Established in 1850 as part of the rural cemetery movement that sought to create park-like burial grounds outside the crowded city, Magnolia Cemetery opens its gates to you here. Designed with winding paths, ornamental ponds, and graceful live oaks, Magnolia was conceived as a place for contemplation as much as for burial, and it remains one of the most beautiful cemeteries in the American South. The cemetery contains the graves of thousands of Charlestonians across every era of the city's history, but several sites are particularly significant.
The Confederate section holds more than 1,700 Confederate soldiers, including many who died in Union prisoner-of-war camps and whose bodies were returned here after the war. Among the most extraordinary graves is that of the crew of the H.L. Hunley, the Confederate submarine that on February 17, 1864, became the first submarine in history to sink an enemy warship — and then disappeared, not to be recovered until 2000. The crew was interred here in 2004 after years of forensic study.
Walking Magnolia Cemetery is walking through Charleston's full social history — the planters and the shopkeepers, the soldiers and the civilians, the names that appear in history books and the names that do not. The city of the dead holds much of what the living city prefers to leave unspoken.