Land, Agriculture

Golden Grains of White: Rice Planting on the Lower Cape Fear

BY JAMES M. CLIFTON^*

[Vol. 50 (1973), 365-393]

With the permanent settlement of the Lower Cape Fear in the 1720s by a group of wealthy South Carolina planters, a new agricultural staple was introduced into North Carolina—rice. Rice by this time had proved to be the “golden grain”¹ of South Carolina as tobacco had earlier become Virginia’s “golden leaf.” These planters, from the St. James Goose Creek Parish about twenty miles up the Cooper River from Charleston, brought numerous slaves with them to the Cape Fear and acquired extensive holdings along the main river (about thirty miles in length) and for some distance up both the Northeast and Northwest branches of the Cape Fear. While much of this land was retained by the planters for their own development, a sizable portion of it was cut up into smaller sections and sold, and a number of plantations were developed shortly along both sides of the river.² Thus was the Cape Fear settlement a land of large plantations from the beginning—the very opposite of most colonial settlements—an extension of the South Carolina plantation system and in a larger sense that of the West Indies, especially Barbados.³

Naval stores—tar, pitch, and turpentine—brought the planters to the Cape Fear⁴ and remained their principal economic interest throughout the colonial period because of the enormous immediate returns these commodities brought on the planters’ investment.⁵ Rice, however, seems to have occupied a strong secondary position in the economy there from the beginning. Travelers in the area reported seeing rice growing as early as 1731;⁶ in the same year the Assembly established it as one of the official “commodities” of the colony, indicating its having reached some status as a crop.⁷ Marshlands suitable for rice culture—those of “a wet, deep, miry Soil; such as is generally to be found in Cypress Swamps; or a black greasy Mould with a Clay Foundation”—abounded along the river and its branches for a considerable distance.⁸

Simultaneous with the extension of rice production into North Carolina was the development of irrigation in the rice-growing process (rice had previously been grown on moist lands without any application of water to the crop). Since the initial use of irrigation seems to have been simply to provide more moisture for the plants, only small water reserves such as ponds or dammed-up streams were needed.⁹ Thus rice in this period could be grown over a much wider area than was true later in the antebellum period when the tidal flows (used to control grass and weeds which required more water than the reserves of the inland swamps could provide) served as a locative factor confining rice planting largely to the main river.¹⁰ As a consequence, the most important colonial rice plantations were located not on the main river but rather along the branches.¹¹

While information as to the rice acreage of specific plantations is extremely meager for the colonial period, a few newspaper advertisements have survived indicating rather expansive rice swamps. The largest advertised rice acreage was that of Lilliput, two miles north of Brunswick Town on the main river, “at least two hundred Acres of Marsh, and Swamp, very good Rice Land, fronting on the River, about three Quarters of a Mile, and on a Creek near three miles,” the whole plantation consisting of 1,280 acres.¹² Spring-Field, at Rocky Point several miles up the Northeast branch, was advertised as containing 150 acres of “very good Rice Land.”¹³ General Hugh Waddell’s plantation, Castle Haynes, ten miles up the Northeast Cape Fear, had seventy acres of rice fields out of a total improved acreage of 500.¹⁴ Schawfields, the plantation of Robert Schaw, about six miles up the Northwest branch, contained fifty acres of rice land, twenty of which had been ditched.¹⁵ The total amount of rice planted on the Lower Cape Fear at the close of the colonial period seems, however, on the basis of recorded rice exports, to have been only about 500 acres.¹⁶

Rice planting on the Cape Fear inland swamps was conducted under a number of handicaps. Clearing the cypress and gum forests required such an enormous expenditure of labor that generally the rice fields were continually obstructed with unremoved logs and stumps, only the branches and saplings being piled and burned.¹⁷ Beyond this, the construction and maintenance of the extensive dikes and ditches needed for flooding and draining the rice fields restricted the industry to those with sizable slaveholdings. Experience in South Carolina had demonstrated that thirty slaves and one overseer constituted the proper unit for a rice plantation.¹⁸ At the close of the colonial period, only twenty planters on the Lower Cape Fear possessed this large a number even though the area had the lion’s share of large slaveholdings in the colony.¹⁹ Thus, because of the shortage of laborers, rice planting there would not have reached any great proportions in the late colonial period even if naval stores production had not been in a position on account of its more immediate profitability to lay first claim to what labor was available. Working under a system dependent entirely on hand labor, using such primitive tools as the hoe for breaking the soil and cultivating the plants, the open-ended gourd for sowing the seed, the sickle for harvesting, the flail for threshing, and the mortar and pestle for polishing the rice for consumption, each slave was expected to produce four to five barrels of rice averaging 500 pounds each—the normal output of about two acres— as well as provisions for the plantation for the season.²⁰

