Patriots Point and the USS Yorktown

The USS Yorktown was commissioned in 1943 and quickly earned the nickname the Fighting Lady. She was actually the second carrier to bear the name, built to replace an earlier Yorktown lost at the Battle of Midway, and she carried her namesake proudly through the island campaigns that pushed across the Pacific in the closing years of the war. Her aircraft flew strike after strike, and she earned a chest of battle honors.

After the Second World War she was modernized and served on into the Cold War, seeing duty during the Vietnam War and playing a role in the space program when she recovered the Apollo 8 crew and capsule from the ocean in 1968. She was retired in 1970 and, rather than being scrapped, was brought to Charleston to open Patriots Point in 1976. She is now a National Historic Landmark, one of the few surviving carriers of her era open to the public.

A visit to the Yorktown is a hands-on plunge into a floating city of steel. Up on the flight deck, vintage aircraft sit chocked and chained where planes once launched and landed, and you can look down the long runway that once bristled with activity. The island superstructure holds the bridge and command spaces, and self-guided tour routes lead down through the hangar bay and into the warren of compartments below.

Down in the belly of the ship you find the mess decks, the sick bay, the engine rooms, the sailors' bunks stacked three and four high, and the ready rooms where pilots waited to fly. The passageways are narrow and the ladders steep, and moving through them gives you an honest feel for how thousands of men lived and worked packed inside a single hull. Aircraft exhibits and displays fill the hangar deck, tracing naval aviation across the twentieth century.

Tied up beside the carrier is the destroyer USS Laffey, sometimes called the ship that would not die. Off Okinawa in 1945 she was struck by a swarm of kamikazes and bombs in a single furious hour and stayed afloat, a survival story that makes walking her decks especially moving. The submarine USS Clamagore, a Cold War diesel-electric boat, lets visitors experience the extreme tight quarters of undersea service.

Ashore, the museum grounds hold a recreated Vietnam naval support base with bunkers and patrol boats, along with a Medal of Honor museum that tells the stories of the nation's highest award for valor. Together the ships and exhibits make Patriots Point one of the largest naval museums in the country, and a powerful place to reckon with the human cost and courage behind the machinery of war.

Part of the pleasure of Patriots Point is simply where it sits. From the flight deck the whole sweep of Charleston Harbor opens up, with the historic peninsula and its church spires across the water, Fort Sumter out in the channel where the Civil War began, and the graceful cables of the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge soaring overhead. Container ships and shrimp boats slide past on the tide.

Dolphins often surface in the harbor around the piers, and shorebirds work the mudflats at low water. The site is exposed to sun and sea breeze, warm and bright in summer and pleasantly mild in the cooler months. It pairs naturally with a broader Charleston trip, whether you take the water taxi across to the peninsula or drive the short way over the bridge into the heart of the old city.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.