Sweetgrass Basket Makers Highway (US-17 North basket stands)

Individually owned, family-run roadside stands where Gullah Geechee artisans sew and sell coiled sweetgrass baskets. Each stand is its own independent business run by a weaver or weaving family; there is no central operator, no shared hours, and no single phone number or website. Stands open at the owner's discretion, generally daylight hours, weather-dependent, and many are unattended when the family is not there. Payment practices vary by stand; ask the weaver directly. The craft is coiled basketry: bundles of sweetgrass (often with longleaf pine needles and bulrush) bound with split palmetto leaf. It descends from West and Central African coiled basketry brought by enslaved Africans to the Lowcountry, where fanner baskets were used to winnow rice. Baskets have been sold from stands along Highway 17 since the 1930s. In 2006 the South Carolina General Assembly designated the sweet grass basket the official state lowcountry handcraft (S.C. Code Ann. Sec. 1-1-676, 2006 Act No. 234, effective February 21, 2006), and a stretch of US-17 in Mount Pleasant was named the Sweetgrass Basket Makers Highway. Mount Pleasant lies within the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, a National Heritage Area established by Congress on October 12, 2006 under the National Heritage Areas Act, running from Pender County, NC to St. Johns County, FL. The Town of Mount Pleasant and Charleston County adopted a Sweetgrass Basket Overlay District along Highway 17 that offers a transportation impact fee credit to property owners who build and maintain wooden basket stands with safe parking for buyers and sellers. Practical notes for visitors: stands sit directly on a high-speed US highway, so pull fully off the road into the stand's parking area; do not photograph weavers or their stands without asking; prices reflect that a mid-size basket can take many hours to many days of hand sewing.