In a black neighborhood in Kingstree in the 1960s, Michael Allen wondered why grassless yards were swept clean and babies were passed over graves at funerals.

A decade earlier, Cynthia Porcher, who is white, spent summers in her native Charleston where black women balanced baskets of laundry on their heads. Their speech was unlike the voices of black people in Porcher's home in the Upstate.

While Allen and Porcher come from communities once divided by race, they share childhood memories of African features of Gullah speech and culture. Earlier this year, the two National Park Service employees joined in a plan to bring more attention to it.

On Monday, their efforts paid off when the Washington, D.C.-based National Trust For Historic Preservation named the Gullah/Geechee Coast as one of America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places.The designation brings national recognition to Gullah culture to increase the chances of funding to preserve historic sites in a coastal area -- from Wilmington, N.C., to Jacksonville, Fla. -- which is being threatened by development.

Within that region, the history of Gullah people began three centuries ago when their enslaved ancestors were brought to the South from West Africa. Today, scholars estimate that about one-third of black Americans can trace their roots back to the Gullah region.

In the Phillips community east of the Cooper, men carry out the African way of gathering under shade trees while women sew sweetgrass baskets that resemble coiled baskets made today in West Africa. Many of them are the descendants of people who worked on the plantation owned by Dr. John Rutledge. Money isn't needed to preserve the lifestyle in the close-knit community, said Richard Habersham, president of the Phillips Community Association.

The community, he said, wants recognition that it is being squeezed by residential growth.

"We are trying to slow that development, and with this designation, maybe (local governments) will stand behind us to help preserve the community," he said.

While Habersham wants to maintain a lifestyle, Amy Roberts is trying to give new life to an old school on St. Simons Island, Ga. She is president of the St. Simons African American Heritage Coalition that is proposing to turn the abandoned Harrington School into a museum or a cultural center. From 1938 to the early 1950s, it was one of two schools on the island for black children.

Roberts is cautiously optimistic about the National Trust's designation. If it helps obtain funding, they still might not be able to raise the necessary matching funds to preserve the old school. Black Georgians prefer the term Geechee.

Allen and Porcher nominated the Gullah region for the designation.

Allen, the park service's education specialist, said, "This is another milestone in the understanding of Gullah/Geechee culture in the development of American history."

Porcher, a park service contract historian, said she didn't think the Historic Trust would grant the designation "because it was not the ordinary type of thing the (Historic Trust) does."

The preservation group rarely gives the designation to a wide geographic area. This year's list also includes the state of Vermont that could lose its character due to the growth of retail development.

John Hildreth, director of the Southern Office of the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Charleston, said the designation should help raise public awareness of the significance of Gullah culture and what the loss of that culture and the places associated with it would mean to this area.

The Historic Trust's designation is the most significant event in Gullah history since Union Army Gen. William Sherman gave land to freed Africans as the Civil War ended, said Emory Campbell, retired executive director of the Penn Center in Beaufort. Established during the Civil War, the Penn educated freed slaves.

Although Sherman's famous Field Order No. 15 was later rescinded, many newly freed slaves remained on the coastal lands. Their preserved African culture began to come under threat of encroachment in the 1950s with the start of resort development, he said.

Soon after Penn was placed on the endangered site list in 1991, it received funding from the National Park Service, he said.

U.S. Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., who obtained funding for a Gullah/Geechee study through the park service, said he hopes the National Trust's recognition will spur Congress to fund the study. Clyburn said he envisions Gullah/Geechee interpretative sites on U.S. 17 near Mount Pleasant, at the Penn Center and in McIntosh County, Ga.

In about a year, the National Trust's designation could begin to produce funding for smaller Gullah-related projects, Hildreth said. "There is no direct correlation between the 11 most endangered list and funding, but it is a tool for building awareness, and that awareness can lead to needed funding," he said.

Anthropologist Joe Opala said the designation could increase awareness of other important historic sites in Georgia, such as Ebo's Landing, where in May 1803 near St. Simons Island, about a dozen newly arrived Igbos from Nigeria drowned themselves instead of accepting slavery. Ebo is the 19th-century spelling of the Igbo people of Nigeria.

The designation also could serve as a reminder that Gullah culture exists on the Lowcountry mainland and not just on the sea islands, said Opala, a research fellow at Yale University who is researching Bunce Island, a former British slave-trading post in Sierra Leone from which captured Africans were shipped to Charleston, Savannah and St. Augustine, Fla.

Joe Riley, mayor of Charleston, the largest city in the center of the Gullah region, said he has "seen the threats to the Gullah/Geechee communities that come from development and tourism."

"These are a people that have thrived in spite of oppression and whose culture has been remarkably preserved. Within this community one can see glimpses of Africa in a way that is not present anywhere else in America. We have to be very careful that we don't lose it," he said.

Cultural preservation creates an opportunity for an eco-tourism industry in the Gullah Lowcountry that is similar to Brazil and Asia, where visitors tour indigenous communities, Walter Rhett, a Charleston tour guide, said.

Rhett, founder of Rhett's Charleston, said, "That model needs to be sensitively developed so it does not become another Disney model that emphasizes just good times over artifacts."

If done properly, he said, "the result could be a greater appreciation of how we all are connected by looking at how the Africans found their place among the Europeans and native Americans, who were the original inhabitants of the Lowcountry."