 5 Rosemont Street has since been replaced, the site retains its importance for the DeCosta family as a signifier of the care, labor, and commitment inscribed in the property for the family and the memories intertwined with it. The same holds true for other buildings along the route, many of which still existed in 2025, in what appears to be their original historical shape. Among them were 167 Congress Street, described in the program as the “home of Aunt Miriam DeCosta Seabrook and Uncle Herbert Seabrook,” and 76 Spring St, once the “office of DeCosta Construction Company,” and now home to an architecture firm. Some memories carried forward through time and property spaces, connecting sites further with family history. One example of this is a piano, which Howard Harrenburg gave to his daughter Anna Harrenburg at 5 Rosemont St., who passed it on to her daughter Miriam DeCosta Seabrook. She eventually had it turned into a table for the house at 167 Congress St. At 91 Spring Street, the former home of Herbert and Julia DeCosta and later of Bernice DeCosta, the family history records another layer of memory: the original tombstones from Zion Cemetery had been placed under the rear steps of the residence after the remains were relocated.

Preservation and Its Silences

Charleston is famous for its preservation efforts. Yet it is also a city built on slavery, racial violence, and unequal memory, and tracing the DeCosta reunion route highlights the limits of preservation and the city’s selective public memory. Not only did the DeCosta family live in Charleston, they also helped build and preserve it. The reunion tour points to houses and public sites connected to Benjamin DeCosta’s work as carpenter and builder as well as those connected with Herbert A. DeCosta, an architect who did important restoration work in addition to new construction. Yet the public narrative remembers buildings more readily than the Black labor and expertise that sustained them. The Sunken Gardens in Hampton Park, built for the South Carolina Inter-State and West Indian Exposition of 1901-1902, illustrate this tension.

The family tour identified the “Sunken Gardens and bridge as built by Grandfather DeCosta.” Public histories of Hampton Park, however, tend to foreground the work of White individuals, such as the exposition’s architect Bradford L. Gilbert or the Olmsted brothers, whose father designed Central Park in New York City. This doesn’t prove the family memory wrong but rather shows how official histories prioritize White actors while Black family histories remember those involved in erecting sites and the pride attached to their labor in the absence of public recognition. In a city such as Charleston where historical preservation is central to civic identity and tourism, an alternative account of the history of buildings and properties like those included in the DeCosta reunion tour sheds light on the limits and biases of recognizing African American contributions in public memory and how preservation can protect properties while obscuring the Black histories embedded in them.

Rethinking History through Property-based Knowledge

The 1995 reunion tour can be understood as an act of preservation itself as it brought together family members dispersed across the country and (re-)connected them to Charleston. Moving through the city by way of the reunion program sheds light on approximately 200 years of presence and involvement of a Black family in the city’s transforming spatiality, real estate market, cultural landscape, and social networks. Retracing the route on my own in 2025 made clear how much historical knowledge depends on the family’s continuous care work, physical maintenance of sites, and intellectual labor. Without the family program and family history, many buildings along the route would have appeared to me as ordinary streetscapes, while the family memory made them historically legible, expanding the predominant narratives of Charleston.

The route emphasized that property isn’t only a legal category or economic asset but also embodied memory and a signifier of belonging across generations. This memory becomes even more important to a demographic commonly rendered invisible by racially unjust systems of practice and remembrance. The question “Who owns Charleston?” can’t be answered merely by looking at property records. Charleston belongs to those whose labor built it, whose families experienced it, whose schools and churches sustained communities, and whose memories keep histories attached to places. Preserving these memories through formats such as the DeCosta reunion tour, for example, allows African American families to claim not just a set of addresses but the opportunity to say ”we were here” and claim space and agency through the material fabric of a city.