The typical rice planter also engaged in the production of indigo, another crop requiring very large amounts of labor—each hand was expected to produce only about two acres—but the cultivation requirements of which complemented well those of rice. While rice was grown only on land which could be flooded, indigo could be produced on the adjoining upland. The indigo work season, too, ended with the summer, leaving the slave free for the rice harvest, the most demanding time of the year, and the threshing and cleaning of the rice during the ensuing winter months.²¹ The rice produced on the Cape Fear was lighter in weight than that farther to the south but of a very high quality and sought after by the more southerly planters for seed.²² Indigo, too, was not produced commercially north of the Cape Fear, the season there allowing normally for only one cutting as compared to a possible three cuttings in South Carolina and four or five in the West Indies. As a consequence, the total indigo crop on the Cape Fear probably never exceeded 100 acres.²³

The era of the American Revolution marks a great watershed in southern rice planting. By that time planters on the inland swamps were having to cope with a number of very serious problems. Continuous cropping had caused soil depletion, encouraging the planters to seek new lands to develop, though doubtless this was less of a problem on the Cape Fear than in South Carolina where the swamps had been planted much longer. The most difficult problems facing the planter were those of controlling grass and weeds and securing a dependable source of irrigation which would provide enough water at the time it was needed without the risk of the devastating floods from untimely rains so common to the inland swamps. The solution to both of these problems was found in the rise and fall of the river tides, which could provide ample water for controlling the grass and weeds, thus eliminating much of the hoeing under the inland swamp system of irrigation, with little risk of untimely flooding.²⁴ Too, by using the tidal waters for irrigating, the growing season was shortened and the yield per acre generally increased. Consequently, in the years following the Revolution and continuing well into the nineteenth century, there was a general shift in planting from the inland swamps to the tide, or river, swamp-lands.²⁵ However, only a stretch of a few miles above salt water (generally from ten to twenty) along the lower reaches of the rivers received enough strength of the tidal flow to make that source of water commercially feasible.²⁶ As a consequence, the rice kingdom was severely circumscribed, with land at a premium as more and more of the available acreage was reclaimed. By way of comparison, tidal river plantations as a rule were generally larger with more acreage devoted to rice but with less upland acreage available for cultivating provisions or other crops than were those of the inland swamps.²⁷

The Revolutionary era, too, brought a significant change in the economic picture of the Lower Cape Fear. No longer was the British bounty available for naval stores as an inducement for imperial production; consequently, exports from the Cape Fear declined sharply. Indigo, without the bounty as an impetus, disappeared entirely. Doubtless the planters there turned their attention now more and more to rice production. That change of interest, coinciding with the general shift of rice planting to the tidal swamps, served to make the post-Revolutionary period the real beginning of a large-scale commercial rice industry on the Lower Cape Fear.²⁸

Reclaiming the tidal swamp represented a formidable task for the rice planter. First, a large dike had to be built parallel along the river, with each end terminating perpendicularly on the high ground, to keep back the tides while the trees and brush were being felled and cleared. Next, smaller levees would be constructed in such a manner as to divide the rice land into fields, or squares, of about twenty acres each. Behind these embankments canals and drainage ditches were dug, with floodgates or trunk culverts (with hanging doors at each end which opened and closed automatically with the changing tides) as openings through the dikes, to carry the river flows onto and off the fields as the planter wished. Finally, a number of smaller drains were constructed perpendicular to the large ditches, dividing the fields into plats of about one acre each, to quicken the flooding and draining processes. The scarcity of tidal swampland plus the considerable cost of reclamation made improved rice acreage the most valuable land in the antebellum South, selling for as much as $200 an acre, “more than double [that] of the best sugar-lands on the Mississippi.”²⁹

Rice planting methods changed little with the shift to the tidal lands. The hoe continued to be the chief work implement, the planter feeling no need to increase the productivity of the slave with the animal-drawn plow since the acreage that could be harvested—generally five to six acres per slave by the late antebellum period³⁰—determined what was planted. Only when the opening up of the virgin cotton lands of the Southwest put a severe drain on available slave power did the rice planters turn to the plow even for breaking the soil.³¹ A drill plow developed around 1812 which could trench and plant eight to twelve acres a day as compared to two by hand, was not used to any great extent because it “required more minute attention and judgment than could be calculated on among the field-laborers of that day.”³²

