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Indigo

The cultivation of indigo and production of dye from it added greatly to the economic development of the Cooper River region before the American Revolution. The first successful processing of indigo in the province took place in the 1740s. Indigo quickly gained significance as a cash crop because it commanded a bounty paid for it by the English government (as a result of the Seven Years War and the interruption of French colonial sources for indigo needed in the British cloth industry), because it was relatively easy to grow and cultivate it on high ground, and because some planters sought to wean themselves from what one of them called their “Bewitchment to Rice.” 39 Just before the American Revolution the Southern colonies exported about a million pounds of indigo.

The success of indigo, however, was doomed by the Revolution and the loss of the British bounty once the war began. British troops in the Carolina lowcountry, furthermore, made significant attempts to destroy both the crop and the plantations on which it was grown and processed. In the upper Cooper River region, for example, the British burned 20,000 pounds of prepared indigo on Peter Sinkler’s plantation. The industry never fully recovered after the Revolution, though some indigo was planted as late as the first few years of the nineteenth century. Some ruins and other remains of indigo processing vats are still extant in the upper Cooper River region.40

Plantations growing rice and indigo as cash crops also sometimes grew other cash crops such as cotton. Most of them also grew the typical subsistence crops of the colonial and antebellum periods, such as corn, wheat, and peas and beans, and raised livestock such as horses, milk cows, chickens, and sheep, producing milk, butter, eggs, and other farm products.

Home Page for the Historic Resources of the Cooper River, ca. 1670-ca. 1950

Historic Resources of the Cooper River, ca. 1670-ca. 1950
Name of Multiple Property Listing Berkeley County, South Carolina
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet