Sweetgrass Baskets in the Lowcountry

Though the traditions are ancient, sweetgrass baskets are a recent development in our Sea Islander communities -- as we learn in Dale Rosengarten’s book, Row Upon Row: Sea Grass Baskets of the South Carolina Lowcountry.

Coiled, handmade baskets of sweetgrass (sewn with longleaf pine needles and strips of palmetto leaf) command good prices at roadside stands or on the City Market and streets of Charleston. Enslaved people had been making coiled baskets (an African technique different from the European weave) since the late 1600s, and the Sea Island baskets are related to those of Angola, Senegambia, and the Congo.

The most common material used to be black rush (a marsh grass) bound with strips of white oak or saw palmetto stem. Sweetgrass became popular only at the beginning of the twentieth century, when a black community in Mount Pleasant (across the Cooper River from Charleston) began making "show baskets" from the material. These baskets provided much-needed income in the aftermath of hurricanes and boll weevil infestation. Tourists bought so many baskets that sweetgrass won out over more traditional varieties.

Sweetgrass basket purchased in the Charleston Market in the 1970s (By courtesy of Virginia Adams) Photo by Dennis Adams

"Sweetgrass ( Muhlenbergia filipes) … is a long-stemmed plant that grows in tufts behind the second dune line from the ocaean or along the boundaries between marsh and woods," wrote Rosengarten. "Here, salt-tolerant trees and shrubs have pinned down the sand and stopped it from shifting, creating a stable barrier from tidal flooding." Sweetgrass is "prized" by the Mount Pleasant sewer system for its flood-controlling qualities.

On St. Helena Island , however, rush work baskets continued into the first half of the twentieth century. Though the Penn School offered training in "Native Island Basketry" for fifty years, today black rush is used mainly to strengthen and decorate certain types of sweetgrass baskets.

The early rice industry in the Lowcountry owed its success to a particular type of black rush basket, the "fanner". Slaves "fanned" threshed rice into the air from the baskets to let the wind separate the chaff. On the plantations, the male slaves wove fences, granaries, traps, and heavy field baskets. It was up to the women to make the smaller, fancier baskets for the households.

Avery Research Center, College of Charleston, is home to a massive sweet-grass basket collection.  The Lowcountry Digital Library makes it possible to view forty-two images of baskets from Avery's archives online using the following link: http://bit.ly/Tsnc7x.

 

African Origins

Margaret Casey, in The Encyclopedia of Africa South of the Sahara, describes two basic methods of basketry and mat making used on the content of Africa well before slaves came to America. The first of the Old-World methods is plaiting, where braids of wood strips, reeds, grasses or roots are twined or twilled into many different patterns. But it is from the second method that our local sweetgrass baskets descend: "sewn basketry, often called coil-sewn, involves a thin continuous foundation, usually of grass, which is sewn spirally on itself, using split palm leaf, raffia, or similar fiber. Some baskets are so tightly sewn that they can be used for containers of liquid, being watertight when the fibers have swelled. Other sewn basketry may have the foundation elements plaited or lying in parallel rows , sewn together and then sewn to the rest of the basket."

In Africa, a basket can be more than just a basket. Other daily uses include roof and wall framework, fish and animal traps, beer strainers, flour sifters, clothing and hats (including ceremonial headdresses and crowns), and dance masks.

The 1924 Penn Center annual report lists the selection and prices of the "St. Helena baskets" of the time. The 1924 price appears first for each item, followed by the estimated present-day (2005) value in parentheses:

St. Helena Baskets:
Types and Prices (1924)