Week 13 – CULTURE – The Weave of History: From Africa to Harrington

Basketry is one of the oldest crafts of African origin in America. Enslaved workers, brought from Africa’s West Coast to cultivate rice and Sea Island cotton, preserved native traditions within their plantation communities. The descendants of these Africans, known as the Gullah in South Carolina and the Geechee in Georgia, continued practicing ancestral crafts such as basket making. The woven forms were originally made forpractical purposes: winnowing rice, carrying clothing, cradling infants, and storing and sorting foods. Practical designs were later altered to reflect European influences and increase their marketability.

Charles Wilson, who lived in the Harrington Community on St. Simons Island, was well known for his basket making skills. According to local historian Margaret Davis Cater, writing in the 1950s, Wilson was the “last of the old basket makers to ply his trade in this area.” Charles selected his materials with great care. He used the leaf stems of the cabbage palmetto, or sabal palm, turning the outer surface of the stem to the outside to give the basket a polished finish.

The craftsmanship exhibited by Wilson and other basket makers on St. Simons made their creations popular souvenirs for tourists. In More Fun Than Heaven, an account of her childhood vacations spent at the Waycross Colony near the St. Simons Lighthouse, Frances Peabody McKay remembers purchasing baskets from one such artisan. She and her friends and family traveled by wagon into the interior of the island, “about half way to Ft. Frederica,” where their driver took them to a palmetto thicket. Frances remembers: “Then we saw, rising just above the palmettos, a tin roof of sorts. The shack under it was woven palmetto mats tacked to pine poles. Sitting in front of it was a wrinkle-faced black man with a palmetto hat on his head. His gnarled hands were working steadily with the palm fronds from which he was creating a large basket … He found the palmetto leaves similar to the materials his ancestors had woven baskets from for generations in Africa.”

Although the man had no completed baskets to sell to Frances and her family, he asked Frances’s mother to draw him a picture of the basket she wanted. He asked the group to return in a week, when he produced a basket to Mrs. Peabody’s exact specifications. He sold it to her for fifty cents, despite her insistence that it must be worth more. Frances says that her mother returned to this specific basket maker for several years before she lost track of him, and also sent several of her friends to him to purchase baskets.