The crop season generally began in December with the burning over of the stubble from the former crop and the light breaking of the soil to a depth of about three inches. This preparation for planting continued during the ensuing winter months, interspersed with work periods for cleaning out the canals and ditches and repairing any breaks in the dikes or rotting planks in the wooden trunks. By mid-March planting was begun, with the planter usually scheduling three plantings: one in March and two in April, to coordinate with the dates forecast for the new and full moons for those months when the tides were strongest, with a possible additional planting in late May or early June. The seed was sown in shallow trenches about three inches wide and twelve inches apart and lightly covered, three bushels per acre being used for new ground and two to two-and-one-half for the older fields. Planters grew their own seed or purchased it from neighboring planters who specialized in the production of rice for seed or through their factors in Wilmington or Charleston.³³ Carolina Gold Rice, the type initially brought by the Goose Creek planters, remained the principal variety of rice grown on the Cape Fear. Carolina White Rice, also introduced from South Carolina, was planted to some extent but suffered in popularity from the tendency of the rice grains to shatter during harvest if overripe.³⁴

The planting was so conducted that an entire field or square was completed the same day it was begun, in order that the water could be turned on immediately with the next high tide. This flooding, known as the “sprout flow” (because its object was to help the seed to sprout), lasted normally four or five days or until the grain pipped, after which the water was removed by opening the floodgates at low tide. The field then remained dry until the rice plants could be seen in the rows from about fifty yards distance. Next came the “point” or “stretch” flow, lasting from three to seven days, or until the plants were three or four inches high. This flooding was designed to kill the grass and weeds, soften the hard lumps of earth, and protect the young plants from the birds. The field was then dried and given a light hoeing, with a second hoeing coming after fourteen to eighteen days. The “long” flow followed, with the water being raised at first above the tops of the plants to float off trash and kill insects and then lowered until the tips of the rice plants could be seen, at which level it was retained from ten to twenty days. The long flow was the most important of the flows, requiring considerable judgment and careful attention in its execution. Two additional hoeings were given the rice plants, one immediately when the field became dry and the other, the fourth or final hoeing, when the plants were about to joint, generally fifteen to eighteen days later. The final flooding, the “harvest” or “lay-by” flow, lasted from six to eight weeks, during which time the level of the water was raised continuously so that it remained “just below a white streak which is always seen on the stalks of rice just below the ear.” The main purpose of this last flooding was to give support to the rice stalks as the grain ripened; otherwise, they would become top-heavy and topple over.³⁵

An innovative method of planting, known as the “open trench” system, was developed in the Georgetown, South Carolina, area in the 1820s. By the 1840s it was being used quite extensively, especially where soils were beginning to show signs of deterioration as on the lower plantations on the Cape Fear which received little in the way of refreshing deposits from river freshets to compensate for soil decomposition. Under the open trench system, seed previously “clayed” (thinly coated by rolling it in moist clay to prevent its floating away) was sown in open drills, with the initial flow being kept on the fields for about three weeks as compared to the four or five days of the sprout flow when the seed was covered. Open planting had certain decided advantages: the crop was given a much faster start by a quicker germination of the seed and a faster growth of the plants in the initial growing period, making the rice plants in a month as large as those from covered planting in six weeks, thus shortening the growing season by two to three weeks; labor was saved by not having to cover the seed and by reducing the normal number of hoeings from four to three; the fields generally had less grass and weeds and volunteer rice (unwanted rice stemming from the refuse of the previous year’s crop) since these would have been largely killed off in the lengthy first flow; and crop yields were increased. Yet, there was a decided gamble involved in the first few weeks in open planting, for there the plants were pushed to grow more rapidly than their root system could support should a windstorm take place early in the growing season. However, planters faced with soil deterioration to the extent of having to abandon fields, as some were being forced to do on the Cape Fear, generally chose to take the risk involved.³⁶

The rice harvest usually began in early September. Immediately upon the withdrawal of the harvest flow, the hands took to the fields with the sickle or rice hook, cutting the rice stalks in handfuls about twelve inches above the ground in a sweep of three to four rows per hand, laying the cut rice across the stubble to dry. The following day the dried rice was collected into bundles or sheaves for removal to the barnyard where they would be put together in large stacks to await threshing. Most of the rice produced on the Lower Cape Fear was threshed by the hand flail, as was true of much of that of South Carolina and most of the rice of Georgia.³⁷ A threshing mill had been developed around 1811; however, the cost of threshing mills confined their use to only the wealthiest of the planters.³⁸ The winnowing house, present on all the plantations, served to separate the seed from the chaff. The final process in preparing the rice for market was that of “pounding,” or removing the outer hull from the grain. This involved the most complicated milling process³⁹ and entailed the greatest expense in machinery for the planter, to the extent that most planters by the late antebellum period were sending their rice for polishing either to the mill of a neighboring planter specializing in milling or to the rice mills in the cities.⁴⁰ Following the polishing the rice was placed in barrels averaging 600 pounds each (the finished product of about twenty bushels in the rough) for shipment. By the close of the antebellum period, a great deal of rice was being shipped in the rough, even to Europe (where pounding mills had been erected), since rough rice underwent transportation better and when cleaned was brighter and more palatable than rice polished before shipment. Factors in the rice ports—Wilmington, Charleston, and Savannah—handled the selling of the rice for the planters (which normally brought about 2 cents per pound in the rough and 3½ cents when polished) and made necessary purchases of stores and stock for their plantation and personal use, generally operating on a commission of 2½ percent.⁴¹

