2024: A Year In Review
Season’s greetings to all our Museum friends! On behalf of The Charleston Museum Board of Trustees and staff, I wish you a joyous and healthy holiday season.
Whereas 2023 was a year of celebration for the Museum’s 250th anniversary, 2024 has been about accomplishing several critical long-term projects. Probably the most important was the recent opening of Beyond the Ashes: The Lowcountry’s New Beginnings, our new addition to the permanent galleries. If you missed last month’s newsletter, the exhibit continues the story of Lowcountry history from the Reconstruction period immediately after the Civil War, through the 20th century, and up to the 21st. We hope that you will have a chance to see it soon, with plans to come back again as some of the cases in the exhibit will feature rotating collection pieces. With the installation of Beyond the Ashes, Museum guests can now experience Lowcountry cultural history from Native Peoples to the present and natural history from 400 million years ago to the current epoch in our permanent exhibition galleries. The project, a major initiative of the Museum’s 2023 Strategic Plan, could not have been accomplished without our dedicated staff. Chief Curator Jennifer McCormick and Graphic Designer Sean Money deserve particular praise for their endeavors to see it through. The Museum was fortunate to receive a grant from the State of South Carolina for the project. State Representative Leon Stavrinakis and Museum Board of Trustees Vice President Julie Armstrong were absolutely key to this process. We also thank the Joanna Foundation, Dominion Energy Charitable Foundation, Post and Courier Foundation, and Therblig Foundation for their generous support of this crucial success, as well as those of you who gave to the 2023 Annual Appeal.
Another significant project highlighted in the recent Strategic Plan was the replacement of chiller units and related controls for the Museum’s HVAC system. Despite supply chain delays, this was fortunately accomplished by early April before outdoor temperatures became too warm. We also undertook a project to modernize the equipment and controls for the Museum’s public elevator. These endeavors could not have been accomplished without the generous support of Charleston County and the City of Charleston, which provide annual funding to our facility fund for capital projects. Both the County and City also granted additional moneys for the chiller replacement. We are most grateful to them for their continued generous support.
On the collections front, the Museum Board of Trustees approved an update to our Collections Policy in September, and we had a number of fascinating collections acquisitions during the year. Among the interesting pieces acquired were a uniform and personal belongings of George Edward Thompson, a member of the U.S. Army Air Force who lost his life when his plane was shot down over Europe in the Second World War, clothing and other objects that belonged to J. Arthur “Joe” Brown, who headed the local chapter of the NAACP in the 1960s and was a significant figure in the area Civil Rights struggle, an alarm clock from a McClellanville residence, that stopped at 12:54 a.m. when flood waters from Hurricane Hugo reached it, and a quilt produced by local artist Torreah “Cookie” Washington that commemorates the victims of the Emmanuel tragedy. The quilt, clock, and objects related to Joe Brown are currently on display in the Beyond the Ashes exhibit.
Also, with regard to collections, many of you may know that Martha Zierden, the Museum’s longtime Curator of Historical Archaeology, retired at the beginning of 2024. Although we were sad to see Martha go after a long and successful career with the Museum, we were pleased to bring on John Fisher as our new Curator of Archaeology. John joined us after significant experience with the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, and he has been a part of a number of archaeology projects conducted across the state. In his new role, he has been collaborating closely with representatives from Native American tribes to ensure the Museum properly meets new guidelines issued this year related to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). The updated NAGPRA guidelines require consultation with Native Peoples before exhibiting any cultural items that belonged to their ancestors. If you have been in the Museum recently, you may have noticed that many of the cases that contained Native American materials are empty. Objects will be placed back on exhibit after appropriate consultation with, and approval by, tribal representatives regarding pieces related to their cultural heritage. We are hopeful that this will occur before the end of the year.
In other exhibits news, the Museum hosted two exhibitions in the Historic Textiles Gallery this year, The Art of Abstraction: Modernism in Quilting, a collaboration with the Gibbes Museum of Art featured earlier this year, and Lovely & Lethal: Killer Fashions from the Collection, which opened in September and will be on display until April 20, 2025. Virginia Theerman, Curator of Historic Textiles, developed the concept for each of these exhibits, selected the textile objects to display, and was a key member of the exhibits team that installed them. Lovely & Lethal includes fashion items that were potentially dangerous to the wearer or that were detrimental to the environment. For instance, many fashions produced in the 19th century contain arsenic while some hats contained mercury. Come see the exhibit before it closes, but please don’t try anything on!
2024 has been another busy year for the Education Department, and we are pleased to see the continued resurgence of school field trips to the Museum, the historic houses, and Dill Sanctuary in the wake of the pandemic. School group attendance has increased 31% through October compared to 2023, so, yes, many children are visiting the Museum, such a critical component of our mission. The Education Department also continues to provide significant outreach to Title I schools. Throughout this school year, Museum educators offer a weekly program at Sanders-Clyde Elementary School, and over the summer they participated in the Charleston County School District Summer Reading Program, which assists students from Title I schools who have fallen behind established reading levels. Chief of Education Elise Reagan obtained a grant from the South Carolina Department of Education to allow the Museum to participate in the Summer Reading Program. Elise and her staff regularly develop new mission-focused children’s programs, and a grant was awarded earlier this year from the South Carolina American Revolution Sestercentennial Commission (SC250) for the acquisition of materials for Revolutionary War-focused Museum programs. 2026 will be the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and SC250 has been making generous grants to help the community rediscover its unique American Revolution history. SC250 also recently awarded a grant to the Museum for the addition of a Revolutionary War focused audio tour at the Heyward-Washington House. The new audio tour will complement the current general tour, which has been highly popular with guests to the house. We are so appreciative to the Commission for these grants.
At the Dill Sanctuary, the Museum Board of Trustees Dill Sanctuary Planning Committee continues to investigate options for the long-term protection of this important natural and cultural resource. In accordance with a recommendation in the Dill Sanctuary Strategic Plan, in March the Board adopted a land management plan for the property. The plan outlines ecologically motivated practices that will improve wildlife habitat at the Dill Sanctuary. Some of these practices have already been implemented beginning this year, and we look forward to furthering the ecological value of the property as others are instituted over the coming years.
Finally, 2024 has been an active year at the Museum’s historic houses. We undertook a major project to restore the column bases of the south porch at the Joseph Manigault House which was completed this summer and conducted exterior woodwork painting and repairs at both houses. A significant effort is upcoming at the Heyward-Washington House, however, with the replacement of its aging HVAC system. We have engaged an engineer, Live Oak Consultants, to design a new HVAC system for the Heyward-Washington House, which we plan to install this winter. This is a critical project, not only for the comfort of staff and guests, but also to provide proper climate control for Museum collections at the house, which include Jeremiah Theus’s portrait of Christopher Gadsden and the Holmes bookcase. Donations given to this year’s Annual Appeal will be directed toward this project. Thank you to those who have already given to this effort, and, if you have not, please consider making a gift in support of it.
As always, I wish to thank our wonderful members, donors, and volunteers for all your support of the Museum this year. This institution has flourished for more than 250 years in large measure due to the assistance of people such as you. With you, it will continue to thrive.
Carl P. Borick
Director