South Carolina

Named for a king

Carolina is built on Carolus, the Latin form of Charles. King Charles I used the name in his 1629 grant of the region to his attorney general, Sir Robert Heath, and Charles II reissued the territory to eight Lords Proprietors in 1663. Charles Town, the colony’s first settlement, was founded in 1670 and moved to its peninsula by 1680. The colony was later split, and in 1710 the proprietors gave the northern part its own governor; the southern part became South Carolina.

The palmetto fort

South Carolina’s nickname comes from a battle of the Revolution. On June 28, 1776, a British fleet attacked a fort on Sullivan’s Island built of palmetto logs. The spongy logs absorbed the cannonballs, and the fort held. Over it flew a blue flag with a white crescent, made for Colonel William Moultrie’s troops; when its staff was shot away, Sergeant William Jasper rescued it. That flag, with a palmetto added in 1861, is today’s state flag.

The eighth state

A state convention meeting in Charleston ratified the US Constitution on May 23, 1788, making South Carolina the eighth state. The state’s two mottoes, both on the Great Seal of 1776, are Dum spiro spero, “While I breathe, I hope,” and Animis opibusque parati, “Prepared in mind and resources.”

A capital in the middle

Charleston was the seat of government from colonial times, but the upcountry wanted a capital closer to it. In 1786 the General Assembly voted to move to a central site and laid out a new city near the geographic center of the state, named Columbia for Christopher Columbus. Lowcountry politicians resisted, and the legislature did not hold its first session there until 1790. The State House, begun in the 1850s, still bears the marks of Union shells fired at it in February 1865 and was not finished until 1903. The capital page tells the story.

Wrens, jessamine and palmettos

South Carolina has 59 official state symbols, one of the longest lists of any state. The Carolina wren is the state bird, the yellow jessamine, one of the first flowers of spring, the state flower, and the sabal palmetto the state tree. The list reflects the state’s culture and coast: the shag as state dance and beach music as its popular music, the sweetgrass basket, the Boykin spaniel, the loggerhead sea turtle, boiled peanuts, barbecue as the state picnic cuisine and Porgy and Bess, set in Charleston, as the state opera. See them all on the South Carolina symbols page.

Land and people

South Carolina covers 32,020 square miles, 40th among the states, and had about 5.57 million residents in 2025, 23rd in the country and up nearly 9 percent from 2020, the third-fastest growth of any state after Idaho and Florida. It borders North Carolina and Georgia and faces the Atlantic. Charleston, with about 159,000 people, is the largest city, followed by Columbia, North Charleston, Mount Pleasant and Rock Hill.