About the South Carolina State Museum
The South Carolina State Museum opened on October 29, 1988, in the former Columbia Mills building on Gervais Street in downtown Columbia. The mill, which started up in 1894, was the first textile mill in the world powered entirely by electricity, and it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982 before its conversion. Visitors can still spot the textile brads and rings set into the original floors that once guided the spinning threads. The museum describes itself as the state's flagship cultural institution; it has welcomed more than five million visitors since opening and holds about 1.1 million objects, artworks and specimens.
Four disciplines share the building: art, cultural history, natural history, and science and technology. Together they run from the fossil whales and Eocene sharks of the coastal plain to the state's art, communities, industries and contributions to science. In 2014 the museum added an astronomy wing with a digital-dome planetarium, a 4D theater and the Boeing Observatory, which houses a working telescope and a historic telescope collection. Changing exhibitions in 2026 include "When I See Myself, I See" and "From the Vault: SC Art from the Museum's Collection," and the museum's statewide education programs reach thousands of students in Columbia and at schools around the state.
Collections and Research Services
The museum is not a genealogical library, but its collections are open to study. An online "Search the Collection" tool lets you look for objects, photographs and artworks by place or subject before contacting a curator, and the Research Paper Collection on the website gathers peer-reviewed papers by museum staff, most of them on the state's fossil record (shark-bitten whale skeletons, Eocene sharks and rays from Aiken County, fossil amphibians from Dorchester County). The cultural history collection is the one to ask about if you are researching a South Carolina family business, mill village or regiment. For the paper trail on people and property, start with our guides to free family history research and finding out when your house was built, then contact the museum through the email link on its collections pages.
Planning Your Visit
Galleries are open Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and Sunday noon to 5:00 p.m.; the museum is closed Mondays. General admission is $13 for adults, $11 for seniors 62 and older and $10 for children 3 to 12; adding one planetarium or 4D show costs $18, $16 and $15, and two shows $21, $19 and $18. Members enter free. On the first Sunday of each month general admission drops to $1, and the museum takes part in Museums for All, offering discounted entry to visitors with SNAP, EBT, WIC or Medicaid benefits. The Boeing Observatory keeps slightly different hours (from 11:00 a.m. Tuesday through Saturday, 1:00 p.m. Sunday). A sensory-friendly Accessibility Morning runs the first Saturday of the month. Note that some third-floor galleries were closed for renovation when we checked; see scmuseum.org for current closures, show times and directions.
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