South Carolina - Mill Invention

The widespread adaption of tidal rice cultivation precipitated a crisis in the old order: more rice was produced than slaves, using African derived mortar and pestles, could process. No one was willing to buy surplus slaves to handle the harvest work load, and some, who increased the work hours, realized their slaves were getting injured from the resulting fatigue and they were losing more than a quarter of their premium crop to poor handling.

They fell into what I call the contractor’s conundrum: the more successful a builder, the greater the costs and the fewer the rewards. Henry Ford’s answer had been improved automation, a solution criticized by many but rooted in the history of our industrial revolution.

However, when improved rice yields were overwhelming traditional processes, the idea of improved tooling was new. Oliver Evans patented the gravity-fed flouring mill that simplified grinding wheat in 1790. Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin, which made the mass production of cotton in South Carolina possible, in 1794.

Jonathan Lucas built the first workable rice mill for John Bowman in 1787.

His story, as told by his grandson, includes elements of both chance and cultural deliberation. His parents were mill owners in Cumberland County on England’s northwestern boundary with Scotland who trained their son to be a millwright.

During the final year of the revolution, while the Peace of Paris was being negotiated, Lucas, then in his late 20's, emigrated to the New World. The proverbial story holds he was headed for the Caribbean when a storm damaged his ship and landed him in Charleston in 1783.

Two years later, in 1785, a Scots immigrant hired him to build a saw mill on Hog Island. While he was working on the Santee, he and Bowman apparently discussed the problems of preparing rice for market. Two years later, Lucas built an experimental rice mill at Bowman’s Peach Island plantation that imitated the pounding action of the mortar.

By 1793, Plowden Weston was complaining his horse driven mill was so slow he could only process two or three batches a day. By then, Lucas had built a mill powered by the tides at Millbrook for Andrew Johnston, the son of a Scots immigrant, Archibald Johnston.

Jonathan’s son Jonathan married Sarah Lydia Simons in 1799 and soon after built a commercial mill on her Middleburg plantation where local planters could bring their grain to be processed. They also built mills in Charleston, and, in 1817, erected a steam mill in the harbor.

When the senior Lucas died in Charleston in 1822, he had transformed the tidal rice industry. By 1843, Robert Allston observed, "almost every planter of four hundred acres and upward, is provided with a tide-water or steam-pounding mill."

Notes:
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.

Carney, Judith. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas, 2001, describe crisis, broken rice sold at a lower price.

Chaplin, Joyce E. An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815, 1993, quotes Weston.

Lucas, James Jonathan. Letter dated 20 April 1904 reprinted by The Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, volume 32, 1904.