Dorchester County Museum in the Klauber Building, St. George

The Dorchester County museum that most people mean when they ask is the small town museum inside the Klauber Building at 225 Parler Avenue in St. George, open 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on weekdays. The building went up around 1894 as a dry goods store beside the railroad, and it now holds the St. George office of the Tri-County Regional Chamber of Commerce, the county’s visitor center, and the museum under one roof.

That is the short answer. The longer one involves a Bohemian immigrant, a bank, a sawmill, and a second museum across town that opened later and is easy to confuse with the first.

Who built the Klauber Building?

The store belonged to Lee A. Klauber. He and his brother Simon left Bohemia in 1872, and Lee reached St. George in 1877, when the town was two years into its charter and growing on both sides of the South Carolina Canal and Railroad line. He married Sarah Alice Harbeson in 1879 and opened a dry goods store, Klauber’s, next to the tracks. The business did well enough that in 1895 he put up a brick building to hold it, according to the Jewish Heritage Collection’s merchant project at the College of Charleston. The SC Picture Project and the Town of St. George both date the building to about 1894. Sources differ by a year, and nobody in town seems troubled by it.

Discover South Carolina’s write-up calls the builder “Judge Leopold Klauber.” The merchant records call him Lee A. Klauber and say nothing about a judgeship. Lee is the usual short form of Leopold, so the two are almost certainly the same man, and the state tourism copy appears to have picked up a title from local memory that the family record does not confirm.

Klauber did not stop at dry goods. He served as president of the St. George Cotton Seed Oil Manufacturing Company, founded the Bank of St. George, which later became the First National Bank of St. George, and ran a sawmill outside town. The store opened a second location in Bamberg in 1902. When Lee died in 1919, his son Robert Lee Klauber took over as president of the L. A. Klauber Company. Another son, William Adolf, also worked the business. Robert died in 1954 and William in 1952.

What is in the Klauber Building today?

Three things share the restored building:

Tri-County Regional Chamber of Commerce, St. George office. The chamber covers Dorchester and its neighbors and keeps regular business hours here.
Visitor and Information Center. The state’s Heritage Corridor placed an interactive touch-screen kiosk here with information on landscapes, historic sites, restaurants and lodging along the corridor. St. George is a designated stop on the South Carolina National Heritage Corridor, and the town bills itself as the “Town of Friendly People.”
The town museum. A small collection on St. George and upper Dorchester County history, the railroad era, and the town’s founding families. The published sources describe it only as the town museum and do not inventory the collection, so expect a few rooms rather than a campus.

Hours are 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., Monday through Friday, per the SC Picture Project and the Town of St. George. There is no admission charge listed. Parler Avenue is also U.S. Highway 15, and the building sits a short walk from the town clock (0.2 miles) and the old Dorchester County Courthouse (0.4 miles). From downtown Charleston it is roughly 55 miles northwest by I-26 and U.S. 78, a little over an hour.

Is there a larger Dorchester County museum?

Yes, and it is a different institution a few blocks away. The Dorchester County Archives and History Center, which operates a Heritage Museum, was chartered in March 2014 and moved into the historic Dorchester County Courthouse at 101 Ridge Street in May 2015. By the time it planned its public opening in January 2017, its director reported more than 100,000 documents on hand, and digitizing had begun the previous June. Planned exhibits included Colonial dioramas, period uniforms, material on indigo and rice and the African American communities tied to them, the early railroad, and recreated rooms including a jail cell. Its website is dca-hc.com and the published phone number is (843) 563-0053.

The archives center matters because most of the county’s early records are gone. The courthouse burned during Sherman’s march in 1865, and what survives of pre-war Dorchester paper tends to survive in private trunks. One of them, the Moorer-Murray collection, includes a pre-Revolutionary land grant written on skin and signed by Royal Governor Thomas Broughton, wooden seal still attached.

Who runs the Dorchester County Historical Society?

The Upper Dorchester County Historical Society, based in St. George, is the group most often meant by “Dorchester County Historical Society” in local usage. Its president, Phyllis Hughes, also chaired the archives center’s board when it opened. The society owns the Koger-Murray-Carroll House on Wire Road near Grover, believed to be the oldest standing house in the county, and has published The Diary of David Gavin and Memorial Stones, a survey of inscriptions from 138 upper-county cemeteries. Its website is scdchs.com.

A search for “Dorchester County Historical Society” will also return an organization in Cambridge, Maryland. That is the other Dorchester County. It has a fine museum and nothing to do with this one.

Visiting the Klauber Building

Address: 225 Parler Avenue (U.S. 15), St. George, SC 29477
Hours: 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., Monday through Friday
Cost: No admission fee listed
Nearby: St. George Town Clock, 0.2 mi; Dorchester County Courthouse and Archives Center, 0.4 mi; St. George Rosenwald School, 0.9 mi
From Charleston: about 55 miles, a little over an hour by car

If you are working through the county map, this is the sensible first stop. The chamber staff know which churches are open, which campgrounds are in session, and which roads flood. The dispatches on this site, which are fiction, borrow St. George’s streets freely; the town’s own history is on the /history/ page, and the barbershop a few doors down turns up in /almost-here/. The Klauber Building keeps regular hours and nothing in it has ever been reported to move on its own. That is the official position of the chamber, and it is nearly always true.