CHARLESTON, S.C. --- Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison has dedicated a bench in South Carolina that will commemorate the millions of people taken from Africa and enslaved in the United States.

The Bench by the Road, which was placed Saturday at Fort Moultrie on Sullivan's Island, was inspired by Ms. Morrison's own words.

She said in a 1989 interview about her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Beloved , that there was no suitable memorial -- such as a small bench by the road -- that people can visit to remember the millions taken from their homeland.

"This is so exciting and extremely moving," she told a crowd gathered for the dedication ceremony, the Post and Courier newspaper reported. "I'm delighted to be the first to sit on one of the first places 'to be by the side of the road.' "

An estimated 40 percent of Africans who were brought to North America came through Sullivan's Island.

Michael Allen of the National Park Service told the crowd that four "Pest Houses" were built on the island in the 18th century to quarantine slaves so they would not transfer diseases from Africa.

The Toni Morrison Society, which held its fifth biennial conference in Charleston this past week, hopes the Bench By the Road Project will create outdoor museums to mark important locations in black history both in the United States and abroad.

The society plans to mark 10 such sites over the next five years.

Ms. Morrison, 77, was the first black to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The Sixth Morrison Society Biennial will be held in 2010 in Paris.