The Story We Carry

The rivers and tidal lands of Colleton County hold a history older than the state itself. Long before European contact, these waters were Indigenous Chehaw homelands. By the eighteenth century, the marshes had become some of the most productive rice plantations in the antebellum South — engineered and worked by enslaved Africans whose skill made Carolina rice a global commodity.

On June 2, 1863, Harriet Tubman led the Combahee River Raid, guiding three Union gunboats up the river and freeing more than 700 people from these very fields. It remains one of the largest emancipations of the Civil War, and the only U.S. military action ever planned and led by a woman.

The Society works to preserve and share this history through research, public programs, and partnerships with descendants and scholars.

The Combahee River by moonlight. Photograph by J. Henry Fair.

Gullah Geechee people are the direct descendants of West and Central Africans enslaved on the rice, indigo, and Sea Island cotton plantations of the Lowcountry. From the brutal labor of cultivating Carolina rice, they built a distinct culture — a creole language, a foodways tradition that runs from oysters to Hoppin' John, music that became the foundation of American gospel and blues, and craftwork like sweetgrass basketry that traces a direct lineage to West Africa.  

This culture is not historical. It is living. Gullah Geechee descendants in Colleton County and across the federally-designated Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor — from Pender County, North Carolina to St. Johns County, Florida — continue to shape the Lowcountry and the wider South every day.  

The Society honors this lineage by working with descendant communities, scholars, and cultural institutions to preserve and amplify Gullah Geechee voices in the historical record.