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.

Enterprising colonists were the first to cultivate rice in America. It began quite by accident when a storm-battered ship sailing from Madagascar limped into the Charleston South Carolina harbor. The ship's captain made a gift of a small quantity of "Golden Seed Rice" (named for its color) to a local planter.

During the era in which the rice planters ruled the Low Country, a distinctive caste system prevailed. Handed down the system, the planters embraced a social doctrine which pertained not only to economics, but also to race relations. This caste system, which the planter class held so dear, would eventually prove to be the principle that led to the demise of their world. The Georgetown rice culture, as well as the plantation system throughout the American South, may have been little more than a transplant, or continuance, of medieval European Manorialism. However, because of the addition of race as a determiner of slavery, it was uniquely American.

There is debate over how rice came to be cultivated in the Low Country. What isn't debated is that, by 1690, growers were producing it in large quantities. In that year the colonists, dissatisfied with Governor James Colleton, petitioned that they pay their taxes in commodities. On September 26, 1691, the General Assembly of South Carolina ratified the proposal in an act that allowed Carolinians to pay their taxes in rice, as well as other goods.

Once rice proved to be a reliable cash crop in the area, prospective planters began to enlist a large labor force to improve the land. In the swamp areas around Charles Town, the main chores involved in improving the land were to remove the cypress and gum trees and to ditch and dike the land. Without a large labor force already present to perform these duties, local planters followed Virginia's example of using slaves.

During its experimental stage, planters grew rice primarily in river swamps around Charles Town. In 1700, they exported 330 tons of rice from Charles Town to England and the West Indies. Edward Randolph, Collector of Customs for the Southern Department of North America, wrote a letter to the same board explaining, "They have now found out the true way of raising and husking Rice. There has been above 300 Tons shipped this year to England besides about 30 Tons more to the Islands." During the spring of 1700, the governor of Carolina wrote a letter to the Lords Commissioners of Trade and Plantations explaining the problems that Carolina experienced due to the overproduction of rice. He wrote, we "hath made more rice ye Last Cropp then we have Ships to Transport."

The George Town District was not initially part of the Low Country rice planting explosion. In 1700, what became the George Town District was part of the Carolina frontier and depended economically upon forest industries and the Indian- assisted fur trade. However, due to population growth and the success of rice and other local crops, land grants became available in 1705 for the tidal lands around the Waccamaw, Black, Sampit and Pee Dee Rivers. Beginning in 1726, in attempts to promote settlement, the colony passed acts for improving existing roads and building new ones. George Town was laid out in 1729, and in 1732 became an official port of entry. By that time, most of the Indian settlements in the district had been destroyed by either war, disease or enslavement. Those that did survive had been pushed back into the Carolina frontier where they either joined other tribes or perished. Meanwhile, the production of rice advanced to creek bottoms, but it was not until the 1750s that the rice culture expanded to the tidal lands.

During the 1720s and 1730s, the South Carolina rice industry experienced its first boom, but the new George Town planters placed more concern on building their plantations and attempting to find new ways to cultivate rice than on the production of the crop. On the eve of the War of Austrian Succession in 1740 (known in the colonies as King George's War), George Town exported 4,785 barrels of the staple crop, while Charles Town merchants exported 80,000 barrels. Due to crop failures between 1741 and 1746, and the interference in shipping because of the war which caused prices to drop and insurance rates to increase, George Town planters did not match the 1740 exportation figure again until 1755. By 1756, the Seven Years War (known in the colonies as the French and Indian War) spilled over from North America to include the European powers. When the French Navy began to seize ships, it crippled colonial freight shipping and the rice trade suffered. In 1763, the English forcibly removed the French from North America and restored colonial shipping. By 1766, the colonial rice trade stabilized and rice prices remained high until the American Revolution.

