A new exhibit opened last week at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Southport. “Along the Colonial Cape Fear” documents the history of southeastern North Carolina from its vast supply of naval stores, shipping operations from the port in Wilmington and rice cultivation in the 1700s.Exhibit Designer Jamee Vasil says the permanent exhibit is filled with educational interactive displays.
“We’ve got flip up panels, smell stations, touch screens which is interactive for adults and kids to really immerse you in an environment and really understand what people were doing in this colonial period.”
Public Radio East collaborated with the North Carolina Maritime Museum for the project to help share the story of the Carolina’s rice production. When the industry was first established, what we known now as North and South Carolina was a single colony.
“We are the northern most region, North Carolina, for rice cultivation.”
Lori Sanderlin is the Curator of Education for the NC Maritime Museum in Southport.
CROP “It wasn’t an easy job to have to process the rice from this area. But it was an important crop especially at Orton Plantation right down the road from us about 20 minutes was one of the largest rice plantations in the area.”
During the late 1600’s, rice plantations started to proliferate along the low country. Associate Professor of History at East Carolina University Karen Zipf says approximately 500 to 1,000 acres total were dedicated to rice cultivation in North Carolina. That’s compared to 70,000 acres in South Carolina.
“There’s two reasons why South Carolina was a more friendly state towards growing rice. One of those reasons is because it had a longer growing season, you have to have a longer period before the frost. And so the rice that was grown there was generally a slightly better quality at least for market consumption.”
A booming sugar cane industry in Barbados also played into the Carolina’s rice growing interests. Sugar cane, which was produced on the Caribbean island, was so profitable for farmers that they didn’t grow any crops to feed their slaves. Farmers began to set up rice growing operations on the South Carolina coast, and the rice was sent back to Barbados.
“So what happens then is that in eastern North Carolina you see some of the conditions favorable to rice growing and some of these South Carolina planter families begin moving up to the Cape Fear region. They find that that lower Cape Fear River region is very suitable to growing rice.”
Around the mid 1700’s, the Orton Plantation and the Kendal plantation were established in Brunswick County in North Carolina to grow rice.
“Those two plantations were owned by a man named Roger Moore and he had about 250 slaves on those two plantations. There were quite a number of rice plantations in the area, most of them were nowhere near as big as the rice plantations in South Carolina.”
While the size of the industry varied drastically, the process and conditions for growing rice here were similar to that of our southern neighbor. Readying a rice field was back breaking work, tasked mainly to slaves.
“it’s very difficult to do because these swampy areas with trees, some of these old growth trees that had to be cleared out. And of course, he brought in slaves to do this really hard labor in terms of clearing land.”
Before rice was planted, levees and dams had to be built so the cleared land could be flooded. At Orton Plantation and Kendal Plantation, fresh water from the Cape Fear River was manipulated to flow over the rice fields, submerging the plants for weeks at a time.
“and then when the growing season needed to have more dry soil, they would dam up the river in order for the crops to continue to flourish.”
Workers in the rice fields were exposed to dangerous and harsh conditions. They worked long days under the summer sun, trudging in swampy, snake and mosquito infested water.
“there was not any kind of mosquito control so there was a lot of malaria in the area. It was not healthful work at all.”
Zipf says planter families would give control to overseers and leave the plantation during the summer, when malaria was more prevalent. Slaves from Africa already had experience growing rice, with male workers doing more hard labor and women working with the rice after the harvest.
“They are the ones very instrumental in the technique for separating the rice from the hull in order to make it consumable. And it requires a very deft hand in terms of utilizing what was a giant mortar and pestle in order to get these hulls off of the grain of rice without damaging the grain.”
Even with the harshest conditions, expensive plantation maintenance, and human labor, rice cultivation was a lucrative business. Zipf says though rice grown in southeastern North Carolina was mostly for local consumption, some of it was exported to the British Empire.
During the early to mid 1700’s, a new industry began to emerge in eastern North Carolina. Naval stores such as tar, pitch and turpentine came from the numerous pine trees in the region and was used as waterproofing for ships. It was a more exciting and lucrative industry that would eventually replace rice production.
Curator of Education for the NC Maritime Museum in Southport Lori Sanderlin hopes visitors to the new “Along the Colonial Cape Fear River” exhibit gain a better understanding of the history of southeastern North Carolina and their contributions both geographically and economically.
“People really don’t quite grasp the importance of the long leaf pine, and why we’re called Tar Heels. We processed more naval stores than any other state and any other colony. Just the fact that they can come in and see that the trees made the masts and the sap, you would cook it and make the tar and all of these things tie directly into ships. And so it was very, very important to for England to receive this product from the Colonies and North Carolina was of course the most abundant.”
The exhibit is now on display at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Southport Tuesday through Saturday from 9 to 5. For more information, go to ncmaritimemuseums.com.
