History has etched the Lowcountry landscape. Laced by creeks and river deltas, the tidewater region of the South Atlantic coast is crisscrossed by the remains of dikes, canals, and impoundments that once were rice fields. Clearly visible from the air, these earthworks required unimaginable amounts of labor on the part of enslaved Africans and yielded enormous wealth for their masters.

 

 

In various stages of dilapidation and rehabilitation, plantation Big Houses still stand at the ends of allées of majestic moss-draped live oaks. Many former plantations are open to the public as historic sites. Most have overthrown the antiquated “Gone with the Wind” school of interpretation and now feature tours and programs about the central role of Africans and their descendants in creating the culture and economy of the old Rice Kingdom. Indeed, today the Rice Kingdom has a new name. Stretching from the Lower Cape Fear in North Carolina, through South Carolina and Georgia, to northern Florida, the Gullah/Geechee Heritage Corridor exactly coincides with the rice-growing region of the ante-bellum era, and with the historic range of the Lowcountry basket.
Photos: Map of the Rice Kingdom (ie, Gullah-Geechee corridor) showing location of all sites featured in the website
Drayton Hall/ Hampton/ Hopseewee Big Houses
CawCaw rice fields and dikes

Rice and baskets are intimately related. From the late seventeenth century until the early 1900s, baskets were made for agricultural purposes wherever rice was grown. Coiled grass “fanner” baskets—fabricated from bulrush sewn with white oak splits or strips from saw palmetto stems—were essential and ubiquitous tools used to separate the chaff from the grain in the production of South Carolina’s premier staple crop. Winnowing houses, ruins of threshing mills, barns, kitchen houses, slave quarters, praise houses, and cemeteries bear witness to the lives of the people who grew the crops that made plantation owners rich and powerful.

Photos: Boone Hall & Hobcaw Barony slave streets
Mansefield plantation winnowing house
Middleton tenant house & stable yard
Hopseewee kitchen house
Rice Museum
Charleston Museum

African connections
From the founding of the British colony of Carolina in 1670 until the mandated end of the Atlantic slave trade on December 31, 1807—hundreds of thousands of Africans arrived in the port of Charleston. The majority came from two areas of Africa: about 40 percent from the rice-growing region known as the Upper Guinea Coast, and roughly the same percentage from the Congo and Angola. The word “Gullah” may derive from a corruption of the place name “Angola,” or a phonetic spelling of Gola, an ethnic group from the area now called Liberia.

Photos: Old Slave Mart (interior & exterior), Charleston
Slave Relic Museum, Walterboro
Map of Africa

While both coiled and woven winnowing baskets were made across the continent of Africa and still are, in the Carolina Lowcountry coiling prevailed. The dominance of this technique points less to the specific origins of the people who made the baskets than to choices based on the raw materials at hand. The coiled fanner, and not the woven one still in use in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and The Gambia, became the standard along the South Atlantic coast most likely because Africans who landed in Carolina saw on every side a sea of marsh grasses and sedge, including bulrush, ideal for making coiled baskets.

Photos: Senegal fanner & Angolan granary
Waccamaw fanner & either 18C work basket or Lancaster Co. double basket
Penn Center (historic photo)
Edisto Historical Society Museum

Family Farms and City Markets
At the end of the Civil War, plantation facilities lay in ruins and the labor force was freed from bondage. Able to negotiate for wages or farm on their own, many black families succeeded in purchasing ten- to fifty-acre plots. Half the acreage might be planted in cotton, the other half in foodstuffs—rice, corn, sweet potatoes, okra, sorghum, and a host of garden vegetables. Women vegetable vendors, balancing big bulrush baskets on their heads, became familiar sights on the streets of Charleston.

Photos:Welcome Beese Waccamaw fanner
Work baskets in yard and in use on Sandy Island (Brookgreen Gardens images)
Historic photo of vegetable vendor

In the early 1900s, as agricultural work baskets gradually went out of use, sweetgrass basket makers in the vicinity of Mt. Pleasant found a new and growing market. Charleston merchant Clarence W. Legerton, acting through Sam Coakley and other community agents, began to buy large quantities of certain styles of baskets to sell in his shop on King Street and wholesale through his Sea Grass Basket Company.

With the completion of the Cooper River Bridge in 1929 and the paving of Highway 17, basket makers with access to the roadside found a way to sell directly to their customers. They began hanging their work on stands along the edge of the highway, inviting travelers to stop and buy.

Photos: Historic images of Viola Jefferson’s basket stand; Betsy’s Basket Shop
Today’s highway stands, Charleston Market, Four Corners, etc.
Map showing relation of Mt. Pleasant & Charleston, with points of sale (MfAA)

 

Using sweetgrass, a finer and more flexible fiber than bulrush, basket makers produced an ever broader range of forms. To provide contrast in color, they laid longleaf pine needles on the outside of their rows, and for textural accents they tied the pine needles in knots.

Eye-catching displays of folk art on stands represent three hundred years of endurance and creativity. Since 1930, descendants of the original basket makers have operated as independent entrepreneurs, making the styles they want, charging the price they desire, and working the hours they choose in a family enterprise. Basket stands have been the secret to this success. 

Since 1970, sweetgrass habitats, basket stands, and the communities where basket makers live have come under siege. Resort development has placed the coastal zone where sweetgrass grows off limits for harvesting. Six lanes of traffic that carries tourists and new residents past basket stands now makes it difficult to pull off the road. Equally alarming, new subdivisions are encroaching on settlements of extended kin that have traditionally fostered basket making.

Photos: Kayla Snype at the blue house; cousin with Loewe’s in the background (K.Willis)
Sweetgrass Basket Makers Highway sign on Hwy. 17, with traffic roaring by
Gated communities; “sweetgrass corner” shopping mall; new stands at Town Center

[COULD USE ANOTHER SUBHEAD HERE—LOOKING TOWARD THE FUTURE]
Still, the Lowcountry basket is going strong. More people are sewing, including retirees returning to Mt. Pleasant after careers elsewhere. Basket styles and decorative embellishments are increasingly adventuresome. At home and abroad, the coiled basket is widely recognized as a pre-eminent symbol of Gullah/Geechee culture. The fanner, in particular, has become an icon, now enshrined in bronze in the middle of a fountain in Oakland Market, a new commercial mall anchored by Wal-Mart. With the passage of time, the former rice basket has become valued by blacks and whites alike—symbolic of a region, a proud heritage, and a time “gone by.” 

Photos: Winnowing Hands
Sweetgrass festival
Heritage Area hubs: Penn Center, Avery Research Center

Famous in the past chiefly as the site where the Civil War began, Charleston is beginning to be recognized for an even more significant role in American history—as the major port of entry for people of African descent. Despite the brutal and tragic experience of enslavement, African Americans transformed the economic, social, spiritual, and artistic life of the region. In the twenty-first century, the finely crafted coiled basket has come to symbolize the creativity and skills of traditional artists. Generation after generation of Carolinians have sewn native plant fibers into useful and beautiful vessels—objects that can be seen simultaneously as functional containers, works of art, commodities, collectibles, and receptacles of memory. As an artifact that represents the history of Africans in America and an icon of Gullah/Geechee culture, the coiled grass basket has pride of place.