The Charleston Museum
Natural-history specimens, textiles, silver, weaponry, archaeological material, and Lowcountry objects trace Charleston from Indigenous homelands through slavery, war, commerce, and tourism.
Places and wildlife — page 59
Browse Explore’s field guide to destinations, wildlife, art, and the natural world. Open a discovery for practical details and background.
Gibbes Museum of Art
Portrait miniatures, Charleston Renaissance work, modern Southern art, and changing exhibitions occupy a Beaux-Arts building with studios visible to visitors.
Patriots Point Naval & Maritime Museum
USS Yorktown, USS Laffey, aircraft, flight and engine spaces, a Vietnam support-base exhibit, and the Medal of Honor Museum make naval scale physically legible.
H. L. Hunley Museum
The recovered Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley rests in a conservation tank while artifacts, facial reconstructions, and research explain its 1864 attack and the deaths of all three crews.
Greenville County Museum of Art
American art with particular strength in Southern work includes an important Andrew Wyeth collection, Jasper Johns, and a substantial group by South Carolina-born William H. Johnson.
Upcountry History Museum
Permanent and changing galleries connect Cherokee homelands, settlement, slavery, textile mills, civil rights, military service, and the region’s transformation into an international manufacturing center.
Florence County Museum
Regional art, archaeology, Pee Dee history, and the Wright Collection of Southern Art frame Florence-born William H. Johnson within a broader material landscape.
Coastal Discovery Museum
Honey Horn’s 68 acres hold live oaks, salt-marsh views, historic structures, gardens, horses, and exhibits on Lowcountry ecology and culture.
Cecil Williams South Carolina Civil Rights Museum
Cecil Williams’s photographs, cameras, publications, and firsthand interpretation document school desegregation, the Orangeburg movement, the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre, and organizing across South Carolina.
BMW Zentrum
Historic vehicles, concept cars, motorcycles, production displays, and current models introduce the enormous Spartanburg plant that builds BMW sport-activity vehicles for world markets.
South Carolina Railroad Museum
Historic rolling stock, restoration shops, signals, and seasonal excursions preserve the material history of railroading in South Carolina.
Fort Sumter National Historical Park
A ferry crosses Charleston Harbor to the brick fort where Confederate artillery opened the Civil War in April 1861; ruins, batteries, flags, and exhibits interpret the conflict and later coastal defense.
Fort Moultrie
Reconstructed palmetto-log defenses, brick bastions, disappearing guns, World War II control rooms, and harbor views compress military change from 1776 to 1947.
Charles Pinckney National Historic Site
Snee Farm grounds, archaeology, exhibits, and a later house interpret Constitution signer Charles Pinckney alongside the enslaved people whose labor sustained the plantation.
Reconstruction Era National Historical Park
A downtown visitor center connects Penn Center, Camp Saxton, Brick Baptist Church, Darrah Hall, and Beaufort sites where emancipation, education, land, citizenship, and backlash were contested.
Ninety Six National Historic Site
A one-mile loop reaches the original 1781 Star Fort, siege trenches, reconstructed stockade, village traces, and the site of two Revolutionary War battles.
Cowpens National Battlefield
Trails, exhibits, a reconstructed road, and open ground interpret Daniel Morgan’s layered defense and the rapid Patriot victory of January 1781.
Kings Mountain National Military Park
A 1.5-mile loop climbs the wooded ridge where Patriot militia surrounded and defeated Loyalist forces in October 1780.
Historic Camden Revolutionary War Site
Restored and reconstructed structures, archaeology, exhibits, and trails interpret Camden’s British occupation, military logistics, trade, and nearby battlefields.
Penn Center
The former Penn School campus preserves classrooms, cottages, photographs, craft traditions, civil-rights history, and a landscape central to Gullah community life since 1862.
Old Exchange and Provost Dungeon
The 1771 Exchange, Great Hall, archaeological basement, and guided Provost tour interpret customs, slave trading, Patriot imprisonment, ratification, and Charleston government.
Drayton Hall
The remarkably preserved eighteenth-century house, landscape, African American cemetery, and archaeology reveal Palladian ambition alongside plantation slavery and long stewardship.
Middleton Place
Terraced gardens, stableyards, surviving architecture, rice history, livestock, and interpretation of generations of enslaved people occupy an Ashley River plantation landscape.
McLeod Plantation Historic Site
A main house, extant dwellings, gin house, fields, and riverside landscape support interpretation centered on enslaved people, emancipation, Reconstruction, tenancy, and Gullah Geechee continuity.
