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Welcome to Brain Stuff, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, Brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum here.

Nestled off the beaten path in the heart of the Gulligichi Sea Islands of South Carolina's low country

is an American landmark that many have never heard of.

Situated between rich salt marshes and the Atlantic coast and shaded by moss-laden live oaks,

the Penn Center, located for over 150 years on St. Helena Island in Beaufort County,

is a historic site of African-American

education, culture, social justice, and community development that continues its work today.

In 1862, six months before President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation,

and three years before

the 13th Amendment legally abolished slavery, a group of Pennsylvania, Quaker, and Unitarian

missionaries and abolitionists founded the Penn School on St. Helena. This was part of what's

called the Port Royal Experiment.

In South Carolina, plantation owners had built an economic empire on enslaved labor.

It was the first state to cede from the Union, sparking the civil war, and becoming an immediate target of Union forces in 1861.

The U.S. Navy seized the Port Royal Sound from Confederate troops the

following year. The plantation owners fled the sea islands, reluctantly abandoning their

prized crop of world-renowned cotton and liberating somewhere from 10,000 to 32,000 enslaved people. Seeing a need and an opportunity,

the U.S. opened the area to a number of public and private programs aiming to figure out how

to reform a social and economic structure based on enslavement into a free society. It was an early and less restricted form of reconstruction.

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