The Charleston Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, founded on January 12, 1773, is widely recognized as the oldest museum in the United States. Open to the public since 1824, it holds collections in local and natural history, decorative arts, and archives, and now occupies a building completed in 1980 after an earlier one burned. Its history includes Laura Bragg’s 1920 appointment as the first woman to lead a publicly funded art museum in America. The institution also operates the Heyward-Washington House, the Joseph Manigault House, and the Dill Sanctuary, and it has undertaken repatriation of Native American remains in its collection.