Charleston’s cobblestone streets and alleys, copper roofs and church steeples are drenched with a history that began before colonial times, creating stories that run through the Civil War and into the modern era.
The interpretation of the city’s culture, art and military heritage is displayed at a series of historic sites and exhibits, including the Charleston Museum, America’s first museum.
Charleston can also boast as having one of the nation’s newest museums, the International African American Museum (IAAM) that opened in June 2023.
In the glare of such museum stardom, however, visitors to the city and Lowcountry residents might not notice other galleries of history beyond the city limits.
In the spirit of remembering smaller local museums, the Charleston City Paper offers this list of places where history buffs can also find important and intriguing stories about our past.
The Village Museum
In McClellanville, a fishing community at the northern end of Charleston County, the Village Museum is celebrating 25 years of sharing the history of McClellanville and the nearby communities of Awendaw, Tibwin, Buck Hall and South Santee. That history includes the area’s indigenous inhabitants alongside people of African and European descent.
The museum’s collection includes a searchable database centered on the area’s African American history. “Peachtree Plantation: Its Land & Its People” is its latest exhibit. Peachtree is the site of the world’s first water-powered rice mill at the home of Thomas Lynch Jr., a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
The museum also tells the story of Robert Blake, who was enslaved at the Blake Plantation on the Santee River, from which e he was carried away from the plantation after a short Civil War battle and given his freedom. He joined the U.S. Navy and performed heroically during a battle. Blake was the second African American to perform a Medal of Honor action.
The museum has garnered high praises in 2015 from Fath Davis Ruffins, curator of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. In a letter she wrote: “I have toured many, many museums … [It] is quite rare to find such high standards of care, such a detailed and complex understanding of different parts of a local community’s history.”
The Edisto Island Museum
At the southern end of Charleston County, the Edisto Island Museum has an extensive and permanent exhibit on Gullah culture.
The museum also has an online collection of 20 oral histories that capture the island’s history and sea island culture. The oral histories were recorded in 2022, 2016 and the 1990s. The interviews include the recollections of the late Rev. McKinley Washington, who served in the S.C. Senate and was founder of the Edisto NAACP chapter.
The museum is supported by the Edisto Island Historic Preservation Society. The society received national attention in 2014 after it donated a two-room slave dwelling to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. The cabin was once on the island’s Point of Pines Plantation.
Dorchester Heritage Center
The Dorchester Heritage Center, one of two local museums in Dorchester County, on Oct. 17-20 will host “The Wall That Heals,” a replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C. The wall will be displayed at the center’s coming location on an 81-acre site in Ridgeville that is scheduled to open in early 2026.
The heritage center, currently housed in St. George, is a regional museum dedicated to the stories of the inland Lowcountry. The museum exhibits include fossils, the Native American history of the Edisto Kuso Natchez tribe and other indigenous groups, the early colonial settlement at Dorchester and the Revolutionary War. (A cell phone app, The Liberty Trail, provides a Revolutionary War history throughout South Carolina.)
Exhibits show the railroad’s influence on small towns that dotted the railway from Summerville to St. George. The museum’s Veterans Room highlights local heroes, including Capt. Katherine Dollason, a Eutaw Springs native who was one of 66 Army nurses captured in the Philippines in the early stages of World War II.
Summerville Museum and Research Center
Did you know prehistoric saber tooth tigers, woolly mammoths and camels once lived here? This area is part of the Camelot site, an approximately 450,000-year-old area that has produced thousands of fossils ranging from rodents to megafauna. The Palmetto Paleontology Museum has partnered with the Summerville Museum to display a wide array of fossils.
The museum, in partnership with the Dorchester County 250 Committee, has a new exhibit that celebrates the role people of African descent played during the Revolutionary War. The museum’s archives also tell about Boston King, who was enslaved at a Dorchester County plantation. He joined the British Army after the war and found freedom in Nova Scotia. Eventually, he received an advanced degree in theology in England and became a teacher in West Africa by 1800.
Berkeley County Museum
The Berkeley County Museum in Moncks Corner, established by the separate Berkeley County Museum and Heritage Center, displays fossils and remains of prehistoric animals and plant life, Native American settlements, African-American history and the development lakes Marion and Moultrie and the Santee Cooper project that brought electricity to rural South Carolina.
The museum will host the American Revolution Experience Traveling Exhibition on Tour from Sept. 16 through Oct. 13. The museum will also have a Colonial Day program on Sept. 28.
The exhibit is being placed at the museum through a partnership with the General Marion Brigade Chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution and the American Battlefield Trust.
The museum recently installed an interactive display “Priscilla kiosk” that tells the story of a 9-year-old girl who was captured in Sierra Leone and sold into slavery on a Ball family plantation in Berkeley County. The story is on display in the IAAM’s Center for Family History in Charleston.
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