Rice

A Winnowing Shed

Rice. Everyone eats it. The Italians liked it so much they made pasta that looks like it.  But where does it come from? Normally one thinks of Asia, you know, Chinese and Japanese. But what if I told you that in the 17th century the center of western rice production was right here in South Carolina? Look at this area. It's hard to believe that as far as you can see there were once fields of rice.  

When this area, South Carolina, was first settled by the English, the Crown demanded that the colonists find crops that could be grown for export. A number of different varieties of crops were tried with little success. Initially the economy of the Carolinas was based on timber and naval stores. What are naval stores, you ask. As the name indicates, they are things or stores that have to do with the navy; products for the building or maintenance of ships such as pitch, tar, turpentine and, of course, timber.  Deer skins were also shipped to England in huge quantities.  But, according to one story, the colony's fortune changed with the weather. 

Literally, a hurricane was responsible by forcing a pirate, John Thurber, into the port of Charles Town which later became Charleston. It seems that Thurber had aboard his ship, a brigantine, some African slaves from his last port of call, Madagascar where rice was regularly grown in terraced fields.  Those slaves had with them bags of seed. And those seeds were grains of rice. How much did they have? Legend says as much as a bushel. That would have been quite a bit of rice. That rice was used as partial payment for repairs on the pirate ship at a local shipyard. Henry Woodward, the shipyard owner, managed to get the seeds to grow. 

Initially the rice was grown on dry land.  There are two types of rice, "dry" and "wet", in reference to the soil in which each is grown. The eventual rice economy of South Carolina was based on the “wet” variety of rice. The thin topsoil with the clay subsoil was ideal for a crop that required very wet growing conditions. Unfortunately the land was covered with  predominantly marine forests in the late 17th century.  To remove the forests and prepare the land for rice production, hundreds of African slaves were imported. Some local Native Americans were also enslaved. Trees were cut down and  stumps removed. Much of the acreage was burned; perhaps the beginning of slash and burn in the Western Hemisphere. The fields needed to be level too since they would be flooded periodically with water during the growing of the rice crop.  As the forests were removed and planting began, slaves from rice  growing countries such as Sierra Leone, Gambia and others were sought. Indeed, slaves with rice growing knowledge fetched high prices.  

The control of water in the production of rice is very important.  There are two points in the growth cycle of rice that the fields must be flooded with freshwater; salt water could not be used. The fields must be flooded prior to planting. When the rice stalks mature to a certain height the fields are flooded again to kill the weeds and grasses which would tend to inhibit the growth of rice. (Weeds could not survive under water.) This may be repeated as necessary.   Initially, streams were dammed up to produce reservoirs of water to allow flooding on demand. In Madagascar rice was grown in fields which were flooded by water. From the diary of John Bertram we find that in 1783 Gideon Dupont of Goose Creek perfected the use of tides to push the fresh water from the creeks into the rice fields when needed. McKewn Johnstone had done this initially at Winyah Bay in 1758 but Dupont perfected the process. On the Carolina coast the water level changed over five feet between high tide and low tide. Through a system of dykes, ditches, and flood gates or trunks the water was controlled flowing into and out of the fields. With this water management system the cultivation of rice had reached its pinnacle. 

When the rice matured and the green stalk changed from green to yellow the rice was cut down with a scythe or sickle. The stalks would be bound in bundles of about eight inches in diameter. These bundles are called sheaves. A number, six to eight,  of these sheaves placed in the form of a teepee to dry are called shocks.  After the rice had dried it would be threshed. One method of threshing, removing the rice from the stalks, is to place the sheaves on the ground and flail them until rice kernels are removed from the stalk, leaving the straw and kernels of rice separate. By another method the sheaves are beaten against the ground to separate the grain kernels from the stalk. The rice, once removed from the straw, was winnowed. Winnowing consists of taking the rice after threshing and tossing it into the air from a large flat basket, allowing the wind to remove the chaff as the rice falls back into the basket.  On larger plantations there was a winnowing shed which was raised off the ground about eight feet with a hole in the floor. Threshed rice was poured through the hole in the floor while the wind blew the chaff away before it hit the hard packed earth. The rice was swept from the ground before the next process. The next process would remove the husk.  To do this the rice was pounded in a large mortar and pestle to remove the husk from each grain. The mortar was usually made of a hollowed out section of hardwood approximately three feet tall by ten inches in diameter.  The pestle was a four to five foot length of hardwood with the end rounded to the curvature of the mortal which was used to pound the rice.  At this point in the process the rice is brown and edible.  Continuing this pounding polishes the rice. Polished rice is the product we normally refer to today as white rice.. Eventually, the use of water power in 1817, and later steam power, mechanised threshing and pounding processes. Remnants of some of these rice mills can still be seen today.

Growing and cultivating rice was extremely labor intensive. No part of the process from planting  to processing the harvested grain had been mechanised prior to 1817. Therefore there was a dependence on slave labor. Rice had to be planted and harvested by hand. By 1690 South Carolina was shipping 300 tons of rice per year to Great Britain. There are many who claim that the African slave is responsible for the Carolina rice culture including all the technical aspects of rice production. While it is true Africans had been cultivating rice for centuries, even utilizing tidal control for flooding the fields, rice would have never become king of the Carolinas without the capital, land and other resources of the English.  

The production of rice made the Carolina colony the gem of the American colonies; the richest colony. The plantations were of various sizes but with a combined total of over 120,000 acres under till for rice when production was at its peak.The rich planters were the aristocracy of the new world. But, as  they say, all good things come to an end, and the era when rice was king did indeed come to an end. In the late 19th century rice production declined. However, the elimination of slavery, which had an adverse effect on labor for the rice fields, it was not the only reason for the demise of rice production in South Carolina. After the American Civil War, Europe, the major market for Carolina rice, found less expensive sources. India and the Far East provided cheaper rice, although it did not rival the quality of Carolina rice. Also, as rice cultivation became mechanised, the soft earth of the Carolina lowcountry would not support planting and harvesting machinery. This combination of factors led to the abandonment of rice as a cash crop in South Carolina. American rice production moved west to Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. 

If you look closely you can notice how the topography of the land was changed for the growing of rice. This abandoned plantation with its ruins of a grand house is all that reminds us of the days when rice was king in the Carolina lowcountry.