Joyce Chaplin argues Jonathan Lucas gets too much credit as the inventor of the pounding mill, that other men had preceded him as other men had preceded Nathaniel Heyward in using tidal cultivation and others had introduced rice besides Henry Woodward.
She’s correct that whenever there are important inventions or scientific discoveries, there usually are many who recognize the problem and are working towards a solution. Robert Allston mentions Robert Nesbit who returned from a trip to Scotland to introduce a wind-operated threshing mill 1811 and a drill plow to simplify planting in 1812.
However, an idea must be accepted before it’s a successful innovation. Heyward was important because others followed his specific example. Nesbit was not because his neighbors abandoned his tools after he died in 1821, because they required workers have more skills than they could expect.
James Jonathan Lucas listed the people who ordered mills from his grandfather, so we know the path of diffusion for his innovation. No doubt he only mentions the most noted customers, but then those are the ones most likely to have influenced others.
Between John Bowman and Andrew Johnston he names Mrs. Thomas Middleton, Peter Horry, William Alston, Plowden Weston and Mrs. Arthur Middleton. The most important lines of communication weren’t between the Middleton brothers, but between the daughters of Rebecca Brewton and the grandchildren of William Allston.
Rebecca’s grandfather, Miles Brewton, had followed Jonathan Bryan into Georgia. She married Jacob Motte and became famous during the revolution when she helped Francis Marion burn her Congaree plantation house that the British had taken as a headquarters.
Rebecca was wealthy apart from her marriage: she inherited her brother Miles’ property when he died at sea. Laura Edwards suggests she defied convention when she settled plantations, no doubt those from Miles, on her daughters alone, and did not give her sons-in-law ownership. Her daughter Frances married Thomas Middleton, while Mary married William Alston.
Among the Middletons, both Frances Motte and Mary Izard were widows refusing to remarry at the time they ordered mills for the estates they managed. Like Frances’ mother, Mary Izard inherited property from her brother John, which is the land she developed on the Combahee with Lucas. Also like Rebecca Motte, she was left to her own devices during the war when her husband Arthur was a prisoner at Saint Augustine, and in this time, apparently, was reduced to begging from friends to feed her children.
The linkages and lines of influence may have been stronger between Rebecca and Mary, because Mary’s cousin, also Mary Izard, was the daughter of her father Walter’s brother Joseph who married Rebecca’s brother Miles.
William Allston and Esther LaBruce’s daughter Elizabeth married Thomas Lynch. Their daughter married John Bowman. Elizabeth’s sister Esther married Archibald Johnston, whose son was Andrew, while her brother Joseph’s son William married Mary Brewton Motte.
The path of diffusion then went from Elizabeth Allston Lynch’s daughter Sabina Bowman to her cousin by marriage, Frances Motte Middleton, and her cousin William Alston, married to Frances’ sister Mary. From there patronage passed to Frances’ cousin-in-law, Mary Izard Middleton.
The others, Peter Horry and Plowden Weston had plantations in the same area. Indeed, Weston’s Laurel Hill bordered land inherited by William and Esther Allston’s son John. John’s son William married Rachel Moore; when he died, she and her new husband sold the land she controlled. Her son, Washington Allston, sold Springfield to his cousin Benjamin Allston, while she sold Brook Green to Robert and Francis Withers who sold it to Joshua Ward, the husband of Benjamin Allston’s wife’s sister.
To keep himself identifiable in a family that reused names in each generation, the William who ordered the mill from Lucas changed his last name to Alston, while his uncles continued to use two L’s.
It’s rare to be able to trace diffusion so clearly. However, the Lucases’ mills might not have spread if the person who ordered one after Andrew Johnston hadn’t been Henry Laurens. The Allstons and Mottes proved the invention worked; Laurens gave it credibility with a larger market.
Notes: Mills built by Jonathon Lucas. List from James Jonathan Lucas, letter dated 20 April 1904 reprinted by The Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, volume 32, 1904.
1787 John Bowman, Peach Island, married to Sabina Lynch, granddaughter of William Allston
Wife Sabina Lynch
Her mother Elizabeth Allston
Her grandparents William Allston and Esther LaBruce
* Frances Motte Middleton, Washo plantation
Daughter of Rebecca Brewton and Jacob Motte
* Peter Horry, Winyah Bay
Wife’s sister married to Daniel Heyward
Horry uncle of Nathaniel Heyward
* William Alston, Fairfield on Waccamaw
Son of Joseph Allston
Grandson of William Allston and Esther LaBruce
Married to Mary Brewton Motte
Her parents Rebecca Brewton and Jacob Motte
* Plowden Weston, Laurel Hill on Waccamaw
Neighbor of William Allston’s widow Rachel Moore
His father John Allston
His grandparents William Allston and Esther LaBruce
* Mary Izard Middleton, Hobonny on Combahee
Daughter of Walter Izard
Niece of Joseph Izard, father of Mary Izard who married Miles Brewton
Cousin-in-law of Rebecca Brewton through her brother Miles
1791-1792 Andrew Johnston, Millbrook
Son of Esther Allston and Archibald Johnston
Grandson of William Allston and Esther LaBruce
1793 Henry Laurens, Mepkin
Many think it was Washington Allston’s older stepbrother Benjamin who was the one who bought Springfield, not the cousin Benjamin. The brother Benjamin was supposed to have inherited Brook Green. The resolution of William Allston’s estate was apparently messy, and no one provides any strong evidence to support the claim for either Benjamin.
Allston, Robert. A Memoir of the Introduction and Planting of Rice in South Carolina, 1843, reprinted in several other publications, including James Dunwoody, The Industrial Resources, Etc., of the Southern and Western States, volume 2, 1852, on Nesbit.
Chaplin, Joyce E. An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815, 1993.
Edwards Laura F. The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South, 2009.
Lane, G. Winston Jr. “Economic Power among Eighteenth-Century Women of the Carolina Lowcountry: Four Generations of Middleton Women, 1678-1800,” in Jack P. Greene, Randy J. Sparks, and Rosemary Brana-Shute, Money, Trade and Power: The Evolution of Colonial South Carolina's Plantation Society, 2000, on Frances Motte and Mary Izard.
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