It's the Museums!

Yes, everyone talks about the food in Charleston. But join us for an art-filled tour. We can eat before and after, too.

- KLARA GLOWCZEWSKA

Charleston abounds in museums, for specifically Charlestonian reasons. For its first 200 years, it grew incomparably rich, the richest city in the richest colony in British North America. As its upper class reaped enormous profits from the exploitation of slave labor on rice and indigo plantations, it spent this fortune on the very best of everything: houses, paintings, furniture, Grand Tours, decorative arts. It is for this reason that nowadays many traditional museums in Charleston are informed both by the revelatory acquisitiveness of the planter class and, increasingly, by the less profuse but compelling details of the lives of the enslaved. The post–Civil War economic collapse plunged the city into decades of stagnation, with a silver lining: decrepit buildings were patched up rather than renovated or torn down, and white Charlestonians, driven by sentiment or necessity, hung on to their grand old things. As J. Grahame Long, director of museums for the Historic Charleston Foundation, puts it, “Collecting is by and large preserving. People were, thank god, stuck in their ways, and I mean that as a high compliment.” It’s why the U.S. preservation movement in effect originated in Charleston, why the country’s first board of architectural review was established here, and its first museum.