Each rice plantation constituted a composite community within itself. The focal figure in administering the plantation was the overseer. Because of the unhealthy malarial conditions occasioned by the stagnant waters of the flooded rice fields, the planters and their families sought refuge elsewhere following the planting season until the killing frosts of fall—in Wilmington, where a number of the Cape Fear planters maintained homes, or at such summering places as Smithville (now Southport), Summerville (a village in the pine woods sixteen miles from the river where several of the planters had summer homes), and Masonboro Sound.⁴² Acting as executive officer for the planter the overseer had complete charge of the plantation for the period of his contract (this was written, normally in January for the calendar year, giving the salary and terms agreed upon), and was consequently responsible for the labor and well-being of the work force, the maintenance of the plantation facilities, and especially the success of the crop, on which the renewal of the contract very often depended.⁴³

Next to the overseer in the plantation hierarchy was the slave foreman or “driver,” who had direct responsibility for the day-to-day performance of the workers. The driver would get the workers to the fields in the mornings, organize the work gangs for the day and assign “tasks” (one to smooth the ground, another to dig the trench, another to sow the seed, another to cover it, etc.), and excuse them upon the satisfactory completion of the day’s labor. In the absence of the overseer, the driver was responsible for the plantation, including disciplining the slaves, making him of necessity one who had the respect of the plantation work force.⁴⁴ The trunkminder was perhaps next in importance to the plantation. It was his responsibility to flood and drain the fields with exact precision and to keep the trunks in an ever-ready working condition.⁴⁵ Of especial importance at certain times of the year was the birdminder, whose task it was to drive away the rice birds or bobolinks, which visited the plantation in multitudes twice yearly with regularity—in May on their migration northward when they could damage severely the young plants in dry fields, and in August as they returned south for the winter when the ripening heads of rice would be too tempting to pass up.⁴⁶ In addition, each plantation had a corps of artisans, such as carpenters who built the trunks and maintained the houses and fences, a blacksmith or two who did the iron work, coopers who made the barrels to contain the rice, and bricklayers.⁴⁷

The rice plantation was populated principally by field hands. Because of the nature of the labor involved, rice plantations had a larger number of slaves per unit than did those of any other staple.⁴⁸ The slaves lived in simple quarters some distance from the plantation house, generally double houses of wooden boards or shingles with a chimney in the middle and occupied by two families, along what was called the “street.” At some point on the street was located the “sick house,” where the plantation nurse daily cared for the debilitated slaves (who suffered mainly from the various fevers but occasionally from such deadly diseases as cholera), administering the medicines prescribed by the doctor who looked after the health of the slaves on a number of plantations at once, normally under contract for so much per slave—$ 1.25 or $1.50—each year. Clothing was issued twice yearly to the slaves—in late April or early May for the summer season and in late November or early December for the winter. In addition, the winter issuance included blankets for the family. Rations were given out weekly, consisting of corn or rice mainly, with sometimes smoked bacon, potatoes, molasses, salt, and tobacco, in accordance with the size of the family. The slave family was generally given a piece of land for a garden to supplement its diet and sometimes was allowed to plant small patches of rice on the outer margins of the river. The planter also attended to the religious welfare of his slaves by employing missionaries to preach, and encouraging the holding of religious classes, on the plantation, and by allowing them to attend churches of their faith, usually Baptist or Methodist, in the general neighborhood.⁴⁹

Discipline on the rice plantation may have been virtually impossible had not the task system of labor been employed. Although little discretion on the part of the worker was allowed, with the driver standing by, often with whip in hand, to see that he did not do his work slightingly, the actual labor involved was generally not overly hard nor were the hours very long. By the 1840s the tasks had become standardized for all the different kinds of work involved in rice planting—in cultivation, for example, no more than a half acre was required for each full hand, which could be accomplished with industry by two or three o’clock in the afternoon. A northern visitor to relatives in the Georgetown area in 1851 described the tasks there as “only half day ones if they are ambitious, & then they can cultivate land for themselves, raise poultry, pigs & on some places cattle, catch fish, dig oysters or whatever they please....”⁵⁰ Beyond the portions of days of leisure the tasks provided for, a vacation of several days was given to all the plantation hands following the six-to-eight-week harvesting period, the one time of the crop season when the task system was not followed, with the entire plantation work force busy from dawn to dusk and even on Sundays, if the condition of the crop necessitated such a schedule.⁵¹ Finally, the laborers were rewarded at the year’s end with the lengthy vacation of the Christmas season, described at Buchoi Plantation on the Cape Fear as lasting “from Christmas Eve—always a half holiday—until the Yule log burnt in two after New Year’s Day.” The entire period was one of general merriment, especially Christmas Day when dancing went on from morning to night, with the slaves going up to the “Big House” for greetings and gifts and “their Christmas dram.” The Christmas season generally brought to the workers extra provisions in the way of beef or pork, molasses, and tobacco.⁵²

