HCF Launches Free Mobile App Featuring House Museum Audio Guides and a Charleston City Guide
Alison and Bruce Van Patter of Lewisburg, PA were the initial app users at the Aiken-Rhett House. We're delighted to report that they both loved the new audio guide!
Historic Charleston Foundation (HCF) has launched a free mobile app that offers self-guided audio and visual tours of its popular historic house museums, the Aiken-Rhett House and the Nathaniel Russell House. Each tour lasts about 45 minutes, with “extras” available for those wishing to spend additional time learning more intimate details of the house museum and its collections and of those who lived and labored on the site. Also included in the app is a comprehensive city guide that tells the story of Charleston through the lens of preservation.“We are happy to offer guests to the house museums the opportunity to enrich their experience through this uniquely engaging new tour,” said Winslow Hastie, President & CEO of Historic Charleston Foundation. “For some time, we’ve been working on an initiative to tell everyone’s history, and we believe the new app helps to advance that initiative. Our house museum narratives have evolved into a more complete story of not only the families who owned the properties, but also the stories of the enslaved who lived and labored there.”The new app also features a comprehensive tour of Charleston, told through the preservation lens. With over 300 text stops and 30 audio stops, the guide covers Charleston from the Battery to Magnolia Cemetery. “The app features stories of Charleston’s more recent history, as well as its African American history, women’s history, immigrant history, LGBTQ history, and working-class history that remain largely untold,” said Northup. “Such gaps not only speak volumes about the historic biases of our city, but also how much work we have yet to do in order to progress. As a citywide preservation organization, we realized that we had a unique opportunity to interpret these overlooked and forgotten narratives through the Historic Charleston Foundation app, and thus to help shape the narrative of our city moving forward.”The Historic Charleston Foundation app is available from the App Store or click here.