The Charleston Museum, founded in 1773, was America’s first museum. The E​arly Days​ gallery reflects its long history from founding to the late twentieth century when its mission focus changed solely to the history of Charleston and the Lowcountry. This gallery recreates the appeal that the Museum traditionally had for visitors as a “window to the world.”

The concept for a museum in Charleston originated with several men, educated in England, who had seen the British Museum and admired its many specimens.​ Early collections for this “new” museum combined local scientific specimens with ethnological and zoological materials from all over the world. These objects were destroyed by a fire in 1778 but active collecting resumed by the 1790s. One of these pieces, a grass helmet from the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii), is still on exhibit in E​arly Days.​

Objects on display in this gallery reflect the diverse interests of eighteenth and nineteenth century Charlestonians and their acquisition of materials from around the world, including Greek and Roman artifacts, an Egyptian mummy and mummy case, a two­-headed snake, and early fluid specimens preserved with the use of “spirits.”