FORT SUMTER — Signs that were pulled down per Trump administration directives at National Park Service sites in Charleston are back up following an order filed by a federal judge earlier this summer.
Notably, a climate change marker at the Fort Sumter National Monument has been restored. Posters above water fountains encouraging parkgoers at historic sites downtown and in Mount Pleasant to avoid using single-use plastic water bottles have been restored, too.
Local National Park Service staff directed The Post and Courier’s inquiries about the status of the signs to the agency’s national media line. Questions left there specifically about the status of the climate change sign at Fort Sumter were not immediately answered.
A newspaper reporter verified that the signage again greeted tourists at Fort Sumter as they disembarked the Spirit of Carolina to visit the Civil War-era monument on Sept. 14.
A handful of tourists funneled off the ferry on a hot afternoon and passed by the sign affixed to the walkway with little more than a passing glance, eager to see the fort known for the first shots of the Civil War.
The sign that gives visitors warning details about the looming impacts of sea level rise expected to affect the historic man-made island monument was pulled from the dock in January.
In the nine months since its initial removal, the marker has become a symbol of the administration’s efforts to pull content from national park sites across the country. Fort Sumter was referenced as “one of the country’s most environmentally endangered parks,” in a lawsuit filed by a coalition of environmental and historic preservation groups, retired park employees and advocates in a challenge against the National Park Service and the Department of Interior in February.
The Park Service and the Interior Department were ordered to re-install the signs by U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley of Massachusetts earlier this summer. She originally gave the agencies a July 3 deadline—the day before the nation’s monumental 250th anniversary. A trio of federal appellate judges later lifted that deadline but not the order to restore them.
Fort Sumter, Fort Moultrie and the Charles Pinckney Historical Site in Mount Pleasant were the among the sites where 57 pieces of material at parks across the nation were altered or removed by the Trump administration. Park staff removed the pieces to comply with President Donald Trump’s “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order issued in 2025 and a subsequent directive from Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.
Those directives called for the removal of any material that may disparage Americans, dead or alive, and to “restore Federal sites dedicated to history” to ones that "remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage," Burgum wrote in a May 2025 order.
To fall in line with those orders, park staff flagged hundreds of signs, brochures, videos, displays and exhibits across the nation. Most items dealt with Black history and climate change content, an internal database leaked in March revealed.
In some cases, materials that were flagged had reportedly been destroyed, including at least one unspecified sign in the Charleston area that staff reported was “unrelated to the beauty, abundance, and grandeur” of America’s natural landscape.
Replacing the signage also became an effort. “Sign needs to be refabricated using an exterior vendor,” staff wrote of the status of its replacement.
Kelley ordered in June that all the signage that had been removed by the administration be restored throughout the duration of the appeal and litigation. In Charleston, those orders have been followed.
The Trump administration orders did not only affect signs at parks. In the gift shop of many of those sites, various books flagged previously for review remain on the shelves, including an autobiography titled “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano,” “Smashing Obstacles & Building Legacies: Laing School and Freedmen's Schools” by Mount Pleasant native Lynette Love, and “Life on a Plantation” by Bobbie Kalman.
Reach Anna Sharpe at 843-806-6790.
