Islanders Crack the Books to Save Their Past : Slaves first became citizens on St. Helena. Residents are learning how to guard heritage, ward off developers.

Joseph Stevens, a former New York City bus driver, came to this idyllic island off the South Carolina coast six years ago to retire. Instead, he found his cultural roots.

Stevens and his wife, Laura, had vacationed here often before. “We came here for 40 years and I never realized the history,” he said. “But what I found out is this is the only authentic African community in the United States.”

Now he is a member of the Beaufort County Planning Board, and he and his neighbors are struggling to keep their calm and unruffled island from becoming just another collection of resorts.

“St. Helena Island is the Ellis Island for African Americans,” said Stevens, 61. “This was the first place in the United States where slaves became real citizens: landowners, voters, business people, you name it. So this island, out of all the islands, has got to be saved.”

Stevens and his neighbors have enrolled in a six-month course that promises to help them fight unwanted development. It is sponsored by the historic Penn Center, which was founded by Northern abolitionists during the Civil War to educate freed slaves.

On islands like St. Simons in Georgia and Hilton Head in South Carolina, massive developments for well-to-do vacationers and retirees have nearly destroyed the unique way of life that the descendants of slaves established among grassy marshlands and moss-draped oaks.

On St. Helena, islanders believe it’s just a matter of time before developers seek to build walled-in, golf-course resorts beside the sea. Already, outside interests own 40% of the island, one of the largest off the South Carolina coast, but the parcels are so fragmented that no one has been able to get a toehold.

The Penn School for Preservation will lead 25 participants from St. Helena and 10 from other coastal communities through subjects they have heretofore little understood: planning, zoning, growth management, economics--the whole array of government that islanders believe has worked against them for so long.

And from the lessons, participants will choose and work on at least three economic development projects to improve life on the island while maintaining its cultural identity.

“We need to train our young people about economics and what the island means to them and their history,” said one of Stevens’ fellow participants, Gloria Potts.

Situated just across the Intracoastal Waterway from Beaufort, S.C., St. Helena Island was settled in 1520 by Lucas DeAllyon, a Spaniard. Six years later, the first group of Africans was brought here to work the fields.

Insects, heat and disease combined to ensure that only the strongest slaves remained here, Stevens said. Others were sent to Charleston to be sold.

Plantation owners fled the island in 1861 when Union ships sailed into Port Royal Sound to take over nearby Beaufort, which remained a Union headquarters for the duration of the Civil War. Ten thousand slaves were left on St. Helena. Seizing an opportunity to teach the former slaves, Northern abolitionists then started the Penn School.

The school stayed alive until 1953, when it became a community center. Now it is teaching again.

“I knew nothing about my culture before coming here, but now I can feel what those people felt during the hot summer months--the heat, the insects,” Stevens said.

Families on St. Helena, with a population of about 7,000, continue to live side-by-side in small modest communities. Fishing, basket weaving and other age-old undertakings endure. Customs, like using medicinal herbs, resemble those of West African tribes. Many speak Gullah, an African-influenced Creole dialect that once brought shame, but now resonates with great pride.

“People have been ridiculed for the way they speak,” Stevens said. But now the island offers a festival each spring and a restaurant celebrating Gullah. Soon, a Bible written in Gullah will be available.

“Our Gullah language was almost wiped out until we realized that this was something we should maintain,” said Potts, 64, who moved to St. Helena, her grandmother’s home, in 1963.

The language, in fact, may be the centerpiece of the preservation school’s development efforts. Many participants expect one of the projects to come from the school to be some sort of tourism effort focusing on Gullah.