The story begins in the 1700s, when enslaved West Africans were brought to the coastal Lowcountry specifically for their knowledge of rice cultivation. Planters in South Carolina and Georgia prized captives from the Windward Coast -- present-day Sierra Leone, Senegal, and Guinea -- because they understood how to flood, drain, and harvest rice paddies in the subtropical heat. Those same captives also worked indigo plantations and cotton fields along the coast. The warm, humid climate mirrored conditions in West Africa, and the relative isolation of the Sea Islands -- separated from the mainland by tidal creeks and vast salt marshes -- allowed enslaved communities to retain African languages, spiritual practices, and foodways to a degree unmatched anywhere else in North America. After emancipation, many Gullah Geechee families settled in remote villages on 79 Atlantic barrier islands within what is now the corridor, forming tight-knit communities that endured for generations.

Gullah -- sometimes called Geechee in Georgia -- is a creole language rooted in English and several West African tongues, including Mende, Vai, and Krio. It is not a dialect or slang; it is a fully formed language with its own grammar, vocabulary, and oral traditions. Elders on islands like St. Helena, Sapelo, and Daufuskie still speak it fluently, and linguists consider it the only distinctly African-American creole language in the United States. The language carried with it a world of stories, proverbs, and songs -- including ring shouts, a form of communal worship involving call-and-response singing, hand clapping, and counterclockwise movement that scholars trace directly to West African spiritual ceremonies. The corridor was established in part to ensure these living traditions do not vanish as development and outmigration change the character of the Sea Islands.

The corridor specifically focuses on 79 Atlantic barrier islands and adjoining areas within 30 miles of the coastline. These islands -- St. Helena, Hilton Head, Edisto, Sapelo, Jekyll, and dozens of others -- are the geographic heart of Gullah Geechee culture. Their isolation was both a burden and a gift: cut off from the mainland, communities had to be self-sufficient, building their own boats, fishing their own waters, growing their own food, and resolving their own disputes. That self-reliance bred a culture of communal land ownership, shared labor, and mutual aid that persists to this day. But the same beaches and tidal creeks that once protected Gullah Geechee villages now attract resort development, driving up property taxes and pushing longtime residents off ancestral land. The heritage corridor, administered as a partnership between the National Park Service and local governments, was created in part as a bulwark against that displacement.

The Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Commission oversees interpretation and preservation efforts across all four states. Annual events like the Original Gullah Festival in Beaufort, the Penn Center Heritage Days on St. Helena Island, and the Sapelo Island Cultural Day in Georgia draw thousands of visitors and remind younger generations of what their ancestors built. Sweetgrass basket weavers still sell their work along Highway 17 north of Charleston, using the same hand-coiled techniques their forebears brought from Africa. Gullah cuisine -- shrimp and grits, Hoppin' John, okra soup, red rice -- has entered the American mainstream, but its deepest roots remain in the Lowcountry kitchens where these dishes were first prepared from memory, ingredients, and ingenuity carried across an ocean. The corridor does not freeze this culture in amber. It recognizes a living community whose language, art, food, and faith continue to evolve on the same barrier islands where they took hold centuries ago.