Cemetery Walking

Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, S.C.

I've brought you here before, I'll drag you here again and you will like it. Magnolia Cemetery is one of my favorite places to walk and I revisit familiar scenes each time.

Magnolia Cemetery, One of Charleston's Best Kept Secrets: The best kept secret in Charleston!  The artistry of the grave stones, quiet southern gentility, pride, privilege and sacrifice are all around.  Magnolia Cemetery is the final resting place for Planters, Politicians, military leaders, bootleggers, whorehouse madams - you name it, anybody from the last 150 years of Charleston's history.

Buried at Magnolia are 2,200 Civil War veterans (including the famous crew of the Confederate submarine Hunley) - a great percentage of the war's total casualties that includes five Confederate generals and 14 signers of the Ordinance of Secession.  The Confederate connection probably attracts the most people, because there are so many buried here from that era.  A special Confederate section contains more than 1,700 graves of the known and unknown. One reads, simply, "Unknown, Three Bodies, Fort Sumter." Here, too, are 84 bodies of South Carolinians who fell at Gettysburg and were re-interred at Magnolia.