The Charleston Museum—America’s very first museum, founded in 1773—is a cornerstone of the city’s Museum Mile, a section of Meeting Street that boasts six museums, five historic homes, four parks, as well as important churches and public buildings. The museum is dedicated to all aspects of South Carolina Lowcountry, and the wide-ranging collection goes all the way back to prehistoric fossils found in the region. A silver gallery shows off the spectacular and shiny evidence of Charleston’s times of wealth and a Lowcountry History Hall contains a rich array of artifacts that tell the area’s human history, from the early Native American residents, through the colonists and the enslaved African Americans who brought their cultures with them to the New World. From the vintage signs to the leech jar used in the 1830s by a Charleston doctor on the King of Siam, to the collection of toys, there is truly something for everyone. (My favorite was the re-created apothecary.)
