“…The Frissell Community House (pictured below) within the historic Penn Center is one of several buildings still utilized by the St. Helena Island cultural center. The center was founded in 1862 as the Penn School, one of the country’s first schools to serve freed slaves. Two missionaries from the North, Laura M. Towne and Ellen Murray, established the school as part of the Port Royal Experiment, a government program that taught newly-freed slaves to manage land abandoned by former plantation owners who fled the area during the Civil War. The school first met in the abandoned Oaks Plantation home before it outgrew the space and relocated to nearby Brick Church and, finally, to its current location…”
South Carolina Picture Project: Penn Center — St. Helena Island, South Carolina