Remnant of Horn Work
Charleston, Charleston County, South Carolina
Marker Inscription
Remnant, of Horn Work. May 1780 Siege of Charleston
The Story
During the American Revolution, Charleston was defended on its landward side by the Horn Work, a massive tabby-and-earthen fortification that anchored the American lines across the neck of the peninsula. In the spring of 1780 a British army under Sir Henry Clinton laid siege to the city, digging parallel trenches ever closer until the defenders were trapped. On May 12, 1780, the American garrison surrendered here, handing Britain one of the largest captures of Continental troops in the entire war. This surviving fragment of tabby is nearly all that remains of that once-imposing gateway defense.
Why it matters
The fall of Charleston was a devastating low point for the American cause and opened the brutal southern campaign that would ultimately turn toward Yorktown. This weathered remnant marks the very ground where that pivotal siege was decided.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Sir Henry Clinton
- · Benjamin Lincoln
Related events
- · Siege of Charleston
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
"The Kings Highway"
Mount Pleasant, SC
The King's Highway began as a colonial post road, stitched together in the 1700s to connect the seaboard settlements from the northern colonies down through the Carolinas. By 1791 it had become the natural route for President George Washington's grand Southern Tour, a deliberate journey through the young nation's newest states to bind them to the federal government in person. This marker, set beside that old road in Mount Pleasant, was raised by the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1932 to mark the bicentennial of Washington's birth.
Colonial Fort Augusta Stone
Augusta, GA
When General James Oglethorpe's Georgia trustees ordered this fort raised in 1735, Augusta was the raw edge of Britain's youngest American colony—a fortified trading post on the Savannah River where deerskins moved between backcountry hunters and the coast. Within a generation the settlement had grown enough to build St. Paul's Church tucked beneath the fort's earthen curtain wall in 1750. During the Revolution the British renamed the strongpoint Fort Cornwallis and held it against Patriot forces, making this quiet churchyard ground the site of some of the war's hardest fighting in the Deep South.
Revolutionary Cartel
Marlboro County, SC
During the American Revolution, a "cartel" was a formal agreement between opposing forces for the exchange of captured prisoners under agreed terms. In the Carolina backcountry, where the war became a brutal contest of raids and reprisals between Patriots and Loyalists, such arrangements offered a rare moment of negotiated order amid the chaos. This marker in Marlboro County recalls one of those understandings, a reminder that even a bitter civil conflict on the frontier followed certain rules of war.
Wragg Square
Charleston, SC
In 1801, when the estate of the prominent Charleston merchant John Wragg was divided among his heirs, a parcel of the family's land north of the old walled city was set aside as an open square for public use. This was the era when Charleston was spilling beyond its colonial boundaries, and the Wragg family lent its name to the surrounding Wraggborough neighborhood as it took shape. Squares like this one were deliberately reserved as breathing room and common ground amid the growth of one of early America's busiest Atlantic ports.