The Santee Delta region was once the heart of rice
production in the New World .
Beginning in the late 1600s and continuing through the late 1800s, the Santee Delta was extensively developed primarily for tidal rice production.
Tidal rice was perfected in the Santee Delta Region by generations of enslaved labor- and remnants of those fields can still be seen today. Little is known of the rice culture, enslaved workforce lifeways, and the plantation task system in South Carolina.
There is a gap in current scholarship regarding enslaved people who were living and working in the Santee Delta.
Unloading Rice Barges, South Carolina, 1870s. Sketch. Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early
African Diaspora, accessed May 29, 2022, http://www.slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/item/1164
My work in the Delta began in the 1980's as I began studying rice culture with the plan to write a book on rice cultivation in South Carolina.
I spent many a day in the Delta, surveying for artifacts associated with rice cultivation. Artifacts included mill sites, steam and water powered mills and threshing barn remnants, storm towers, slave settlements, overseer’s house sites, as well as any other sites that represented human and agricultural activities.
Dr. Richard D. Porcher, Jr.
Excerpt from letter written to owners of Kinloch Plantation
The Ingenuity of their Architecture
The Brilliance of their Agricultural Technology