The Charleston Museum was founded in 1773, making it a contemporary of the Boston Tea Party rather than the Smithsonian. It opened its doors to the general public in 1824, joining a small handful of institutions competing for the distinction of being America's first museum - the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, and the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia are among the other claimants. What sets Charleston's museum apart is its continuity: it has operated in some form for over 250 years, surviving revolution, civil war, earthquake, and fire. The original museum building burned down under mysterious circumstances at some point, but the institution carried on. Its present home, completed in 1980 at 360 Meeting Street in the Wraggborough neighborhood, is a modern building that belies the antiquity of what it contains.

Among the museum's most remarkable holdings is the only known fossil of Pelagornis sandersi, a seabird that soared over the oceans roughly twenty-five million years ago. With an estimated wingspan of twenty to twenty-four feet, it is possibly the largest flying bird ever discovered - dwarfing the wandering albatross, today's largest living flyer, whose wingspan reaches about eleven feet. The fossil was found in South Carolina, a reminder that this coastal state has been attracting winged creatures for geological ages. The museum's natural history collections extend well beyond this single specimen, encompassing South Carolina ornithology, invertebrate and vertebrate paleontology, rocks and minerals from around the world, and specimens collected by generations of local naturalists who combed the Lowcountry's marshes, forests, and barrier islands.

In 1920, the Charleston Museum hired Laura Bragg as its director, making her the first woman to lead a publicly funded museum in America. Bragg was a pioneer in museum education, developing programs that brought collections to schools and communities rather than waiting for audiences to come through the front door. Her appointment came at a time when women were just gaining the right to vote, and it signaled that the Charleston Museum, for all its traditional Southern trappings, could be a place of firsts. The museum's collections of decorative arts, including Charleston-made furniture and silver, Lowcountry textiles, costumes, quilts, and needlework, reflect the material culture of a city that prided itself on craftsmanship and refinement - and that depended on enslaved labor to sustain both.

The museum extends well beyond its Meeting Street building. It owns and operates two historic house museums that open windows into different eras of Charleston life. The Heyward-Washington House is a late eighteenth-century residence built by Thomas Heyward Jr., a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and is best known as the lodging where President George Washington stayed during his 1791 visit to Charleston. The Joseph Manigault House is a Federal-style home furnished with American, English, and French pieces from the early nineteenth century. The museum also maintains the Dill Sanctuary on James Island, a property that includes diverse wildlife habitats, three earthen Confederate batteries, and archaeological sites spanning from prehistory through the postbellum era. A freshwater pond with nesting islands provides habitat for migratory and resident birds.

Like many American museums of its era, the Charleston Museum accumulated human remains - in this case, the remains of Native Americans collected through accidental discovery and archaeological expeditions during the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. To its credit, the museum began repatriating remains before Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990. Two sets of remains have been returned, and the museum is in ongoing consultation with tribes about approximately eighty additional Native American ancestors in its inventory. This process of reckoning is part of a larger story playing out in museums nationwide, one that asks institutions founded in one era to meet the ethical standards of another. For the Charleston Museum, the nation's oldest, that tension between preservation and accountability stretches across the full sweep of American history.