SCSouth Carolina Fun Facts

The palmetto on the South Carolina flag is there because the wood is spongy. In June 1776 an unfinished fort on Sullivan's Island, thrown together from palmetto logs and sand, absorbed a full day of bombardment from a British fleet. The soft trunks swallowed the cannonballs instead of splintering, the ships withdrew, and Charleston stayed out of British hands for another four years. A tree got on the flag for being bad lumber.

Facts most people get wrong

• Charleston is not the capital. Columbia has been since 1786, when the legislature built a new town in the middle of the state to settle a long argument between coastal planters and the backcountry over who ran things.
• Fort Sumter was not the first shot. Citadel cadets on Morris Island fired on the Union supply ship Star of the West on 9 January 1861, three months before the bombardment of Sumter on 12 April. South Carolina had already left the Union on 20 December 1860, the first state to do so.
• Cotton did not make the Lowcountry rich. Rice did. Carolina Gold was grown in tidal fields using the labour and the agricultural knowledge of enslaved West Africans from rice-growing regions, and it made Charleston the wealthiest city in mainland British America before the Revolution.
• Gullah is not broken English. It is a creole language with West African grammar and vocabulary that formed on the Sea Islands, and it is still spoken along the coast from South Carolina into Georgia.
• Andrew Jackson's birthplace has never been settled. Both Carolinas claim him. Jackson said South Carolina, in the Waxhaws settlement near the border, and the state agrees, but the surveyed line and the family accounts do not match cleanly.
• Tea is not just a drink here, it is a crop. South Carolina is where tea was first grown commercially in the United States, and the working farm on Wadmalaw Island near Charleston is one of very few in North America.

Records and firsts

• The first successful submarine attack in history. The H.L. Hunley, hand-cranked by a crew of eight, sank the USS Housatonic off Charleston on 17 February 1864 and then vanished with everyone aboard. It was located in 1995 and raised in 2000.
• The oldest museum in the country. The Charleston Museum was founded in 1773, three years before independence.
• The first opera performance in America was staged in Charleston in 1735, and the Dock Street Theatre, opened in 1736, was the first building in the colonies put up specifically for plays.
• The oldest landscaped gardens in the United States. Middleton Place, near Charleston, was laid out beginning in 1741 and still follows the original plan.
• Second in peaches, and it matters here. South Carolina trails only California in fresh peach production and ships more than Georgia in most years, a fact locals will raise unprompted.
• The largest BMW plant on Earth. The Spartanburg factory opened in 1994 and has been among the top vehicle exporters in the United States by value for years.

Geography that surprises

• Only two neighbours. The state is a rough triangle wedged between North Carolina and Georgia, and the Savannah River forms the entire Georgia line.
• 187 miles of coast, nearly 3,000 miles of shoreline. The straight measure is short. Trace the tidal creeks, marshes and Sea Islands and the number multiplies.
• Sea level to 3,553 feet in one drive. Sassafras Mountain, the high point, sits on the North Carolina line in the Blue Ridge, close enough to the coast that you can start the day on a beach and finish it on the summit.
• Charleston is closer to Havana than to Chicago.
• Old growth just outside the capital. Congaree National Park, a short drive from Columbia, protects the largest remaining stand of old growth bottomland hardwood forest in the southeast and some of the tallest trees in eastern North America.

Where the name comes from

Carolina comes from Carolus, the Latin form of Charles. Charles I granted a charter for the region in 1629 and called it Carolana after himself. Nothing came of it. In 1663 his son Charles II reissued the grant to eight supporters who had helped restore him to the throne, respelled it Carolina, and the name honoured both kings at once.

The single colony was too large to run from one place. North and south had separate governors by 1712 and both became royal colonies in 1729. South Carolina ratified the Constitution on 23 May 1788 as the eighth state.

Quick stats

• Population: 5 to 10 million
• Area rank: #40 of 50
• Admitted: 1788, the 8th state
• Capital: Columbia
• Largest city: Columbia
• Time zone: Eastern

Bordering states

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