Charles Towne Landing Brochure Sheet
Need information on Charles Towne Landing in one handy sheet? Download and print the Charles Towne Landing State Historic Site brochure sheet and take it along with you on your visit to the park.
Legare-Waring House and Founders Hall
We have two beautiful spaces available for rental at Charles Towne Landing. For more information on renting, please visit the Legare-Waring House site or the Founders Hall site.
2010 Monthly Events
To see what's going on each month at Charles Towne Landing, download our 2010 Events Calendar.
Preview Video
Want a taste of what's in store for you at Charles Towne Landing? Check out our preview video of the park.
New Adventure for Charles Towne Landing State Historic Site
CHARLESTON – The S.C. State Park Service is looking for a new Adventure.
That’s the name of the full-size replica 17th-century trading ship that sat at a dock at Charles Towne Landing State Historic Site for more than 30 years before the elements forced its retirement and demolition.
The S.C. Department of Parks, Recreation & Tourism (the Park Service’s parent agency) and the Materials Management Office of the State Budget & Control Board have issued a request for proposals from shipwrights to build a new Adventure off-site.
The all-new ship is expected to be completed by November 2008.
“This contract, utilizing a professional shipwright working in a fully equipped shipyard, will ensure that the work is done to the highest standards, with the greatest degree of accuracy, in the timeliest manner,” says Phil Gaines, director of the State Park Service.
“This approach also will allow us to incorporate the current, partially constructed replica Adventure as a permanent exhibit of 17th-century shipbuilding techniques, designed to give the visitor a view of how large the ship is out of the water, and the complexities required to build wooden ships by hand more than 300 years ago,” Gaines says.
The original Adventure, a 65-foot sailing ketch, was built in 1969 for the South Carolina Tricentennial Commission. It quickly became one of the most popular attractions at the park, which protects and interprets the site off the Ashley River where a group of English settlers and African slaves landed in 1670 after a stormy sail from Barbados.
The new ship is part of a several-year project that has seen an extensive makeover of the 664-acre historic site, which now includes a new visitors center and museum, history trail, ongoing archaeological digs, a palisade area, crop garden and replica indentured servants’ quarters.
The name “Adventure” was chosen because records show that several vessels of that name did trade in and out of Charles Towne in those first years. The ketch design was chosen because Lord Ashley Cooper, a leader of the Lords Proprietors of the Carolina Colony in London, was known to have owned a large ketch in the 1670s.
“In modern terms the Adventure could be compared to a midsized delivery truck,” says Patrick Cook, manager of history and education at CTL. “While such ships were typically used for trips along the coast and to the West Indies, they did make trans-Atlantic crossings, too.”
Birthday Party Packages
Charles Towne Landing now offers cool, new packages for your next birthday party! Click here for more information.
Audio Tour Added to Learning Lineup at Charles Towne Landing
Visitors to newly renovated Charles Towne Landing State Historic Site can now hear history come alive as well as see it.
The park has installed an audio tour system on its history trail to help visitors better understand the 665-acre site where the first permanent European settlement in South Carolina was established in 1670 on a secluded, marshy point just off what is now the Ashley River.
The mile-and-a-half trail goes from the new visitors center to Albemarle Point on Old Towne Creek and past the Legare-Waring House, the home of Ferdinanda Legare-Waring, the pioneering horticulturist and preservationist who sold the property to the state to create the park that opened in 1970 to mark South Carolina’s tricentennial.
There now are 22 marked stops on the trail where visitors who rent the MP3 players can hear detailed accounts of what they’re seeing, such as archaeological digs, reconstructed palisade walls, full-size, working replica cannons, a trial crop garden and the sailing ship Adventure.
The audio players rent for $5 and are available during regular park hours of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. The play time for the recordings total about 40 minutes and the tour generally takes about 90 minutes.
Charles Towne Landing State Historic Site is undergoing a $19 million renovation also highlighted by a 12-room museum inside the visitors center that tells how the settlers, their slaves and servants and local Native Americans came together to create a community that would become a major port city and the birthplace of the plantation system of the American South.
The park also includes Animal Forest, a naturalistic zoo that’s home to animals the settlers would have encountered, including bears, otters, pumas and bison. Programs that include cannon and musket firings and other living history demonstrations are regularly scheduled.