South Carolina's Lowcountry is awash in history, mystery, and breathtaking beauty and is comprised of roughly 27 counties south and east of the Fall Line, a low, east-facing cliff paralleling the Atlantic coast. Over the past 300 years, farmers and their families, planters, and African Americans-both enslaved and freed-have shaped this area's culture. Through war, peace, poverty, and prosperity, the unique characteristics and customs of the Lowcountry have been woven together and form a rich, enigmatic tapestry distinct from any other.Rural Life in the Lowcountry of South Carolina contains over 200 previously unpublished images depicting life at the grassroots level during the first half of the 20th century. This volume presents a realistic and at times sobering view of everyday people and their struggles to make a living. Exploring such topics as growing crops, making syrup, and raising livestock, this volume also portrays the area's distinct architecture, evident in barns, farmhouses, and church buildings. As the state becomes more industrialized, residents are beginning to forget their agricultural heritage, and many know only the stories of elderly family members. These photographs, coupled with informative text, will bridge the present generations with the past.

South Carolina's Lowcountry is awash in history, mystery, and breathtaking beauty and is comprised of roughly 27 counties south and east of the Fall Line, a low, east-facing cliff paralleling the Atlantic coast. Over the past 300 years, farmers and their families, planters, and African Americans-both enslaved and freed-have shaped this area's culture. Through war, peace, poverty, and prosperity, the unique characteristics and customs of the Lowcountry have been woven together and form a rich, enigmatic tapestry distinct from any other. Rural Life in the Lowcountry of South Carolina contains over 200 previously unpublished images depicting life at the grassroots level during the first half of the 20th century. This volume presents a realistic and at times sobering view of everyday people and their struggles to make a living. Exploring such topics as growing crops, making syrup, and raising livestock, this volume also portrays the area's distinct architecture, evident in barns, farmhouses, and church buildings. As the state becomes more industrialized, residents are beginning to forget their agricultural heritage, and many know only the stories of elderly family members. These photographs, coupled with informative text, will bridge the present generations with the past.

Architecture has been defined as "the gift of one generation to the next." In the South Carolina Low Country the gift is a particularly precious one-a rich treasure of buildings that not only charm us with their graceful beauty, but offer us a glimpse into a vanished world of prosperous plantations and provincial aristocracy.

A thorough account of rice culture's final decades and of its modern legacy. In mapping the slow decline of the rice kingdom across the half-century following the Civil War, James H. Tuten offers a provocative new vision of the forces—agricultural, environmental, economic, cultural, and climatic—stacked against planters, laborers, and millers struggling to perpetuate their once-lucrative industry through the challenging postbellum years and into the hardscrabble twentieth century. Concentrating his study on the vast rice plantations of the Heyward, Middleton, and Elliott families of South Carolina, Tuten narrates the ways in which rice producers—both the former grandees of the antebellum period and their newly freed slaves—sought to revive rice production. Both groups had much invested in the economic recovery of rice culture during Reconstruction and the beginning decades of the twentieth century. Despite all disadvantages, rice planting retained a perceived cultural mystique that led many to struggle with its farming long after the profits withered away. Planters tried a host of innovations, including labor contracts with former slaves, experiments in mechanization, consolidation of rice fields, and marketing cooperatives in their efforts to rekindle profits, but these attempts were thwarted by the insurmountable challenges of the postwar economy and a series of hurricanes that destroyed crops and the infrastructure necessary to sustain planting. Taken together, these obstacles ultimately sounded the death knell for the rice kingdom. The study opens with an overview of the history of rice culture in South Carolina through the Reconstruction era and then focuses on the industry's manifestations and decline from 1877 to 1930. Tuten offers a close study of changes in agricultural techniques and tools during the period and demonstrates how adaptive and progressive rice planters became despite their conservative reputations. He also explores the cultural history of rice both as a foodway and a symbol of wealth in the lowcountry, used on currency and bedposts. Tuten concludes with a thorough treatment of the lasting legacy of rice culture, especially in terms of the environment, the continuation of rice foodways and iconography, and the role of rice and rice plantations in the modern tourism industry.

Examines the creation of 'sporting plantations' in the South Carolina lowcountry during the first four decades of the twentieth century.

"Yancey Yarboro is home from the war and growing tomatoes on his father's land. Susan Drake, married, beautiful and neglected, lives in a beach house not far away. They have never met, at least not yet. When real estate developers come looking for land to expand a golf course, Yancey wonders if he is about to lose everything. But Yancey has four hundred pounds of marijuana salvaged from a dope run gone awry. And he has Gator Brown, near-sighted hoodoo doctor, whose spiritual machinations sometimes fly wide of the mark. It's the Lowcountry of South Carolina. The jasmine is blooming and the moon and the magic are working overtime"--Dust jacket.