“Charleston County and the city of Charleston, its county seat, are the most historic locations in the state.” Situated in the Lowcountry, the county serves as a popular vacation destination but also relies on the business that results from its port. The area in general serves as a large cultural and economic hub for the state.
Charleston County was founded as Charleston District in 1769, and the district became smaller after some of its lands were used to create Colleton and Berkeley counties. The county and its seat were named after King Charles II.
The city and county are saturated with Revolutionary War and Civil War history. Three signers of the United States Constitution and two famous abolitionists resided in Charleston County, and the Civil War began when soldiers fired shots from the county’s Fort Sumter.
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Sarah and Angelina Grimké worked tirelessly for both abolition, and women’s suffrage. The Grimké sisters were the first to say, in print, that women deserved to live alongside men with an equal...
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The Penn Center, formerly the Penn School, was founded on Saint Helena Island, South Carolina, by Northern abolitionist missionaries. The school was created to educate freed people, and was one of the...
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A circular dance called the "Ring Shout" was a part of Gullah-Geechee Christian worship services for many years.
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Scholars have located a song linking a family from Georgia to the village of Senehun Ngola in Sierra Leone. Linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner traveled to Georgia in 1931 to hear people speaking and singing...
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Nakia Wigfall is a seventh generation Gullah basket maker from Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. Wigfall travels to Sierra Leone with a mission to make sweetgrass baskets with the other local residents...
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In the city of Kabala, in Sierra Leone, residents speak their native tongue, as well as a Creole language called "Krio," which is similar in many ways to the Gullah language spoken by the Gullah...
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Freetown was founded by formerly enslaved people, many of them from South Carolina and Georgia. Their first attempt to establish an African colony in 1787 failed, but in 1792, more than a thousand...
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With the ending of the civil war in Sierra Leone, the next generation looks to the future with hopes of rebuilding their country, and getting educations. These inspiring young Sierra Leoneans are also...
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From 1617 to the abolishment of the English slave trade in 1807, Bunce Island was the last glimpse of home for tens of thousands of enslaved Africans. Today, only ruins remain, as a testament to the...
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Rice is a staple food of Sierra Leone. Rice is not only a favorite dish of Sierra Leoneans and the Gullah-Geechee, but it is also a part of their history. A dike system for cultivating rice worked...
