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← STORIED OBJECTS / Sweetgrass Baskets
A vertical stack of three coiled baskets with lids made from sweetgrass and pine needles ranging in shades from blond to dark brown and stacked largest on the bottom to smaller on top.

Photo by Zvonimir Bebek, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives

Image Description A vertical stack of three coiled baskets with lids made from sweetgrass and pine needles, ranging in shades from blond to dark brown. The combination of color shades and the vertical and horizontal orientations of the sweetgrass and binding strips create a small checkerboard-like pattern in each basket. The baskets decrease in size from bottom to top, and the lid of the top basket is topped with a tightly coiled knob-like handle. The bottom basket has two thin, looped handles which jut out horizontally from either side of the basket.

Sweetgrass Baskets

Traditions can be powerful enough to link oceans. These coiled baskets created by African American basket sewers from the Low Country of South Carolina are part of a deep and unbroken connection to African heritage that dates from the 1700s.

Born from West African agricultural expertise

Experienced African farmers enslaved and forced to work in American plantations brought the tradition of coiled sweetgrass basket making to the United States as part of a broader repertoire of farming knowledge and expertise. Baskets were originally created from locally available materials such as bulrush, palmetto, and sweetgrass to winnow rice, hold food, and transport cotton. With diminishing use of baskets in farming, basket sewers in South Carolina continued to make and use baskets for their homes, and eventually to offer them for sale to tourists at outdoor markets. In the 1920s, heritage craft schools such as Penn Center taught these traditional arts as a valuable occupational skill.

National Heritage Fellow Mary Jackson demonstrated the art of Low Country basket sewing at the 1996 Folklife Festival’s American South program. The baskets in the Center’s collection were made for sale in the Festival Marketplace by Marguerite S. Middleton, another well-known basket sewer. Supporting traditional artists by marketing and selling their work was an early hallmark of the Folklife Festival. The 1976 program on the African Diaspora, in fact, was one of the first places sweetgrass baskets were available for purchase outside of the South. At the time, most of the baskets were sold from outdoor stalls along Route 17 in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina.

  • Detail of one of Marguerite Middleton’s baskets.
    Photo by Zvonimir Bebek, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives

As recognition of the tradition’s connections to African heritage and its role in American history has grown, so has the demand for the baskets and their growth into an art form. In a move to protect the source of their weaving materials, basket makers formed the Mount Pleasant Sweetgrass Basketmakers Association to protect the wild sweetgrass. The members work together to keep the tradition alive, advocate for fair prices, and maintain high standards of African American basket making.

These skills are passed on in African American families throughout the Low Country of South Carolina, and the baskets have been become a source of both income and creative expression. They are forceful reminders of an enduring African American history and heritage.

—Diana Baird N’Diaye, curator
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