During the Colonial period, Northern Europe, mainly Holland and the German states, imported as much as sixty-five percent of the rice exported from South Carolina and Georgia. Southern Europe, primarily Spain and Portugal, imported less rice, only seventeen percent of the crop. Shipments to the West Indies accounted for the remaining eighteen percent. Generally, English consumers eschewed rice and remained dependent upon their staple of wheaten bread. France banned the importation of North American rice, and, like the Spanish, relied primarily upon cheaper rice from Turkey and Brazil. Thus, the largest market for the Carolina planters was Northern Europe. In those regions, people and livestock ate rice during the winter when peas were scarce and barley was unavailable. To the poor, rice was a cheap alternative to other cereal products and local foods. Rice also supplemented bread and even meat in ordinary people's diet.

By the 1730s, the major influx of slaves into South Carolina was from the west coast of Africa. Planters preferred Africans from Angola, the Gambia River area, the Windward Coast and the Gold Coast, although some slaves, mostly prisoners of inter-tribal warfare, came from as far as 700 miles into the interior of the Africa. In the coastal regions, rice growing had been a dominant part of African culture since 1500 BC. Tribal members "recruited" and sold most of the slaves for trade with Europeans. The most common reasons for selling tribal members to the Europeans were for offenses against society, such as murder or theft, offenses against the king, or even personal or tribal misfortunes such as indebtedness or tribal famine. Slave brokers, along the coastal regions of Africa, often trained future slaves in rice fields similar to those in which they would work in the new world. The sale of human lives was profitable for African tribal kings and the European traders as well as the colonial planters.

By 1730, two-thirds of South Carolina's population was slaves, and the use of the local Indians as a slave force had dwindled. Large scale Native American slavery in South Carolina ended during this period for two reasons. First of all, the Indians were far weaker than the Africans; they could be worked to death and others died from European diseases. Also, they proved to be nearly impossible to retrieve once they escaped from their masters. Once freed, they could easily find groups of Indians and return to their traditional lifestyle. In an attempt to end these problems, slave holders began to sell their Indian slaves to the northern colonies and the West Indies.

Between 1735 and 1740, Charles Town imported 12,589 African slaves. In the 1740s, a decade that witnessed considerably lower rice exports, the slave trade also decreased. During the 1750s, Charles Town only imported 1,562 slaves. The decrease may have been the result of the 1739 African slave uprising south of Charleston known as the Stono Rebellion, the largest slave rebellion in Colonial American history, or problems related to the War of Austrian Succession. Over the next twenty-five years, the slave trade reached new heights of importation. By 1775, South Carolina imported nearly 60,000 more slaves. With the rise of the American Revolution, the British stopped shipping African slaves to the North American colonies. After the war ended, South Carolina outlawed African slave trade in 1787, but reopened the slave trade in 1804. In 1808 the United States Constitution permanently outlawed the trade.

With the development of tidal flooding in the 1730s, and it's perfection by 1750, George Town became the center of rice production in the colony. Due to this new technology, rice became so profitable that many merchants, physicians and attorneys left their professions, purchased land and slaves and became rice planters.

The process of transforming the Carolina swamps into rice fields was difficult work. First, the land had to be measured and the trees felled and burned. Next, slaves cut a four or five foot ditch through the clearing to form an enclosing bank with the mud, leaving a fifteen or twenty foot wide space surrounded by a canal. The next phase was to put trunk docks, also known as floodgates, in place to drain the fields. After slaves temporarily blocked off the canals and constructed floodgates, the fields were ready for the first season.

The following season, slaves dug smaller ditches which ran the length of the field. These ditches are referred to as quarter ditches, because they are a quarter of an acre apart. They also repaired banks so that they remained a few feet higher than the spring tide and constructed smaller banks to divide the fields. Finally, slaves dug large ditches around the entire field and put in small drains in place so the fields could be drained.

