By Cari L. Goetcheus, Assistant Professor, Clemson University, Clemson, SC
Since the early 1800s enslaved Africans and their descendants have practiced the tradition of crafting coiled baskets of natural materials they collected along the coast of the southeastern United States. Originally used to winnow rice grains harvested on plantations, by the early 1900s the baskets were sold to an increasing number of tourists visiting South Carolina. Today, the creation and sale of sweetgrass baskets not only continues a cultural tradition brought from Africa two centuries ago, but provides a living wage for numerous families throughout Charleston County.
1938 photograph of Viola Johnson taken by Bluford Muir while he was scouting land that became the Francis Marion National Forest along the coast in South Carolina. (Photo courtesy of the Francis Marion National Forest, USDA)
Recognized as a vital historical and cultural tradition, over the past thirty years numerous researchers have investigated topics ranging from the African origins of the basket-making craft and its transfer to the South Atlantic coast to the political, social, and economic impacts of suburban development on basket makers and their communities. This study of ten undocumented historic African-American communities in which Low Country basket makers live(d), work(ed) and sell (sold) their wares was undertaken to identify buildings, structures, and sites as well as natural environments of historic significance to communities associated with basket-making.
The communities began as informal hamlets at crossroads, remnant Freedman’s communities on former plantations, or platted land subdivisions. The once predominant rural practice of gathering and collecting natural resources for basket making, today takes place within and in contrast to a rapidly urbanizing greater Mt. Pleasant area. While this unique cultural tradition is one of the primary draws for newcomers to the region as it occurs nowhere else in the United States, concurrent rapidly-paced road and housing developments virtually overwhelm the physical spaces of the communities where these basket makers reside. The interplay of rampant suburban development in a desirable 2nd home area, a lack of groundtruthed data, and near exclusion from area planning processes has left these communities threatened by development and the ecological, social and cultural landscape transformations that have accompanied this process.
From the research of Cari Goetcheus (Clemson University) and Dr. Patrick Hurley (Ursinus University), 2009
A combination of accepted and emerging research methods used within the fields of landscape preservation and geography, including participatory mapping techniques that integrate qualitative data with spatially explicit analysis, are used to provide the context for the contemporary built environment of the communities. Prior to undertaking any data collection, we organized and met with leaders as well as a number of elders from all of the communities along an approximately 20 mile corridor. During our initial meetings, we recruited informants to participate in oral histories and/or community tours that provided a broad understanding of community history, resident-defined boundaries, and various historic and current natural and cultural resources significant in each community. Further, we undertook both cultural resource and natural resource surveys for approximately 3000 individual properties in all the communities, mapping significant historic resources, traditional ecological habitat collection areas and basketstand locations and operations along key roadways. Simultaneous to the community interviews, tours and survey work, both archival repository research and development of a GIS database occurred. The GIS database contains roads, parcel data, water lines, municipality-defined Sweetgrass overlay district boundaries, scanned and georectified historic aerial photos ranging from 1938 to 2006, and GPS points collected during the community tours. All of this data has facilitated analyses within the context of land-use and landcover change patterns, providing the opportunity to study the history of land use, local power relationships, past and present aspects of racism and gender dynamics, and the trajectories of ecological and social change at a turning point for basket makers and their environs.
Do landscape architects, architects, planners and designers have an ecological, social and cultural responsibility to design for such “ethnographic ruinscapes” as they devolve and perhaps have a rebirth?
Preliminary findings indicate two arenas in which design professionals can positively impact these ethnographic ruinscapes: 1) through the reinforcement and creation of physical and regulatory linkages that allow Non Timber Forest Products (NTFPs) to continue to be foraged and collected fostering sustainability in the everyday lives of urban, suburban, and rural peoples; and 2) through analysis of historic community land development patterns that can guide proposed land development actions to respect and put forth contextually sensitive design solutions that balance cultural and natural resource conservation along with economic development pressures.
Prior to suburbanization, many African American communities in Mt. Pleasant were fairly isolated and surrounded by vast agricultural fields and woodlands. Historically, basket-makers harvested the materials (primarily sweetgrass) needed for their culturally important art form from accessible, rural, and privately held tracts of land in close proximity to their communities, in community woodlands—de facto resource commons—and along agricultural fringes. Today, development pressures and changes in resident interpretation of property rights have decreased access to basket-making resources. The sweetgrass (M. filipes) basket-making tradition is one of several NTFPs that link the SC Lowcountry to western Africa, provides income, and offers a means of artistic expression. The study findings highlight the forced migration of Africans to North America and the resulting knowledge transfer and uses applied to local plants. Today, a new migration pattern—associated with the area’s natural amenities—is changing the relationship between land ownership, use, and management and plant distribution and use. Sweetgrass distribution in pre-urbanized habitats has been reduced, but the plant has reappeared in gardens cultivated by basket-makers and in landscaping for private yards and subdivision community commons. Further, in moving from pre-urbanized habitats to suburban spaces, NTFP sweetgrass has been biologically transformed through landscaping practices. Finally, the research highlights key ways that changing migration patterns can alter interactions among the knowledge systems, gathering and management techniques, and property regimes associated with particular plants. This study illustrates a new way of re-imagining suburban landscapes as potential sites of natural resource production for NTFPs through the efforts by private citizens and local activists, not just passive sites of passive consumption.
In considering emerging tools and practices from planning and design literature, such as conservation subdivision design, greenbelts and greenways, linked landscapes, transects and form-based codes, all of which have been advocated as important practices for conserving natural resources and community character at both local and regional scales, we begin to see an approach that can assist the conservation of these communities via context sensitive land development. Currently these communities are simultaneously perceived as: cultural landscapes in peril of becoming ruins; "ruins" of a distinctive but threatened/dying cultural tradition; and landscape ruins that represent a history of neglected investment as a result of racism and for that reason perhaps should not be conserved. Linked by extended family, church, school and tradition, the data suggests significant historic and natural community resources are threatened, yet the analysis also provides clues of ways in which the communities, and the traditions that sustain them, could be regenerated via planning and conservation design processes that exist and/or must be created. Through detailed analysis (plan, elevation, section, etc.) of historic community land development patterns, and extrapolation of extant design parameters, it is possible to craft specific guides for proposed land development that reflects and respects existing patterns and cultural traditions. The combination of linking NTFP livelihoods and community character-defined development guidelines affords a context-sensitive design solution that begins to balance cultural tradition, natural resource conservation and economic development pressures.