Sunday, January 24, 2016

Forgotten Fields -- Carolina Gold Rice

We live in the Low Country area of South Carolina where rice once thrived, a crop that was a perfect fit for South Carolina's geography and weather. The first rice seeds were brought here on a ship from Madagascar in 1685, a variety that came to be called Carolina Gold Rice.



 

 

This old rice field is about a mile and a half down the road from our house, and in the foreground you can see the embankment or dike that held the water.

 

Slaves from the west coast of Africa were brought here for their expertise and methods of growing rice that made the Low Country plantation owners some of the richest men in the American colonies.

From the slaves, plantation owners learned how to dig, dike, and flood a rice field.

 

 

 

 

The rice fields were built out of marshes by slaves. They built dikes to control the water and canals to transport the crop.

Men, women, and children spent most of the year knee deep in mud and swamp water. Already weakened by the long journey over here, slaves succumbed to tropical diseases, smallpox, pneumonia, heat exhaustion, and malaria. They dealt with alligators, snakes, and malaria carrying mosquitoes.

Altogether they cleared 77,000 acres and built 780 miles of canals, and by the start of the Civil War, they were producing 160 million lbs of rice a year.

(The above two photos are from a collection at the Library of Congress.)

 

 

The rice seed was planted in April in rows in a dry field, then the rice fields were flooded by raising a system of wooden gates that let the water flow in.

 

In September it was harvested using hand tools like these sickles and then bundled into sheaves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The sheaves were carried to higher ground, sometimes by barge via the rice canals, sometimes by mule-drawn carts along the dikes, sometimes on the backs of the slaves.

Finally it was dried then threshed by beating the stalks against the ground with wood and iron flails.

 

The dried rice was pounded using a wooden mortar and pestle (lower left) to loosen the hulls. The hulls were blown away by slaves using fanning baskets (lower right) woven from sweetgrass, leaving clean rice for the farmer to sell.

 

Packed in barrels, the rice was taken by water to markets in Charleston and Georgetown.

 

 

 

With the advent of the Civil War, plantation owners lost the slave labor necessary to make rice profitable. After 200 years, last field of Carolina Gold Rice was grown in 1927 and the heirloom seed was pretty much lost for the next 60 years.

In the 1980s a Savannah eye surgeon hunted down some of the old seed from a seed bank and brought the rice back into cultivation to lure wild ducks to his plantation not far from where I live. Today 149 acres of the heirloom rice is grown and you can buy a 2lb bag for about $18 plus postage. Yikes!

I haven't tasted it but Anson Mills, who sells it, says:

"Milled to emulate fresh, hand-pounded rice, Anson Mills Carolina Gold rice has a clean, sweet flavor and mouthfeel superior to modern long-grain rice."

I'll let you know when we find some and try it.

 

20 comments:

  1. Cynthia it was a terrible time for slaves. I can't imagine the hell in which they had to live. I have watched a lot of films abour South Carolina and rice fields ......

    ReplyDelete
  2. A well documented history lesson on the rice fields of the South.
    Well done and much appreciated by me.
    Cheers
    Colin

    ReplyDelete
  3. So interesting to read of the rice fields and what slaves endured during cultivation and harvesting. That heirloom rice must be golden!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Very interesting! Rice was grown in southern Louisiana where I was raised, and still is, as well in in southeast Texas. We used to cook "Wild Pecan Rice," which had a good nutty aroma, but, alas, no pecan taste. Sad to think that it was slave labor that started rice cultivation in the U.S.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Some good history there. Our town park is built around rice fields that Henry Ford had developed on his land. Great place to walk.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Good job on an interesting history....;)

    ReplyDelete
  7. Well done. I found that article extremely interesting as you covered many aspect of the blacks growing rice.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Interesting history and what hard work! I cannot imagine the working conditions...I could never have done it...if I saw one snake I would have flopped over dead and been alligator food :)

    ReplyDelete
  9. I enjoyed reading such interesting history but having read a lot about slavery I'm not surprised to hear about their treatment. How on earth did we justify it for so long?

    ReplyDelete
  10. It will be a coup if you do find some growing wild, rather that than paying such a high price.
    Unfortunately slavery is still common around the world - it's just hidden now. It would have been a very hard life.

    ReplyDelete
  11. What a miserable work to stand in the mud all day long and probably in the burning sun aswell. But it is the way rice still is planted in Asia.

    ReplyDelete
  12. What an interesting post! I love doing research on things that intrigue me!

    ReplyDelete
  13. Oh, you should try it and let us know if it is superior to other rice. Thanks for the history lesson, although very sad to see the plight of the slaves in water and mud all day. How awful.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Heirloom rice! How wonderful! The hostory lesson wqs very intersting to read. I checked the websit for Andon Mills and read how that came about. It was an interesting read, well excpt for the weevils. I hope it has a distinguished flavor.

    ReplyDelete
  15. I love history lessons like this. Makes you feel like crying to think of the work those slaves did. Looking at the picture of the two women you can tell it was back breaking work.

    ReplyDelete
  16. That does sound like some expensive rice, but I would love to try it!

    ReplyDelete
  17. I don't think I would pay that price for rice no matter how good they say it tastes! Good to be reminded of its history. Something we should never forgot.

    ReplyDelete
  18. I don't think I would pay that price for rice no matter how good they say it tastes! Good to be reminded of its history. Something we should never forgot.

    ReplyDelete
  19. Good amount of history; I loved our visit there a few years ago.

    ReplyDelete
  20. I loved this peek into the history of South Carolina. It's a shame that with the freeing of the slaves the plantation owners weren't interested in continuing the planting of rice. While I think the planting of this heirloom seed for the ducks is a good idea, I wouldn't pay that much for rice myself.

    ReplyDelete