Business Member

Home

E-Mail

The Recovery of the Rice Culture, Mills, and Canals

After the Revolution, rice production in the Cooper River region recovered and then surpassed its previous totals with the widespread adoption of the tidal rice culture system in the last decade of the eighteenth century and the first two decades of the nineteenth century, a system which held sway in much of lowcountry South Carolina until the Civil War. That system, based on the acquisition and development of acreage by planters and on the exhaustive labor of African slaves who cleared the land, laid out and maintained the fields, and planted, tended, and harvested the crop, brought about a dramatic and lasting transformation of the landscape in the region.46 In 1860 St. John’s, Berkeley led the Cooper River region, boasting eleven rice plantations with more than 100 slaves on each; there were four such plantations in St. Thomas’s and St. Denis’s Parish. This is particularly significant as even in South Carolina only 1,471 planters (out of a total white population of 274,563) owned fifty or more slaves in 1860.47

The eighteenth and nineteenth century planters of the Cooper River region included several of the most prominent and significant South Carolinians of their day. Henry Laurens, former President of the Continental Congress and commissioner from the Treaty of Paris, returned home from imprisonment in the Tower of London and retired at Mepkin Plantation, building a new house and transforming the landscape into that of a country seat. Here he was the first prominent American to be cremated and his ashes were buried at Mepkin along with other family members.48 Edward Rutledge, signer of the Declaration of Independence, beautified Richmond Plantation, inherited by his wife; 1803 watercolor views by Charles Fraser confirm that it was “one of the truly rich plantations of the Low Country.”49 Continuing the tradition of earlier planter-botanists was Dr. Sanford Barker of South Mulberry. Scientists such as Dr. Edmund Ravenel, artists such as John Blake White, and writers such as Dr. John Beaufain Irving also lived and worked on the Cooper River. In the late eighteenth century, many of the Cooper River plantations were looked upon as showplaces, especially Mepkin, and all had formal gardens soon boasting parterres and plantings of new imports such as camellias. The Cooper River plantations became one of the leading examples of the romantic plantation ideal. They were first identified as a cohesive area when Irving wrote a series of sketches about them, serialized in six parts in the Charleston Courier in 1842 and published in book form as A Day on Cooper River, describing handsome houses, able planters, cultured wives, daughters and sons, content bondsmen, and such pursuits as entertaining, dining, literature and music, and hunting and fishing.50 Agricultural societies such as Black Oak and Strawberry in St. John’s, Berkeley promoted agricultural improvements and scientific farming.51

 The slave population in the region, often left virtually unsupervised by absentee masters or even the occasional overseer, and usually under the supervision of slave drivers, took advantage of the refinements of the task system brought about by tidal cultivation and enjoyed an almost complete cultural separation from whites, both slaveholders and non-slaveholders alike. 52 With the relative isolation of many slaves in their village complexes, Gullah language, religion, foodways, musical traditions, social events, and other customs made a tremendous impact on the Cooper River region.

 As rice production increased in other areas of lowcountry South Carolina and Georgia, plantations on the Cooper River remained almost unchanged from the eighteenth century, except that in some cases owners removed some of their slaves to plantations established elsewhere as they expanded their holdings and the percentage of their land under cultivation. Silk Hope, for example, boasted more than 200 slaves in 1790, when Gabriel Manigault owned it. Later sold to the Heyward family, it returned to the Manigault family, along with 165 slaves, on Charles Manigault’s marriage to Henrietta Heyward. At least twenty-two prime hands were transferred to Manigault’s newer and more profitable Gowrie Plantation beginning in the 1820s. The Manigaults rarely used Silk Hope, preferring a country seat at Marshlands.53

 Englishman Jonathan Lucas erected his first water-driven rice mill on the Santee River in 1787; by 1817 he built the first steam-powered rice mill in Charleston. Lucas was also responsible for the construction of mills on the Cooper River such as those at Comingtee and Middleburg. His son and successor, Jonathan, Jr., married Lydia Simons and became master of the latter plantation in addition to extensive holdings in South Carolina and abroad.54

 One of the earliest navigation canals in America was built in 1792 for planters along the Back River, eager to improve the transportation of their tidal culture rice crops.55 The Santee Canal, constructed between 1793 and 1800 by Col. John Christian Senf at a cost of $600,000, was intended to provide an important link between the Santee and Cooper Rivers. This link was seen as providing vital commercial access from much of the state’s interior to Charleston Harbor and it was part of the progressive economic vision of Charleston’s federalist leaders of the late eighteenth century.56

The canal route, initially twenty-two miles long, was used primarily for the transportation of cotton. During the earliest years of its operation, 1,720 boats arrived in Charleston via the canal, bringing 80,000 bales of cotton to market. Although considered to be a feat of engineering in its day, the Santee Canal, with its ten masonry and stone locks, was beset with design problems. These problems were most noticeable in the drought years of 1817-1819 when the canal did not have enough water to operate. While the shareholders of the canal corporation received good dividends during the 1820s and 1830s, the canal was largely inoperable again by 1850 and increased competition by new public roads and railroad routes spelled financial ruin. The Santee Canal was officially closed by an act of the General Assembly in 1850

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