S.C. offers military history for Memorial Day travel
Contributed by S.C. Parks and Recreation and Tourism

South Carolina, one of the original 13 American colonies, is steeped in history.

Its numerous battlefield sites and military museums, many of them found in particularly attractive parts of the state, offer an appreciation of South Carolina's role in America's wartime heritage, from the Revolutionary War to Iraq.

With Memorial Day quickly approaching, these sites also can serve as great places to visit while vacationing around the Palmetto State.

Among the many noted sites are

• Historic Camden Revolutionary War Site, a 107- acre outdoor museum complex in Camden, recreates the 18thcentury town site where British soldiers set up their main backcountry supply post.

• Musgrove Mill State Historic Site, set in the peaceful Piedmont woods near Clinton, offers interpretive exhibits of the bloody struggle waged there in 1780.

• Ninety Six National Historic Site near Greenwood stages reenactments of Revolutionary War clashes, including the war's first southern land battle there in 1775. The park includes exhibits, artifacts, and a restored log cabin.

• The National Park Service also operates Revolutionary War battlefield sites at Cowpens and Kings Mountain. South Carolina, in fact, was the scene of more firefights in the Revolutionary War than any other colony.

• Fort Sumter Visitor Education Center at Liberty Square memorializes a defining moment in U.S. history - the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. A ferry, meanwhile, takes visitors out to the fort itself.

• Civil War enthusiasts should see the H.L. Hunley, the first successful combat submarine in world history, now at rest in a warehouse museum while researchers pore over the largely intact craft pulled from the ocean several years ago.

• The only stateºmaintained Civil War battlefield site, meanwhile, is haunting, serene Rivers Bridge State Historic Site deep in the swampy bottomlands near the Savannah River.

• Back in Charleston and fast- forwarding to the modern era, Patriots Point, meanwhile boasts an aircraft carrier, submarine and Coast Guard cutter open to the public on Charleston Harbor.

• Museums and living history in the form of weekly graduations from boot camp await visitors to Parris Island, the U.S. Marine Corps training camp in Beaufort County, and at Fort Jackson in Columbia, the nation's largest Army training base. Parris Island also includes exhibits recalling the stories of the French and Spanish forts that were on what is now the base in the late 1500s.

• Museum offerings also include an exhibit about the recovery of a B25 bomber that sat on the bottom of Lake Murray near Columbia for more than 50 years, a story being told at the South Carolina State Museum in a special exhibit through Jan. 9.

• And under the same roof as the State Museum is the Confederate Relic Room & Military Museum with its extensive collection of artifacts, uniforms and documents.

To learn more about the state's many military history sites, visit www.SCmilitaryhistory.com .