Friday, August 29, 2014
CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) — Archeologists in South Carolina will look for remaining evidence of a wharf where tens of thousands of slaves first set foot in the United States.
Officials announced last month that a $75 million International African American Museum is planned for the site in Charleston where the wharf once stood.
The Post and Courier of Charleston reports (http://bit.ly/1zJr59y ) that Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. says researchers will in the coming weeks begin looking for whatever may remain of Gadsden’s Wharf. He said there may be timbers or other material under layers of fill.
From 1803 to 1807 more than 70,000 enslaved Africans were brought to the wharf at a time when Charleston’s population was only 20,000. The first slaves arrived in Charleston in 1670, the year the Carolina colony was founded.
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