Rosalie’s
Garden
Rosalie Legare Grimball
(1913-1984)
Mother. Worker. Homemaker. Friend.
A Gullah woman who lived, labored, and raised a family on Wadmalaw Island through the Jim Crow South. Not famous or often written about. Yet powerful enough to shape generations.
I named this project after my great-grandmother because it was her legacy and foresight to preserve ancestral land that brought me home to Wadmalaw.
Through storytelling, creative practice, and intergenerational learning, we honor the resilient ways our people here have survived, cared for one another, and fought to pass down knowledge, memory, and possibility.
Rosalie’s Garden is an intergenerational learning ground rooted on Wadmalaw Island dedicated to preserving Black land, culture, and memory. Through growing food, archiving community knowledge, performance, and ancestral practices, Rosalie’s Garden creates space for elders, youth, artists, and community members to learn in relationship with one another and the land.
We exist to ensure that the histories, traditions, and ways of knowing carried through Black Southern and Gullah Geechee communities remain living practices that nourish future generations toward collective healing, self-determination, and freedom.
Community Archives
We honor the knowledge carried through our elders, in kitchens, gardens, praise houses, family photographs, songs, recipes, movement, and the land itself.
The archive serves as a living resource where youth, elders, artists, and community members gather to document stories, preserve cultural traditions, and deepen relationships to place and ancestry.
Memory Keepers
Memory Keepers is an afterschool program currently serving students at Edith L. Frierson Elementary School. Youth learn to document community history and deepen their relationship to land, culture, and identity through oral history, photography, film, mapping, storytelling, and hands-on creative projects. Guided by artists, and culture bearers, students help preserve the stories and traditions of Wadmalaw Island for future generations.
Teaching Garden on Wadmalaw
Rosalie’s Garden seeks to preserve space for creativity, cultural memory, environmental learning, and collective care. The vision includes building a teaching garden with accessible growing beds, an outdoor classrooms performance gathering areas, medicinal and culturally significant plants, and opportunities for elders, artists, farmers, and youth to learn together across generations.
We are currently fundraising to bring this vision to life and build a lasting space where children on Wadmalaw Island can feel rooted, free, and connected to the land and stories that surround them.
About Me
LeeAnn Chisolm Morrissette is a granddaughter of Wadmalaw Island, South Carolina. Raised between military life and the music industry, she spent her childhood years in Germany before her family settled in Atlanta, Georgia in the early 2000s.
She would listen to stories of Wadmalaw shared by her grandmother, Ida Mae Delores Grimball Thornton, and Rosalie’s other children, to which she would find herself enamored by the ways in they lived such interdependent and self-sufficient lives. Through these stories, she developed not only an appreciation for memory as something carried through people and place, but as a lineage of resilience strategies to be preserved and carried forward.
Today, LeeAnn is a photographer, filmmaker, cultural worker, and steward of Rosalie’s Garden. Her work explores Black memory, land, intergenerational wisdom, and the resilient ways Black communities have learned to survive, create, and care for one another across generations.
