This chapter provides an overview of the rapid decline of commercial inland rice cultivation in the South Carolina Lowcountry after the Civil War. Faced with new questions of labor and economies, land owners looked toward new commodities to produce on the former rice plantations. Timber companies began purchasing these tracts in large numbers and agressively harvesting trees and, once again, dramatically altering the landscape. By the turn of the twentieth century, these tracts became part of the United States Forestry Service or incorporated into the growing development surrounding Charleston.

Chapter 6 documents inland cultivation strategies during the final two decades of the antebellum period.Using as a model the Biggin Basin, located at the headwaters of the Cooper River, this chapter discusses how a community of former inland rice planters revitalized the practice to supplement cotton production as a way to counter the fluctuating market. Revival of inland rice was a consequence of agricultural reform that took hold in select planter circles in the mid-nineteenth century. Lowcountry planters were part of this larger population having received the message through agricultural journals and societies, and scientific books. Promoters of agricultural reform called for a modern and scientific practice of agriculture to maintain soil fertility and crop output, halt westward migration, and curb the loss of status and political power by the South Atlantic states.

Chapter 3 discusses the dramatic transformation of inland rice cultivation between 1730 and the end of the American Revolution as it coincided with the appearance of tidal irrigation. Spurred by the land boom, planters moved rice cultivation from small-stream floodplains down to broad inland basins. To build elaborate infrastructures on these low-lying wetlands, planters had to invest in additional enslaved labor. This chapter argues that the dramatic change in inland rice cultivation was modeled on planters’ development of tidal irrigation along the Lowcountry rivers throughout the mid-eighteenth century. Both the evolving inland system and emerging tidal system required more extensive labor forces than before to create precisely leveled fields, massive embankments, and extensive canals. Creating a more extensive irrigation and drainage network called for a sophisticated understanding of hydrology and soils. With the intense development of rice fields in the Lowcountry basins, inland planters also encountered new problems. Malaria, declining soil fertility, pests, freshets, and droughts all documented how the natural and the built environments could work at cross-purposes.

Chapter 4 highlights the collective effort of four rice plantations on the Wando River headwaters in Charleston County that enabled the owners to cultivate the crop up to the Civil War. This chapter explains how inland cultivation maintained an important presence in the Lowcountry landscape. To illustrate the complex role that inland rice plantations played in contrast to the predominant tidal system, this chapter provides a microanalysis of these four inland plantations – Charleywood, Fairlawn, Clayfield, and Wythewood – from 1783 to 1860.The owners of these tracts aggressively annexed surrounding plantations, intensified water management through canalization, and maintained a substantial enslaved labor population to carry out these tasks.Highlighting these four plantations, this chapter traces the evolution of inland rice culture and describes how it resembled and then swayed from tidal cultivation practices.

Chapter 5 explains how aspiring planters used inland rice plantations as a way of entering the planter aristocracy before the Civil War. Land values, as they relate to shifts in technology and agricultural output, reveal the accessibility for an emerging upper middle-class to enter into the planter elite. During the antebellum period, most productive rice lands were beyond the means of professionals and merchants striving to enter into the upper echelons of society. When put up for sale, tidal rice plantations received a premium price, and most desired lands stayed in families through inheritance or marriage. Land, and rice production, was a means to reflect one’s status and define one’s title in the rigid Lowcountry social hierarchy. Inland rice plantations, on the other hand, were more affordable and did become available to people aspiring to obtain rice planter status, although attempting this mode of social elevation came with monetary and emotional costs. Planters still had to populate their fields with a labor force, often in limited numbers, while the inland environment made difficult any attempts to plant the grain.

Chapter 2 discusses early rice-cultivation strategies in South Carolina from the grain’s approximate introduction in 1685 to the end of the proprietary period in 1729. During this time, colonists transformed the grain from one of several experimental commercial ventures into the central cash crop of early-colonial South Carolina. This chapter also discusses the dynamic relationship of rice farming with topography and culture. European colonists began experimenting with rice cultivation alongside wheat and barley, as well as cotton and tobacco. At the same time, Africans' knowledgeable of growing rice made it thrive in wetland areas for the necessary subsistence gardens. By the turn of the eighteenth century, these two cultural interpretations of rice farming merged to produce grain on small-stream floodplains.At the heart of this chapter is an analysis of how both free and enslaved people used various topographies to cultivate a particular grain and the lasting results that evolved from the early plantation landscape.

This chapter defines the scope, themes, and geography of the book.