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Establishment of the Charleston Museum

Name: Establishment of the Charleston Museum
Start: 1773-01-12
Location: Charleston, South Carolina

When: 12 January 1773
Where: Charleston, South Carolina
Part of: Establishment of the first museum in the American colonies

The Charleston Museum was founded on January 12, 1773, in Charleston, South Carolina, becoming the oldest museum in the United States.

The museum was established in 1773, a year when Charleston was a major colonial port with a population of 11,000 recorded in 1770. The city was unincorporated during the colonial period. The museum did not open to the public until 1824.

Sources

Charleston Museum Wikipedia, revision of 2025-10-05
Charleston, South Carolina Wikipedia, revision of 2026-09-16

Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.