Chapter 1: Daufuskie as Site and Symbol

Daufuskie Island, situated just off the southern coast of South Carolina between Hilton Head and Savannah, occupies a liminal space—geographically, historically, and culturally. Spanning only five miles long and three miles wide, it is bordered by the Cooper and New Rivers and faces the Atlantic Ocean. Its separation from the mainland has long shaped both its vulnerability and its resilience: Daufuskie has remained physically unbridged, socially peripheral, and administratively neglected—conditions that have inadvertently preserved one of the most intact Gullah Geechee landscapes, even as they have reproduced longstanding forms of exclusion and dispossession.¹

Now included within the federally designated Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, Daufuskie stands as one of the most critical sites for understanding the continuity and disruption of Black land stewardship in the post-Emancipation South. The island’s relative isolation—electricity did not arrive until 1952—has insulated it from many of the infrastructural transformations that reshaped surrounding coastal regions. But that same isolation has also contributed to systemic underinvestment, rendering the island both a repository of memory and a site of slow neglect. This project positions Daufuskie not only as a physical geography, but as a terrain of cultural survival and speculative return.

Historically, Daufuskie was home to several large plantations, including Melrose and Haig Point, where enslaved Africans cultivated Sea Island cotton, indigo, and rice. During the Civil War, following the passage of the Confiscation Acts, Confederate landowners fled the island. Union troops seized control and subdivided plantation tracts into smaller parcels, which were then sold to formerly enslaved people. In a profound act of self-determination, many Black families pooled their savings and purchased land, establishing a landowning community grounded in agriculture, oyster harvesting, praise house worship, and cooperative labor.²

By the early 20th century, Daufuskie was home to nearly 3,000 Black residents. The island supported an economy based on communal oyster canning operations and subsistence farming. The built environment retains traces of earlier eras of labor and cultural expression—most notably through the tabby ruins that remain along the riverbanks. Introduced to the region in the 17th century, tabby—a durable building material composed of lime, sand, water, and oyster shells—gained widespread use in the 18th and early 19th centuries across the coastal Southeast.³ On Daufuskie Island, tabby was used in constructing cisterns, plantation infrastructure, and slave dwellings, including the arc of one-room tabby cabins at the North Slave Settlement at Haig Point, built between 1826 and 1833.⁴ These structures—among the most intact tabby slave dwellings in Beaufort County—are laid out in a curved formation rather than the rigid grid typical of plantation quarters, potentially reflecting African spatial logics or communal layout traditions.⁵ Today, many of these dwellings stand as roofless ruins, vulnerable to erosion and neglect. Though materially fragile, they hold spatial memory—testaments not only to ancestral labor and architectural ingenuity, but also to the epistemologies of care and place that continue to shape Gullah identity.⁶ Yet their cultural and historical significance is obscured by inaccessibility: the site lies behind the gates of a private residential community and golf course, closed to the public and descendants alike.

The early 20th century brought new pressures. The boll weevil infestation devastated cotton crops, while industrial pollution from the Savannah River contributed to the collapse of Daufuskie’s oyster industry—one of the island’s most vital and community-sustaining economies.⁷ As incomes declined and public services eroded, residents began migrating to the mainland in search of educational access, employment, and infrastructure. By the 1980s, land loss through partition sales, tax foreclosures, and speculative development had severely fragmented Black landholdings across the island.

Ironically, the same conditions that prompted Black outmigration also fueled Daufuskie’s rediscovery by outsiders. Pat Conroy’s 1972 memoir, The Water is Wide, based on his brief tenure as a white teacher on Daufuskie, framed the island as an isolated, timeless world on the brink of disappearance. While the book drew national attention and led to a film adaptation, it reinforced narratives of Gullah life as primitive and endangered, rather than self-sustaining and adaptive. This framing aligns with a broader tradition of white literary and preservationist narratives that sentimentalize Black communities while erasing the political and legal structures that place them at risk.⁸ In the decades since, Daufuskie has become a contested site of memory: a living archive of Black history increasingly enclosed by gated communities, luxury development, and curated tourism.

Today, Daufuskie remains both symbolic and material: a microcosm of Black land struggle in the Lowcountry, and a place where spatial memory, community resistance, and digital preservation converge. It is not just the subject of this project—it is its foundation. Understanding Daufuskie as both a site and a symbol allows us to see more clearly what is at stake: not just buildings or parcels, but the worldmaking practices of a people who have long inhabited the margins—and made them sovereign. As the following chapter shows, the symbolic weight of Daufuskie cannot be separated from the legal and economic systems that have threatened its Black landholders for over a century.