McKissick Museum

The McKissick Museum is located on the University of South Carolina campus, right at the top of the historic horseshoe. The McKissick is a free museum featuring cultural and natural history. Most of the cultural history is local southern Carolinas folk history, and they also have a Folklife Cultural Center on the ground floor.

It’s not a big museum, by any means, but it was a nice rainy day activity and a chance to walk around the historic part of the UofSC campus.

Getting There

While it is a free museum, you have to get a timed ticket beforehand to limit visitors during Covid. I think they only allow 8 people at a time. During my visit, I was the only person there. Guided tours are also available if you call and ask.

You can park at the end of the horseshoe on College or Sumpter and walk in and out through the grounds. I parked closer, at the intersection of Pendelton and Bull. There is a small visitor’s lot right there that I may have been able to park in, but I thought it might be for visiting students only. It was just a few more steps to park on the street.

The North Entrance, the one on that side, is the one you want to enter. In the middle of that hallway is where you “check in” to see the museum and get any instructions. I walked around to the front door and the student at the registration desk told me to go downstairs. Then the student downstairs told me to go to the second floor, so I found it a little confusing at first! It turns out, that ground floor desk is for the museum, but most of the collection is on the 2nd and 3rd floors. I actually found the sign in the elevator to be the most helpful in getting around. (The front door desk is for the visitor’s center, housed on the main floor.)

Child’s Play: Toy Exhibit

Once I made it to the 2nd floor, there was clear signage to two galleries, one at each end of the hall. The first one is an exhibit on toys and play, featuring many toys I had growing up!

Piece by Piece: Quilts

At the other end of the hall is a folk life exhibit. There are some pretty sweetgrass baskets in the main hall. Further down, there is a collection of recording devices used to collect songs and stories from rural life that I thought was cool. Inside the gallery, there are quilts with tons of different patterns. It’s very well presented.

Natural Collection

On the third floor, you’ll find a sizeable and extremely varied natural history collection. There are cases of minerals, including ones that glow! There are taxidermied animals, like a lion, a boar…and an alligator on the ceiling. You can find lots of shells and some really cool fossils in the following rooms.

I think this collection is the University’s original, collected before the Civil War, then partially destroyed when the college was taken over as a hospital. I may have some of those details wrong, but I do remember that the large collection was thrown out into the horseshoe at one point and a lot of carefully-made labels were lost.

Main Floor Gallery

Back down on the main floor is mostly the UofSC Visitor Center. There’s a mockup of a dorm room, meeting rooms for tours, etc. In one alcove, there is a cross-section of the museum’s whole collection in extra-nice display cases. There are pieces from the natural collection, bits of folk art, plus a case full of Gamecock memorabilia. In the center is the University’s symbolic mace and shield/badge, used on ceremonial occasions.

The whole thing took me maybe 45 minutes to tour, probably not even that. It’s not a destination attraction, but it is something interesting to do on a rainy day. And if it’s not raining, it’s a nice chance to walk around the historic campus.