23. Gullah Sweetgrass Baskets

There are no shortcuts to excellence.

There’s something anxious, almost frantic, in the way old-fashioned crafts have come back into vogue. We’ve a generalized desire for handiwork, to attempt to sink into tasks wholly unmediated by machine or screen.

Which makes the classic sweetgrass baskets made by the Gullah communities of the South Carolina and Georgia barrier islands all the more remarkable. The baskets have endured, seemingly indifferent (are they indifferent?—it seems so, from the outside) to the winds of fashion and technological change. After Emancipation, these extraordinary objects morphed from agricultural tools to tourist art, and have been highly desirable souvenirs from Charleston and Mount Pleasant since the 1930s. But the Gullah communities have been making them for centuries, and they come from a West African tradition of basketry used in rice farming that goes back thousands of years. In short: they long predate any recent craft revival.

To make even a simple, palm-sized basket takes an hour using a sharpened spoon handle or cow rib, compressing the sweetgrass, smelling the fresh hay scent for which it’s named. The large, elaborate baskets can take weeks of intense concentration and work. The best examples are waterproof, they are so tightly woven; their forms, undulations, and patterns limited only by the imagination of the basket weaver. It’s astounding that generations of Gullah/Geechee families, through necessity and rigorous discipline, preserved a local, handmade—even, one might say, mindful—technique that could so easily have been lost. The baskets remind us that there are no easy shortcuts to excellence.

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Links:

• “History of Sweetgrass Baskets,” by Tammy Gibson, Sankofa TravelHer, August 1, 2025

• “Gullah Sweetgrass Baskets: A Timeless Craft,” by Anna Wilkes, The Gullah Society

• “Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art,” National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, 2008

• “Sweetgrass - a historically important native grass for coastal conservation,” Natural Resources Conservation Service, USDA, August 24, 2022

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This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 words on 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary. Through December 31, 2026.

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