Rice production helped
support North Carolina's
early economy for many
ye cits. African people had
to clear, design, and build
the rice fields before they
could start laboring in
them to grow the crop.
Successful rice fields (right)
often started out as cypress
swamps (below) or tidal
marshes. The people of
"Guinea" also contributed
many other plants, foods,
and ideas.
Definitions, pages 14-15
When King Charles Hof England
granted the land between Florida
and the Virginia border to the
Lords Proprietors, he referred
to it as Carolina. In 1 712,
the proprietors divided the
colony into North Carolina
and South Carolina.
These codes were laws and
regulations that were written
to restrict the activities and
movements of free black people.
Some codes restricted the
raising of livestock, hunting
with a gun, and learning to
read and write.
The states that border on the
Gulf of Mexico arc usually
considered the Deep South.
By the 1690s, planters who had setded in the
southern parts of the Carolina colony (present-day
South Carolina) found they had the right climate
and geography for growing rice. Some of these
planters then decided to make rice their major
agricultural crop. But few of them, if any, knew
anything about raising rice. They needed people
who did know. So, they purchased enslaved persons
directly from West Africa, where the natives had
been raising rice for several hundred years.
These African natives knew how to prepare
fields and how to grow, harvest, and use rice. The
planters who purchased these people hoped their
new slaves could also grow the crop in the
New World. Indeed, by the 1720s, rice had become
South Carolina’s most profitable export, and before
long, South Carolina planters started moving
northward to the swampy shores of the lower
Cape Fear River valley in North Carolina.
In spite of the large amounts of money needed
to transform swamplands into rice fields, North
Carolina’s rice crops also became very profitable.
These profits, in fact, grew to be second only to
the area’s plentiful harvests of naval stores —
tar, pitch, and turpentine.
The rise of rice in North Carolina
Rice production was very difficult work and
required a large number of field slaves as well as
several enslaved experts. Rice planters relied on these
experts to have the knowledge and skills necessary
for building the fields, planting the crops, flooding
and draining the fields, watching the crops,
and finally harvesting, threshing, and preparing
the rice for sale.
Field slaves had the most difficult jobs on the
plantation, since most of the work they performed
took place in snake- and insect-infested swamps.
Injuries and disease were all too common. Their
work started with clearing the land. They then had
to dig extensive systems of canals, ditches, levees,
and dams that would control water to flood and
drain the fields. Only after all this work was
completed could the annual process of
growing and harvesting rice begin.
In late March and during April, field slaves began
to sow rice seed in rows that were about fifteen feet
apart so they would have room to walk between the
growing plants. The fields were then flooded for
about a week so that the seeds could sprout. The
fields were then drained. During the rest of the
growing season, the fields were flooded and drained
many times. The rice was harvested in September. It
was threshed, polished, and sold during the fall and
winter months.
Its fall came quickly
The emancipation of slaves in the United States
was the beginning of the end for the rice plantations
of North Carolina. Without the cheap labor of
enslaved workers, rice would have become a very
expensive crop. Growers in the state no longer
had the money to raise it.
As technologies changed and made planting
and harvesting rice easier and cheaper, some later
attempts were made to rerive the industry. But
competition from established rice growers in
Louisiana and other states in the Deep South
caused those efforts to fail.
The final end to large-scale commercial rice
production in North Carolina came in the late 1800s,
when a series of large hurricanes damaged the old
rice fields beyond repair. The state’s growers gave up.
That ended not only one of North Carolina’s oldest
farming traditions but also one of the largest African
contributions to North Carolina agriculture.
The importance of rice
to North Carolina
by Keri Towery
R
ice was a very profitable
crop in the late 1600s. People
in foreign lands were already
familiar with it, and it was gaining popularity as a
food for the growing slave trade. The problem
was it would grow only in certain areas under
certain conditions.
Carolina had those areas and conditions
Кеч
Towery is currently
и
graduate
intern at The Sbadcws-en-thc-Teche
Historic
/
louse Museum, a National
Trust for Historic Preservation
property m Louisiana She has also
worked at the Museum of History and
has written for
П
1JI I in the past
Ready lor the I larvcst is copied
from A Carolina Rice I tint anon of the
Fifties , published m 1936. This hook
is. in part, a collection of watcrcolor
paintings by Alice R. Huger Smith.
The cypress tree on the Neuse River
is from the North Carolina Division
of Archives and I listory.
14
