Sweetgrass Baskets: A Highway Lined With Looms

By Ines Keane

There is no loom. The title is a small lie, and we would rather say so at the start. A sweetgrass basket is coiled by hand around a bundle of grass, with a tool as plain as a filed-down spoon.

The stands, though, do line a road.

Where the road is

The Experience Mount Pleasant website says baskets are sold at roadside stands on what is now called the Sweetgrass Basket Makers Highway, a stretch of U.S. Highway 17 in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. A blog we found says that the stretch is about seven miles. It says the shift to tourist sales followed the opening of the Grace Bridge in 1929. Mount Pleasant Magazine says roadside selling began around 1931, when Highway 17 was first paved. The years differ by two, so we say “around 1930.”

The magazine also says the sweetgrass basket was named South Carolina’s official state craft in 2006, and that a portion of Highway 17 was named for the makers in the same year. The Post and Courier’s 2024 reporting counts about 55 stands from Mount Pleasant to Georgetown. In 2011 the magazine had counted about 60 on the Mount Pleasant stretch. These are different counts of different stretches, so they do not show a decline by themselves.

Where the craft comes from

The Experience Mount Pleasant site says the tradition was passed down from the 1700s and that it began with enslaved West Africans, who brought the tradition of weaving baskets from grass. It calls it one of the oldest West African art forms in America. That is a promotional source, and the claim is large, so we attribute it. The Post and Courier says the art form developed during slavery at places such as Boone Hall Plantation, where the enslaved wove baskets as agricultural tools for seed storage and rice winnowing. The Experience Mount Pleasant site agrees that baskets began as tools for rice production before becoming decorative.

A personal blog goes further and says the skills came from enslaved people from Sierra Leone. We found no second source for that, and it is a single blog, so we are not putting it forward as fact.

What the baskets are made of

The sources agree on a few materials. The pale coils are sweetgrass. The Experience Mount Pleasant site says it is woven alongside palmetto fronds and bulrush. The Post and Courier says the baskets combine sweetgrass for the pale coils with pine needles for the dark pattern. The blog adds longleaf pine needles and says the tools are filed-down forks and spoons used to shape the grass into coils.

The Post and Courier says designs are passed down without written patterns. The Experience Mount Pleasant site says the knowledge goes from mother to daughter through the Gullah community. Mount Pleasant lies within the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, which Mount Pleasant Magazine says runs from Wilmington, North Carolina to St. Augustine, Florida. Congress designated it a National Heritage Area in 2006.

The grass itself

The blog names the plant as Muhlenbergia filipes, with pinkish-purple plumes in autumn. It says harvesters pull the grass from the roots, dry it in the sun and cut it into sheaves for weavers to prepare. It also says access to fields is limited by gated communities.

The Post and Courier gives the same worry in other words. It says Charleston’s building boom is consuming the fields, marshes and wetlands where sweetgrass once grew, and that weavers cannot substitute another material. Our reading: a craft that depends on one plant is exposed to the land around it, and the land is changing. We have not found measured figures for the supply, and none are claimed here.

The road changes

Mount Pleasant Magazine reports that a widening of Highway 17 began in April 2011, with funding from the town, county and federal government. Some stands were moved during construction and others were set back from the roadway. It also says the town council passed an ordinance in October 2011 creating a Sweetgrass Basket Overlay District along the highway, which gives transportation impact fee credits to businesses that build wooden stands with designated parking. We have not checked whether the rule is still in force today.

A heat note

The Post and Courier’s 2024 reporting says July of that year was the warmest on record and that temperatures made working at outdoor stands dangerous. It is a short remark in a longer story, and it points at the same pattern. The work is outdoors, and the road is hot.

Where else to see them

The Experience Mount Pleasant site lists the Sweetgrass Cultural Arts Pavilion at Memorial Waterfront Park and an annual festival there. The Post and Courier says the pavilion began hosting an annual summer festival in 2004, and that sweetgrass baskets are in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art. We have not checked current festival dates.

What a basket carries

Hold one and you are holding a tool that turned into an object. Baskets that began as tools for rice work are now objects on a table. The stands date to around 1930, by the magazine’s account, and the official names to 2006. The basket’s working life as a tool is older than either.

How to look at one

The materials are a short checklist. Look for the pale coils, which the Post and Courier says are sweetgrass, and for the dark band, which it says is pine needle. Look at how the coils are stitched together. Ask what else is in the basket: the sources name bulrush and palmetto. Ask where the grass came from, since the supply is the live question. We have not checked what any individual stand will say in reply.

Roam first. Shop later.

Basket makers and weavers can find out what’s involved at /sell-with-sephari/