Penn Center

Penn Center began as an experiment the country wasn't sure would work. When Union troops took Port Royal in November 1861, the plantation owners fled St. Helena Island and left behind thousands of people who had been enslaved — free in name, but without land, literacy, or any roadmap. The North's answer was the Port Royal Experiment: could formerly enslaved people build free lives? In April 1862, Laura Towne arrived on St. Helena; Ellen Murray followed, and their Penn School — named for Pennsylvania and William Penn — became the first school in the South built expressly for freed people.

The school outlasted the experiment. It bought its fifty acres from Hastings Gantt, a freedman who had once been enslaved on the island; it taught masonry and midwifery alongside letters; it survived Reconstruction's collapse and the Depression. When the school closed in 1948 the work didn't — Penn became a community center, and in the 1960s it became something else again: the one place in the South where Martin Luther King Jr. and the SCLC could hold interracial retreats. King drafted speeches at the Frissell Community House; he was planning to return the week he was killed.

Today Penn Center anchors the Reconstruction Era National Historical Park — the Brick Baptist Church, Darrah Hall, the Gullah community it has served for over 160 years. The file keeps Penn: the schoolhouse of the freed, the retreat of the movement, and the proof that the Port Royal Experiment worked.

Penn Center is the archive's Reconstruction file — the first freedmen's school, the MLK retreat, and the island that answered the experiment's question.