Founded in 1729, Georgetown is South Carolina’s third oldest city and was named for George, Prince of Wales, who later became King George II. Settled by migrating families from Charleston, its colonial residents made their livelihood as traders, merchants, and planters. British bounties for indigo, prized in Europe as a clothing dye, helped create an elite class of plantation owners and merchants who formed the Winyah Indigo Society, which in 1755 established one of the first free schools in America. The Revolutionary War ended the indigo trade with England but saw the rise of local patriots including Thomas Lynch, Jr., a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and Frances Marion, the “Swamp Fox.” After the war, local planters made fortunes cultivating rice, known as Carolina Gold, in the area’s low-lying river estuaries, ushering in an era of enormous wealth, aristocracy, and plantations. Although much of the ravages of the War Between the States spared the city, the social, political, and economic upheaval that followed ultimately caused the rice culture to collapse, as most plantations were doomed without slave labor to cultivate the crop. Severe hurricanes in the late 1800s delivered the final blow. Georgetown’s Downtown Historic District contains more than 50 historic homes, buildings, and sites dating back to 1737, and the Rice Museum on Front Street preserves a glimpse of this chapter in the city’s history.