Penn Center and the York W. Bailey Museum

The Penn Center is one of the most important places in the South for understanding Gullah culture and the long road from slavery to civil rights, and it sits under live oaks on St. Helena Island, about twenty minutes beyond downtown Beaufort. Its story begins in 1862, when Union forces had taken the Sea Islands and northern teachers arrived to open schools for people who had just been freed; the Penn School, begun by Laura Towne and Ellen Murray, became one of the first and longest-lasting of them, educating generations of Sea Island children and later training teachers, farmers and craftspeople. In the twentieth century the campus became a center for Gullah community life and the civil rights movement, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his staff used it as a retreat and planning place in the 1960s. Today the campus is a 50-acre National Historic Landmark District with 25 historic buildings and structures, described by the center as the only African American National Historic Landmark District in South Carolina. The York W. Bailey Museum, named for a doctor who served the island for decades, holds the collections: photographs, documents, tools and crafts that trace the school, the island's Gullah families and the movement years. The museum is open Tuesday to Saturday from 10am to 4pm, and tickets and campus maps are sold at the Courtney P. Siceloff Welcome Center, which opens at 9am. A self-guided visit costs a modest fee, a docent-led tour with a documentary costs a little more, children five and under are free, and parking is free. Docent tours run at 10am, noon and 3pm, and they are the best way in.

What makes a visit memorable is the setting. This is not a museum in a downtown block but a working campus of white clapboard buildings, old school halls and cottages scattered beneath huge moss-draped oaks, with the marshes of St. Helena close by. Walking from building to building, you get a sense of the community the school served, an island where Gullah families farmed and fished in relative isolation and where the Gullah language, foodways, crafts and spiritual traditions survived with remarkable strength. The National Park Service recognizes the campus as part of Reconstruction Era National Historical Park, and the park's Darrah Hall exhibits on the campus add context on Reconstruction and education.

Plan around a docent tour if you can; the guides connect the buildings to the people, from the teachers of the 1860s to the civil rights organizers who met here a century later. Allow at least an hour and a half for the museum and grounds. Check the center's events calendar before you go: Penn Center hosts Gullah and Geechee celebrations through the year, including its long-running Heritage Days festival in the autumn, and special programs fill quickly. Because the museum is closed on Sundays and Mondays, build your Beaufort-area day around a Tuesday to Saturday.

St. Helena Island rewards a slow drive. The road out toward Hunting Island passes farm stands, small churches, praise-house sites and family land that have been part of Gullah life for generations; stop respectfully and support local businesses. Combine the Penn Center with Fort Fremont, the Spanish-American War fort on the island's southern tip, and with downtown Beaufort's Reconstruction Era National Historical Park visitor center, for one of the richest history days in the Lowcountry. Visitors who have already seen Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park and taken a Gullah Heritage Trail Tour on Hilton Head will find this the natural next chapter.