By the late antebellum period rice growing had reached considerable proportions on the Lower Cape Fear, to the virtual exclusion of other crops—even corn had to be imported.⁵³ In 1859 twenty-eight planters⁵⁴ (twenty in Brunswick County on the west side of the river with its more fortunate river swamplands and eight in New Hanover to the east) produced a crop of over 9 million pounds, or 200,000 bushels,⁵⁵ the largest ever, more than twice that of 1849⁵⁶ and almost four times the size of the crop of 1839.⁵⁷ Cape Fear plantations were not large when compared with those to the south, the average improved acreage in 1859 being 223.2 acres, from a high of 556 to a low of ninety-five.⁵⁸ Neither did they have the great slave concentrations so common to portions of South Carolina and Georgia—the largest slaveholding in 1860 was 160, the smallest, twelve, with a mean average of 56.2.⁵⁹ However, the Cape Fear rice fields were noted for their abundant yields, the 1859 crop of 200,000 bushels being produced on no more than 5,000 acres,⁶⁰ an average of forty bushels per acre or about ten bushels more than the average in the South.⁶¹

The “model plantation” would have been the Bluffs, owned by Colonel Thomas D. Meares of Brunswick County. Having only the fifth largest improved acreage on the river with 346 acres, in 1859 it produced 864,000 pounds of rice, or almost 20,000 bushels, the largest crop ever recorded on a single plantation on the Cape Fear, a yield in excess of sixty bushels per acre.⁶² The slave population was 107, third largest among the rice plantations.⁶³ The plantation possessed probably the finest milling facilities on the river, steam driven “of the best pattern.” Some of the fields had “been planted regularly for over 40 years and still produce[d] luxuriantly.” Apparently of the “old school,” Colonel Meares used no plows in his rice production, even though he owned four horses and twelve working oxen, “the whole work being done with a broad short hoe and a long narrow one.” An interesting by-product developed on the Meares plantation was hay from rice straw, “put up like clover with salt and water,” which was readily adopted by the other planters as a welcomed replacement for northern-produced hay theretofore used in the vicinity.⁶⁴

No plantation records—planters’ journals, business papers, or correspondence with overseer or factor—have survived to shed any light on individual experiences or profits⁶⁵ among the rice planters on the Lower Cape Fear. Only a few scattered bits of information give any idea as to the facilities on any of the plantations. Beyond the mill of Colonel Meares, it is known that Orton Plantation, southernmost of the plantations and historic home of “King” Roger Moore before his death in 1750 and later home of Governor Benjamin Smith in the early l800s, located in Brunswick County about midway between Wilmington and the mouth of the river, had a water-powered “rice machine” and mill as early as 1825.⁶⁶ Clarendon Plantation, five miles below Wilmington in Brunswick, was advertised in 1834 as having a “brick barn with a framed mill house attached and two [water-powered] threshing mills.”⁶⁷ Belvidere Plantation, immediately west of Wilmington in Brunswick and home of two governors, Benjamin Smith in the late eighteenth century before his purchase of Orton in 1796 and Daniel L. Russell in the late nineteenth century,⁶⁸ had by 1831 “a threshing machine and other machinery” in “a barn, 110 feet long, 40 feet wide,... of brick, put up in the most substantial manner.”⁶⁹ Lyrias Plantation, located three-and-a-half miles above Wilmington on the Northwest branch, possessed “a steam engine of ten-horse power.... Also, a threshing machine, in a building 25 by 35 feet.”⁷⁰ The Census of 1860 gave the number of rice mills on the Lower Cape Fear as ten (all in Brunswick),⁷¹ the combined operation of which enabled about two thirds of the rice produced there to be shipped as polished rice, the rest being sent out as rough or “paddy” rice to be cleaned elsewhere, perhaps in Charleston or New York.⁷²

Rice planters were not given to building elaborate and expensive dwelling houses on their plantations because of their spending only a portion of the year there. The notable exception to this rule on the Cape Fear was the magnificent brick mansion at Orton, the original portion of which had been built by “King” Roger Moore probably in the 1730s. Around 1840 Dr. Frederick J. Hill, then owner of Orton, changed the structure of King Roger’s “story and a half” house to that of two stories with ten rooms and an attic, and beautified its front by installing four large fluted Doric columns in the Greek Revival or Neo-Classic architectural style then in vogue. Orton’s mansion alone remains of the antebellum homes on the Cape Fear; its only change to the present are the two imposing wings added by Dr. James Sprunt in 1910.⁷³ Another plantation house with outlying dependencies of some substance was that of Belvidere, described as a comfortable and convenient two-story dwelling house and a building one and one half story with kitchen, wash house, stable, carriage house, smokehouse, etc.... all of which buildings are of brick, put up in the most substantial manner.”⁷⁴ More typical of the plantation homes, however, would have been that of Clarendon, described in 1834 as being “a comfortable dwelling house,”⁷⁵ probably of wood as most of the Cape Fear plantation houses were.⁷⁶ With respect to additional housing on the plantations in the way of overseers’ homes and slave quarters, Orton had “houses ... for 200 hands”;⁷⁷ Clarendon contained “Negro quarters, capable of containing 100 hands, well built of brick and covered with Dutch pantile,” and “a comfortable house for the overseer”;⁷⁸ Belvidere had an “overseer’s house [which still stands] and kitchen ... of brick”;⁷⁹ and Lyrias was described as having “all necessary outhouses, comfortable quarters for fifty laborers...”⁸⁰

The Civil War caused no disruption of rice planting on the Lower Cape Fear. Except for deteriorating facilities and badly worn or broken tools and implements, the rice crops continued to be produced as usual. Wilmington remained open as a port to the very end of the war, and it seems likely that rice moved out from there in its normal routine, although in somewhat different trade channels. Even after the fall of Ft. Fisher in mid-January, 1865, with the Union forces moving up the west bank of the river toward Wilmington, runaway slaves were being recovered⁸¹ and slaves advertised for sale⁸² as if no war existed.

The end of the war, however, brought almost total chaos to the rice industry there for the immediate moment.⁸³ The rice planters found themselves suddenly dispossessed of several thousand slaves, and some even of their land. Orton, Kendall, Lilliput, and Pleasant Oaks, the four southernmost plantations and collectively making up a stretch of more than five miles along the river, were wrested from their owners by the Union military command in Wilmington and “set apart for the use of freedmen, and the destitute and refugee colored people,”⁸⁴ a situation which continued from April until September, 1865, when a decree from President Andrew Johnson returned the plantations to their original owners.⁸⁵ Undoubtedly the invading army had taken from the rice plantations what it needed in the way of livestock and supplies; however, it seems to have inflicted no sizable destruction on them as had occurred on some of those in South Carolina and Georgia.

The rice plantations on the Lower Cape Fear went largely unplanted in 1865. The only rice reported was that in “small patches here and there, cultivated by Negroes for themselves...”⁸⁶ This seems hardly likely though, for some plantations were being planted to the south where the war’s disruptiveness was even greater.⁸⁷ Two major problems faced the planters in their at-tempted resumption of planting: securing adequate resources to finance the crop and arriving at a suitable work arrangement with the emancipated slaves. Borrowing was the planter’s only financial recourse; however, the excessive interest rate—sometimes as high as 2½ to 3 percent per month—virtually assured that his would be a losing operation.⁸⁸ Securing an adequate labor supply proved to be equally trying. Where the Negroes could be hired for cash wages, the planter often found to his consternation that following payday on Saturday many failed to show up for work on Monday.⁸⁹ Work contracts could be arrived at with the Negroes; the planter had little legal or moral means, however, to insure that the laborers would carry through. Under the contracts the laborers would get one-half of the year’s crop after a fifth had been deducted to cover the plantation expenses. The planter would furnish all necessary tools and equipment; the workers agreed to supply all labor needed, including the maintenance of the ditches, trunks, and fences and to furnish their own provisions.⁹⁰ A labor system used extensively in the Sea Islands and by some planters on the Cooper River in South Carolina, known as the “two-day system,” may have been practiced by rice planters on the Cape Fear. Under this arrangement the laborer would give two days of work a week (usually Monday and Tuesday) in return for five to seven acres of land for his own use and living quarters and fuel. The planter would pay for additional labor performed at the rate of 50 cents a day or task.⁹¹ Some planters used what might be called the “three-day system,” giving two-and-a-half acres of land, two pounds of bacon, and four quarts of corn in return for the laborer working three days each week.⁹²

Recovery was indeed slow on the Lower Cape Fear. “Of the old planters on the Cape Fear River, who had the temerity to undertake the planting of rice with free labor as it existed in 1865, 1866, 1867, and 1868, not one succeeded.”⁹³ Several plantations were put up for sale, such as Lyrias in 1865⁹⁴ and in 1872 the great Orton, valued at $100,000 before the war.⁹⁵ Others were leased; Kendall, historic home of General Robert Howe of Revolutionary War fame, was rented in 1866 by Major J. C. Mann and was the subject of a feature story with illustrations on rice planting on the Cape Fear in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper of October 20, 1866.⁹⁶ The 1867 crop was estimated to be only 32,000 bushels;⁹⁷ and the crop of 1869 was even less, 1,147,343 pounds (748,418 in Brunswick and 398,925 in New Hanover) or about 25,000 bushels, only about one eighth of the 1859 crop.⁹⁸ Six planters in Brunswick and three in New Hanover produced in 1869 in excess of 20,000 pounds, the largest individual production being 280,000 pounds. Wages paid for noncontracted labor by these planters for the year ranged from a high of $2,600 to a low of $100.⁹⁹