With the technology of tidal flooding, rice became the region's number two cash crop; indigo was number one. During the 1740s, the War of Austrian Succession had threatened the indigo crop in the West Indies and enabled South Carolinians to gain the opportunity to grow great crops of indigo for the British. Prosperity for the South Carolina indigo market continued throughout the 1750s and 1760s due to the Seven Years War. However, during the American Revolution, closure of commerce with the British Empire hurt the indigo market, and it never fully recovered. By 1800, the production of indigo in Georgetown ceased. The primary legacy that the indigo planters left was the Winyah Indigo Society, a philanthropic organization that has the distinction of being the first societal order formed by the planters and merchants of George Town.

After the American Revolution, American-grown indigo was no longer important to the British. The British simply restored their crop in the West Indies and created new markets throughout their empire. With the loss of the indigo market, rice assumed the position of the area's primary cash crop. The invention of the rice mill helped to foster its new position in the economy of South Carolina. In fact, the mill had a comparable impact on the rice industry that the cotton gin had on cotton production. With this new invention, planters had no problem advancing the profitability of their crop and abandoning indigo.

Before the invention of the rice mill, slaves milled the rice with wooden, hand-held tools. Animals, mostly oxen, provided the power to run the first mills. Then in 1787, Jonathan Lucas built the first water-powered mill and in 1792, Georgetown built its first tide-operated rice mill. With the invention of the tide-operated mill, the wealth of the Georgetown planters and the district began to expand.

Georgetown needed a multitude of slaves to build its rice culture. The census report of 1790 shows slaves to be the majority of the population. In that year, the three parishes of Georgetown contained 22,122 persons, of whom 13,131 were slaves. At that time, the Prince George Winyah Parish, which contained the town of Georgetown, had the most closely balanced population with 5,111 whites and 6,651 slaves. Prince Frederick Parish, located northwest of Prince George, contained 3,450 whites and 4,685 slaves, and All Saints Parish, located east of Prince Frederick, a coastal community, consisted of 430 whites and 1,795 slaves.

In 1791, the developing rice planting aristocracy entertained President George Washington when he visited Georgetown, on his southern tour of the United States. President Washington wrote of his experiences in Georgetown in his diary:

crossed the Waggamau to Georgetown by descending the River three miles at this place we were recd. under a salute of cannon & by a company of infantry handsomely uniformed. I dined with the citizens in public, and in the afternoon, was introduced to upwards of 50 ladies who had assembled at a tea party on the occasion.
Washington went on to write, "Georgetown seems to be in the shadow of Charleston. The inhabitants of this place (either unwilling or unable) could give no account of the number of souls in it, but I should not compute them at more than 5 or 600."

Over the next fifty years Georgetown developed into a major producer of rice, and an aristocratic faction based on the production of the crop emerged. Although King Cotton ruled the Southern economy after the invention of the cotton gin, when the majority of Southern planters began to concentrate on the production of that crop, the relatively small Georgetown district remained devoted solely to rice. In 1826, when the architect and surveyor Robert Mills visited Georgetown he observed that the town's population had grown little since Washington's visit thirty five years earlier. Mills recorded, "The White population is between 6 and 700: and the black about 12 or 1400." He also made note of the peculiar use of rice that he witnessed in the district: "In Georgetown every thing is fed on rice; horse and cattle eat the straw and bran, fowls, etc. are sustained by the refuse; and man subsists upon the marrow of the grain."

By 1840, the total number of persons in Georgetown had decreased, yet the percentage of slaves had risen. In 1840, of the 18,274 persons living in the Georgetown district, 15,993, 88 percent of the total, were slaves. This phenomenon is due to the fact that the larger planters bought out many of the smaller planters, who then proceeded to acquire new lands in the Southwest. In the district as a whole, the merchants continued to lose influence to the local planters who operated north, south and west of the town.