Redcliffe Plantation State Historic Site
An 1859 Greek Revival mansion, slave quarters, lane, furnishings, and extensive family papers interpret the Hammond household, enslaved workers, and postwar life.
Historic Brattonsville
More than thirty structures, farm fields, archaeological sites, livestock, and programs interpret the Bratton family, enslaved communities, Revolutionary fighting, and later agriculture.
Colonial Dorchester State Historic Site
Church-tower ruins, a tabby fort, cemetery, streets, wharf traces, and archaeology mark a trading town established on the Ashley River in 1697.
Charles Towne Landing State Historic Site
Archaeology, a visitor center, reconstructed ship, fortifications, gardens, trails, and an animal forest interpret the 1670 settlement along the Ashley River.
Congaree National Park
Boardwalks, paddling routes, champion trees, sloughs, and floodplain forest protect one of the largest remaining expanses of old-growth bottomland hardwoods in the Southeast.
ACE Basin National Wildlife Refuge
The Ashepoo, Combahee, and Edisto rivers meet tidal marsh, forest, managed rice impoundments, and former plantation lands within a nationally significant conservation partnership.
Sassafras Mountain Overlook
A short paved approach reaches a 3,553-foot summit overlook with layered Blue Ridge views into South Carolina and North Carolina.
Angel Oak Tree
A massive Southern live oak spreads limbs across a shaded city park, its age measured less reliably than its continuing biological and cultural presence.
Botany Bay Plantation Heritage Preserve
A driving loop, marshes, plantation ruins, maritime forest, and a walk to a shell-covered boneyard beach reveal a protected barrier-island landscape in motion.
Hunting Island State Park
Five miles of beach, maritime forest, lagoon, marsh, trails, and South Carolina’s publicly accessible historic lighthouse create the state’s most visited park.
Huntington Beach State Park
Freshwater and brackish impoundments, beach, maritime habitat, boardwalks, and Atalaya—the Huntingtons’ Moorish-influenced home and studio complex—share one coastal park.
Table Rock State Park
A CCC-built park below Table Rock Mountain offers lakes, historic structures, waterfalls, and strenuous routes to Table Rock, Pinnacle Mountain, and the Foothills Trail.
Jones Gap State Park
The Middle Saluda River, trout habitat, waterfalls, and an extensive trail network cross a narrow mountain valley within the Mountain Bridge Wilderness Area.
Devils Fork State Park
The principal public gateway to Lake Jocassee offers swimming, paddling, boating, camping, short trails, and access to waterfall-lined mountain coves.
Caesars Head State Park
A roadside overlook, hawk migration, Raven Cliff Falls, and backcountry trails reveal the steep eastern edge of the Blue Ridge within Mountain Bridge Wilderness.
Edisto Beach State Park
A beachfront campground and inland Live Oak section offer shelling, swimming, marsh views, cabins, environmental exhibits, and trails through forest built over ancient shell deposits.
Landsford Canal State Park
Catawba River trails pass nineteenth-century canal structures and one of the world’s largest stands of Rocky Shoals spider lilies, which bloom across rapids in late spring.
Foothills Trail
The trail links Oconee and Table Rock state parks through gorges, rivers, Lake Jocassee overlooks, waterfalls, long stair systems, and remote forest.
Palmetto Trail
Mountain singletrack, rail-trail, forests, swamps, battlefields, rural roads, and urban greenways form a developing route across South Carolina.
Prisma Health Swamp Rabbit Trail
More than twenty miles of paved greenway connect downtown Greenville, Furman University, Travelers Rest, parks, neighborhoods, and former rail alignments.
Brookgreen Gardens
More than nine thousand acres hold American figurative sculpture, formal and native gardens, a Lowcountry zoo, creek excursions, and interpretation of four former rice plantations.
Magnolia Plantation and Gardens
Informal paths, bridges, azaleas, cypress-tupelo swamp, wildlife, a house, and former rice fields create a layered Ashley River landscape.
Cypress Gardens
Flat-bottom boats and walking paths enter a bald-cypress and tupelo swamp, with a butterfly house, bird habitats, gardens, and interpretation of a former rice plantation.
Pearl Fryar Topiary Garden
Pearl Fryar transformed ordinary and salvaged plants into spirals, arches, letters, and abstract forms across his residential yard, building a public garden through decades of patient clipping.