By the mid-1870s other uses were being suggested for the abandoned rice fields. An editorial in the Wilmington Post of May 14, 1875, made the following observation:

On the opposite side of the Cape Fear from Wilmington, and stretching nearly ten miles above and below the city lie thousands of acres of land as fertile as any to be found in America. Looking out from the roofs of any of our higher buildings the eye comprehends nearly the whole of a level green, once the source of princely incomes, but now nearly all an uncultivated waste. Where once waved the golden harvests of rice, there is now seen little but a melancholy picture of broken dikes, flooded marshes, and the ruined rice mills. Eagle’s Island, a part of this now unproductive tract, lies directly opposite the city, girted by the Cape Fear and Brunswick rivers. It contains about 2,500 acres of land which, if diked above the highest flood or fresh and drained to the depth of four feet, and properly cultivated would produce annually a crop worth not less probably than $3,000,000. Let us consider the feasibility of utilizing this land. . . .

We ask the attention of our business men, and of capitalists abroad, to this subject. If a good title to the land could be obtained at reasonable rates, and a stock company formed and the enterprise completed, it would be a better paying stock than cotton factories or banks, and we would no longer be obliged to bring our corn from Illinois and our hay from New York. If all those lands could be reclaimed the mouth of the Cape Fear would become the granary of the state.¹⁰⁰

Such changes in the agricultural format of the Lower Cape Fear, however, were not to be effected. Rice continued to be the main agricultural interest even though the crop of 1879 was little more than that of 1869—1,423,920 pounds¹⁰¹ as compared to 1,147,343, the product of only about 800 acres and twelve plantations, four of these exceeding 100 planted acres and one having 300 acres in rice.¹⁰²

The 1880s, however, finally brought a real revival of commercial rice planting on the Lower Cape Fear, even though its duration was to be only that of an Indian summer. A significant factor in this was the tariff imposed on foreign rice (about 100 percent), enabling rice to sell for 4 to 4½ cents per pound,¹⁰³ which made it possible for the planter to grow rice profitably even with the primitive techniques still in use and the cost of emancipated labor. In 1881 sixteen planters had total holdings of 2,192 acres, ranging in amount from 260 to fifty, with a number of Negroes planting about 400 acres in small amounts, thus bringing back into cultivation about half of the abandoned rice fields. On this acreage, it was estimated that 125,000 bushels would be harvested.¹⁰⁴

The most successful effort at reviving large-scale planting on the Lower Cape Fear was that of John F. Garrell of Sans Souci Plantation on Smith’s Creek and the Northeast branch just above Wilmington. Garrell planted twenty-two-and-one-half acres of rice on an experimental basis at Sans Souci in 1878. Success prompted him to purchase the neighboring Hanaper Plantation and engage in a major reclamation effort on both units. By the following spring he had reclaimed 150 acres on Sans Souci and 100 acres at Hanaper. Subsequent purchases of adjoining Traponte and Thornbury tracts enabled Garrell to consolidate the four units into an enlarged Sans Souci Plantation of 1,200 acres. Ultimately Garrell was to reclaim over 300 acres of rice land, on which he produced crops averaging fifty bushels per acre. His fields were a model of perfection, with the canals, dikes, and flood-gates “in excellent condition.” The work force at Sans Souci normally consisted of twenty-five hands, with over 100 at the harvest season, under the direction of an overseer and two assistants. Garrell also engaged in the production of corn and cotton, having about fifty acres of each. On all of his fields he used rice straw as manure, which proved to be quite successful.¹⁰⁵

Simultaneous with the revival of rice culture on the Lower Cape Fear were experiments to improve the techniques of planting. In 1881 a planter was described as

trying an experiment in rice culture this season which has never been tried before in the section.... He is cultivating about 12 acres of lowland or rice fields by plows, instead of in the old way, by hoes.... The cost of cultivation by plows, is fully one-third less than by hoes.... If his experiment turns out as happily as he expects it will, the cultivation of the Cape Fear rice-fields will be much easier and at a low cost.¹⁰⁶

