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Essay on How Rice History Shaped South Carolina
To many people, the rice culture of the South Carolina Low Country represents a tranquil and idyllic period of history. Romantic visions of riding in a horse-drawn open carriage down a long avenue of moss-draper live oaks framing a manor house are the stuff of novels and movies. During their period of greatness, Georgetown rice planters, like the antebellum planters of other communities, created a world that inspired young men to become country gentleman, and insisted that young women train to be plantation mistresses with perfect manners.
Many causes have conspired to obscure from modern vision the doubly tragic role once played by rice on the American stage. Doubtless the principal factor has been the death of low-country rice planting itself. For years no person has lived at Gowrie. If occasionally a family of three raccoons can be perceived stirring the rank overgrowth of cane, not one among thousands of those motorists crossing the flat island on U.S. 17 is likely to reflect that human beings once lived in what is now a wildlife refuge; and that slaves like the persistently intractable house servant Jane, her cousin the compromising driver Robert, and the indomitable carpenter Jack Savage once aspired to a better life than was here afforded them. Sixty miles south, at Butler Island, a highway marker does indeed (though misleadingly) mention Frances Kemble; and the ruin of a steam pounding mill reminds one of a distant era.
These are mementos, however, to the remarkable white mistress and to an abandoned plantation technology, not to the social system Kemble briefly experienced. One hundred and seventy miles north of Gowrie, at Chicora Wood, one can discover two gravestones commemorating bondsmen of Robert Allston's -Mulatto Joe and the "faithful" carpenter Thomas; and one can observe the beautifully restored house where each winter Governor Allston once resided, which his angry former slaves gutted in March 1865......
