Colonial Public Health Events
•1670  Charles Towne is established as an English Colony
1692  Provincial Legislature forbids swine from running free in the city of Charleston and instructs all property owners to refrain from littering their land and to cut “stinking weed in and about the lots and streets.”
•1698  Provincial Legislature requires incoming vessels to produce evidence that no persons on board are suffering from a contagious disease before the ship could dock in Charleston Harbor.
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Some of the earliest actions of the Provincial legislature addressed sanitary measures and quarantine, the two basic public health preventive strategies that were known at the time.  In 1692, the Provincial Legislature passed an ordinance against swine running free in the city, and ordered property owners to cut their stinking weeds. Towns were filthy places. People threw their wastes into the streets. Pigs were a major method of garbage disposal, but they didn’t add much to the ambiance. The 1698 ordinance began the quarantine measures that were an occasionally effective way of keeping contagion away from the city.
Charles Town grew rapidly into one of America’s wealthiest and most cosmopolitan cities in the 1700’s.
As the city grew it was beset with all manner of problems. There were fires, famine, epidemics, hurricanes, and attacks by pirates and Indians. There were extremes of great wealth and poverty. Health care for the sick and welfare for the poor were seen  as the responsibility of the community and church. The colonists recognized their dependence on one another for responding to all types of threats.  Mutual aid groups and parish organizations represented the community’s way of organizing a public health response.

Mike Byrd, ‘Social Welfare Policy Roots, Charles Towne, 1732-1773.” PowerPoint presentation. USC School of Social Work, 2000.

Farley, M. Foster. An Account of the History of Stranger’s Fever in Charleston, 1699-1876. Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1978.