Why didn’t Charleston build a stone fortress like the Spanish did at the Castillo de San Marco in St. Augustine?
• One of the fundamental tenants of military architecture in the late-seventeen and eighteenth centuries was to make the best possible use of the materials available at or near the site rather than wasting money and time importing materials from elsewhere. At St. Augustine, the Spanish used coquina stone, a naturally-occurring sedimentary stone, because they found it in abundance along the east coast of Florida. There is almost no stone of any kind to be found along the South Carolina coast, however, so the builders of Charleston’s fortifications had to make the best of the resources that were readily available—earth, wood, bricks, and oyster shells.