Even with such attempts to increase production and cut costs, the planter still operated under considerable difficulties with respect to labor. Labor had become increasingly more expensive, with females by the 1880s being paid 50 to 75 cents a day and males, 60 cents to $1.25 a day.¹⁰⁷ Also, the laborers became more and more inefficient, sometimes openly refusing to undertake tasks and in other instances performing the tasks with considerable slothfulness, to the consequent reduction of yields per acre and the impairment of the quality of the grain.¹⁰⁸

Further difficulties were to be visited upon the Cape Fear rice planters by developments in Louisiana in the mid-1880s. In 1883 the North American Land and Timber Company, organized by a group of English and American land speculators, purchased approximately 1.5 million acres of state and federal land in southern Louisiana, about two thirds of which was coastal marshland. The object was to drain the marshes for conversion into rice fields. Rice had been grown in Louisiana almost as early as in South Carolina; however, it had never achieved any great commercial importance there, being grown only in small amounts on the bottomlands bordering the Mississippi River. The North American Land and Timber Company undertook to enlarge the rice-growing area of Louisiana by developing a large-scale commercial rice production in the coastal marshlands. “Plow boats”—floating barges stationed in canals half a mile apart to pull plows, cultivators, or reapers on cables back and forth across the fields—would be used for the plowing, cultivating, and harvesting—a hazardous scheme because of its dependence upon an unproven technique, but which was soon plowing as much as seventy acres a day per plow boat. Eventually, however, this reclamation project was abandoned, partially because of engineering difficulties but principally because of competition from an unexpected quarter.¹⁰⁹

A surprising turn of events in rice planting in Louisiana was to come in the development of the Land and Timber Company’s remaining 500,000 acres, upland prairies. Dr. Seaman A. Knapp, president of Iowa Agricultural College and renowned agricultural expert, was chosen to lead in this undertaking. Knapp’s strategy was to set up experimental farms, manned by midwesterners, where wide diversification of crops could be displayed to encourage migration to the area. On such farms it was soon discovered that rice could be grown on the upland prairies. It was only natural for these transplanted midwesterners to apply their small-grain techniques and equipment to the culture of rice, a development which would effect the greatest single change in the history of rice planting. These prairie uplands had sufficient elevation to enable the farmer to drain off the water (here supplied by pumps from streams and wells, making for an almost limitless available acreage) when the grain was ripe and dry out the land firmly enough to support the heavy harvesting machines, something the soggy soil of the river bottoms or coastal marshes could not do. Thus within a few years there occurred a revolution in rice planting by which the yield per man was increased ten- to twenty-fold. One man and four mules could plant and harvest 100 acres of rice.¹¹⁰ The Knapp revolution, further enhanced by the importation of Japanese Kiushu rice seed which enabled about 25 percent greater yields,¹¹¹ catapulted Louisiana into first place among the rice producing states in 1889;¹¹² and by 1900 Louisiana was producing approximately 70 percent of the total American crop.¹¹³

If the sudden developments in Louisiana spelled the doom of rice planting on the Lower Cape Fear and elsewhere in the old rice kingdom, what brought the final coup de grace was a sequence of devastating hurricanes around the turn of the century. Hurricanes had come with some degree of destructiveness to the rice plantations on the Cape Fear about every ten years; one in August, 1837, destroyed all the water mills there except that of Orton and much of the rice crop.¹¹⁴ In the 1890s, with the planters beset with troubles from all sides, the hurricanes seemed to come with greater frequency and more destructiveness. That of August 27, 1893, was particularly damaging. Especially hard hit were the plantations farther down the river: “At Kendal[l] ... the banks were broken and part of them washed away. At Orton, the damage was greater than at Kendal[l].¹¹⁵ Hard on the heels of this, on October 13, came another even more damaging storm. The tide accompanying this latter hurricane was “the highest ever known” in the area, “stretching in an unbroken sea across the rice fields as far as eye could reach.”¹¹⁶ Other hurricanes followed—September 27, 1894, September 29, 1898, September 21, 1906, October 20, 1910, and August 28, 1911—which, while not as violent as those of 1893, inflicted damages of varying degrees.¹¹⁷

Doubtless the planters could have continued to weather these storms had it not been for the devastating competition from the Southwest. Instead, they became weaker after each disaster, until eventually even the most daring were forced to retire. The 1909 crop, last to be recorded for the Lower Cape Fear in the federal census, was only 7,800 bushels from 250 acres, no more than a good crop from one plantation in the heyday of the antebellum period.¹¹⁸ Well might the forlorn Cape Fear rice planter have shared the sentiments of Mrs. Elizabeth W. Allston Pringle, the Famous “Woman Rice Planter” of Georgetown, who wrote following the September storm of 1906: “I fear the storm drops a dramatic, I may say tragic, curtain on my career as a rice planter,” and later in the year: “The rice-planting, which for years gave me the exhiliration of making a good income myself, is a thing of the past now—the banks and trunks have been washed away, and there is no money to replace them.”¹¹⁹

Footnotes