As the planting communities developed into a tightly-knit aristocratic faction, the people in the town became caught up in many of the humanitarian and reform crusades sweeping the country. On December 13, 1817, the women of Georgetown formed the Ladies Benevolent Society, a private organization designed to perform good deeds. In 1827, the townspeople and the clergy of Georgetown formed the Winyah Anti-Dueling Association to suppress the act of dueling, a favorite way of solving disagreements between the planting families. In May, 1832, the Methodists organized the Winyah Temperance Society. However, the Episcopal church, the church of the planter class did not support the society. The Methodists of Georgetown also developed a local chapter of the Methodists "Mission to the Slaves." In 1836 the Georgetown "Mission to the Slaves" expanded to the Waccamaw Neck, where it eventually caused the Episcopal Church to adopt a similar philosophy of improving the lives of the slaves.

The function of these reform organizations was not an attempt to overthrow the planter class or the social order that they dictated but rather to stabilize life in the town. The townspeople moved towards reform measures like the rest of the country; however, they never attempted to form an abolitionist society. Nonetheless, the planter class considered the townspeople's attacks on alcohol and dueling as insults.

While the townspeople became increasingly more in tune with the tide of reforms sweeping the nation, the planters retreated further into their own world. They sipped their imported wines, worked on improving their skills in the art of conversation and relaxed in a lifestyle of ever-increasing leisure. They rocked away on their verandas and in their personal libraries reading such books as that of the Governor of South Carolina and Georgetown resident, John Lide Wilson's The Code of Honor; or, Rules for the Government of Principals and Seconds in Dueling (1838), Arch Ruport's, The Art of Cockfighting and the pro-slavery arguments of Thomas Dew (1832) and Iveson Brooks. In 1832, the planters further alienated themselves from the merchants of the town when they aligned themselves with John C. Calhoun in attempting to nullify federal tax laws. After the Nullification Crisis, the planters began to form their own social organizations for their class only. The planters who lived south of the town strengthened their already existing ties with the Charleston elite while the planters north of town formed their own social societies.

By 1840 over 150 plantations had been built on the rivers leading to Georgetown, the slaves were well disciplined, and a distinct class of aristocracy emerged. During that time the region entered into a period of unprecedented wealth; however, the wealth was almost entirely concentrated in the country side. One visitor to the town of Georgetown in 1843 remarked:

Georgetown District is the wealthiest portion of the State; but a more miserable collection of decayed wood domicils [sic] and filthy beer shops than are clustered together to make up the town, would be difficult to find. Indeed, unlike the free states, the wealth of the South lies almost entirely in the country; the towns, unless Charleston form an exception, being made of artizans and traders.

As the planters grew wealthier, produced larger quantities of rice and became influential, they became closely linked to Charleston and ignored Georgetown altogether. The nature of the large scale rice milling operations resulted in rice bypassing Georgetown en route to the Charleston where it was milled and later exported. Without the foreign trade that earlier revolved around the export of rice, the port of Georgetown was left economically devastated.

The census report taken in 1850 shows the population of the Georgetown District to be 20,647: eighty eight percent slave and 2,193 free persons, including 201 "free persons of color." Of those listed in the census, 604 white persons, 924 slaves and 100 "free persons of color" resided in the town; the rest lived scattered about the country side.

The 1850s proved to be the most profitable decade for the rice planters. The value of both rice and rice land reached their all time antebellum height. During that decade, rice sold from between 2.9 and 4.3 cents per pound. Several planters sold over one million pounds, with each netting a minimum of $32,000 per year. Meanwhile, the average salaries of the inhabitants of the town was only $1,200 per year. During the late 1850s, quality rice land in the district sold for $200 to $300 per acre, as it had in the late 1820s, whereas, undeveloped swamp land cost $100 per acre. By 1860, the planting class had strengthened its hold on local influence. In that year the wealthiest 3.8 percent of the white population owned 50.1 percent of the land in the district. By 1860 the planting class controlled Georgetown and, like the planting class throughout South Carolina and the south, felt confident in building a nation of its own.