Last weekend's Sweetgrass Festival at Waterfront Memorial Park in Mount Pleasant is the most recent in a year's long effort to maintain East Cooper's sweetgrass basket making tradition and connect it to the life of our changing community.

The greatest challenge a community like Mount Pleasant faces today is maintaining a sense of place. The relentless power of globalized markets, mass production and mass media is to displace local character and tradition with cheaper, standardized elements.

It becomes possible to go from one part of suburban America to another and while standing on an intersection anchored by a McDonalds and a Shell station, but unable to say anything about where you are. Ontario looks like New Mexico. Los Angeles and suburban Atlanta cannot be distinguished.

You do not have that problem standing on Coleman Blvd. at Shem Creeek on on North 17 near the basket stands.

When I was growing up in Mount Pleasant in the 1970s, such cultural elements were taken for granted. As inconceivable as it may seem, we celebrated the arrival on national standardized franchises and buldozed happily to accommodate them. The general assumption was that the sometimes run down stands would disappear with time as Mount Pleasant morphed into a modern town.

It was decided that wouldn't happen a long time ago. In a community eager to maintain something distinctive, the sweetgrass basket tradition has been adopted as one of the town's most important identifiers. Many people have worked for years to build on the tradition and use it to help bind a changing community.

New highways have been planned to accommodate the basket stands so the tradition of roadside selling of the baskets, which keeps craftspeople near their homes and children, can be maintained. Working around children is an important link in keeping a tradition like basket making alive.

A neighborhood, shopping center and highway have all been given the name Sweetgrass. There is a large sculpture celebrating the basket tradition at Oakland Market. The new Waterfront Memorial Park has a sweetgrass pavillion where the history of the craft is on display and where basket makers work and sell their craft.

There are actually classes in how to make a basket, though most people learn, after sewing together a few coils that they are unlikely to ever have the skill and patience to put together a big basket.

Sweetgrass is being cultivated around the Lowcountry. The limited supply of the grass has been stretched by the use of bullrush and pine straw.

It was evident Saturday at the park that our local tradition is vital. Over a dozen basket makers were there and their work was being sold to visitors around the country.

The modest footed baskets and drink trays which were once the staple of the craft now have large, complex baskets to keep them company. The prices are sometimes high for these masterpieces, but they represent weeks or months of work.

Examples of the craft can now be found in museums around the country.

The basket itself is a metaphore for how maintaining our sense of identity as a community works. Time and experience run through our lives as does the sweetgrass, bullrush and pine straw which forms the body of the coil. Without attention and effort, it would be scattered to the wind. The palmetto frond strips hold the basket together, binding the straw and joining the coils, maintaining the coherence of today and linking it to yesterday. The artist, who is both seen and unseen in the work, sews the basket. The artist organizes experience and binds it to the days, months and years of life. All of this takes place in a historic and inherited tradition, an even larger process which binds lifetimes and connects them to centuries of history, all sewn together by careful and creative repetution.

We are lucky to have this tradition and the people who have devoted lifetimes to preserving and sharing it deserve the thanks of the entire community. Like the palmetto strips, this tradition takes the many small blades of grass and binds them together into something more meaningful for us all.

(William Hamilton (www.wjhamilton.com) is an attorny who lives in I'On Village.)