Rice to Ruin: The Jonathan Lucas Family in South Carolina, 1783-1929

 1 

SHIPWRECK AT CAPE ROMAIN

Shortly after the American Revolution, an Englishman in his early thirties, Jonathan Lucas,* was shipwrecked at Cape Romain near the Santee Delta of South Carolina. Nature’s fury could not have brought together more auspiciously on those sandy shoals a problem and its solution, for the young Englishman was destined to transform the rice industry in America.

The shifting sands at Cape Romain are barrier islands, behind which lay acre after acre of cypress river swamps and marsh lands devoted to the cultivation of rice for sale on such a scale that Robert Mills (1781–1855), Charleston native and Washington Monument architect, called them gold mines of the state.† After the Revolution the tidal method of rice culture supplanted the inland swamp method, but the extremely successful yields produced a processing bottleneck that Lucas, a millwright, observed as he made his way through the delta.

Lucas pondered the question of how to process the rice speedily as an agricultural predicament needing an industrial solution. The planters confronted a dilemma in which increasingly successful rice crops were hampered by counterproductive, nonmechanical preparation. This son of generations of successful mill owners and builders in western England watched how the grain was milled partly by hand, partly by animal power. The milling processes were tedious, destructive to the laborers, and exhausting to animal power. Lucas identified a problem in the separating of the husks from the grain: planters told him that a slave was lucky to pound out by hand, in wooden mortars with pestles, a bushel to a bushel and a half a day.

He viewed primitive rustic mills turned by animals, which revolved around pecker machines, so named because the pecker struck somewhat like a woodpecker pecking a tree. This was the simplest and probably the earliest type of rice mill used in South Carolina. The cog mill, in which upright pestles were driven by a horizontal cog wheel, was the second type. Lucas calculated that three to six barrels of rice per day was the maximum yield from these two types of animal-powered mills.*

FIG. 1. Cape Romain, St. James’ Santee Parish, South Carolina, where Jonathan Lucas was shipwrecked. Lucas Family Collections. Map adapted by Lynne Parker.

FIG. 2. Mortar and pestle. From Blakes Plantation, St. James’ Santee Parish. Photograph courtesy of the Charleston Museum, Charleston, South Carolina.

FIG. 3. Cog mill drawings by William Robert Judd

In both these types of wooden mills, the rice was ground to separate the chaff from the grain. Hand-powered wind fans then blew the chaff away. Next the rice was beaten in the mills until sufficiently polished and cleaned from the flour. Afterward it sifted through different-sized wire sieves before being packed in barrels. Both the pecker and cog mills were operated by human, horse, or oxen power, with oxen preferred. No matter which system of power was utilized, milling was agonizingly slow, labor intensive, and anything but cost efficient. It was obvious that the rice planters were hampered from truly efficient crop preparation and marketing by an antiquated production process.

FIG. 4. Pecker mill drawings by William Robert Judd

John Bowman, an innovative but eccentric South Santee River rice planter, had come to the United States from Glasgow, Scotland, to speculate in Florida land but instead settled on a Georgia plantation. He later moved to St. James’ Santee Parish, where he married Sabina Lynch Cattell, daughter of Thomas Lynch and Elizabeth Allston and the widow of William Cattell. Through this marriage Bowman came into possession of Peachtree Plantation and the Lynch lands on the South Santee, which his wife inherited when her brother, Thomas Lynch Jr., signer of the Declaration of Independence, was lost at sea. Bowman underscored the plight of his fellow rice planters to Lucas and asked if he could build a machine to clean rice quicker. Lucas said he would attempt to do so.

Another account has Lucas meeting Bowman not at Bowman’s South Santee plantation but in Charleston. According to that version, Bowman, while on King Street in downtown Charleston, noticed a windmill on the gable of a wooden store where Lucas lived. He discovered that Lucas had constructed the mill and needed work. Impressed with his obvious talents, he convinced Lucas to come to Santee.

FIG. 5. Wind-powered sawmill and windmill shaft. A hypothetical reconstruction of the wind-powered sawmill erected on Mill Island, near Cape Romain, in 1793 by Jonathan Lucas I. Drawn by William Robert Judd.

It would be a few years, however, before Lucas’s mechanical genius brought this project to fruition. First he had to get established financially and make a home in Carolina for himself and his new wife, the former Ann Ashburn (1752–1838) of Whitehaven, Cumberland County, England. His first wife, Mary Cook, had died in 1783. The new couple had immigrated to America, leaving behind the five children from Lucas’s first marriage—Jonathan II (born 1775); Jane (1777); Moses (1779); John (1781); and Joseph (1783).

Jonathan Lucas moved to Hog Island to build a windmill for Bowman. Hog Island was in Charleston Harbor near Mount Pleasant. Across from Hog Island, the public road ended at the junction of Shem Creek and Hog Island Channel, where the ferry made its crossings to Charleston. While the couple was living at Hog Island, their first child, Ann, was born on December 15, 1786. The windmill probably provided power for a sawmill. The mill’s harbor side location maximized the effect of coastal breezes and winds. It was also an advantageous location for a sawmill, with nearby shipyards, the city, and the adjacent plantation country.

FIG. 6. Carleton Lodge, Cumberland, England, near Egremont. Ancient home of the Lucas family. Lucas Family Collections.

In spite of these advantages, Lucas did not stay long at Hog Island; John Bowman had not forgotten his quest to find an engineer who could solve the husking problems of rice milling. In 1787, at Bowman’s Peachtree Plantation, Lucas, with his interest in mechanics, built the first completely successful water-powered rice-pounding machine that was fed by an impounded reserve of water. Bowman’s Run was the name of the stream formed when the swamp was banked to create a reserve for the water to run Lucas’s mill. The revolutionary mill operated from a pond or reserve impounded alongside the South Santee River. Since the lowcountry was too flat for waterfalls, Lucas’s design was activated by undershot waterwheels.

Thus Lucas transformed the rice culture. He was the Eli Whitney of the rice culture, though he slightly preceded Whitney’s similar transformation of the cotton culture. These two men played pivotal roles in ushering in the agricultural revolution in the United States. Their expertise would bind the South to two labor-intensive, lucrative crops heavily dependent on slave labor, a dependence that was shattered only by the Civil War.

Previously the rice planters’ predicament was similar to that faced by short-staple cotton planters, whose slaves could in a day’s work separate by hand only a few pounds of fiber from seeds. In 1788 Carolinian John Hart had applied for a patent on a machine to gin cotton, and Georgian William Long-street had developed a steam-powered roller gin in 1792, but it was Whitney who drew on existing devices and expertise to develop an improved gin to remove the bottleneck in cotton production, just as Lucas had done for the rice culture with an improved pounding mill.*

FIG. 7. Fairfield Plantation, circa 1730), St. James’ Santee Parish. Lucas Family Collections.

Both Lucas and Whitney made revolutionary breakthroughs in relatively short periods of time. Lucas had been in South Carolina only a few years, and Whitney had arrived in Georgia at Mulberry Grove Plantation in 1792. Basically Whitney had broken the logjam in cotton ginning by adding three features to a roller gin, and Lucas, by the ingenious use of undershot waterwheels, achieved a similar triumph in the rice business.

For the next half century, Jonathan Lucas, his son and grandson of the same name, and his son William constructed his remarkable new rice mill along the rice coast of Georgia and South Carolina and in England, Holland, and other European sites. Lucas mills were also built in Egypt and India.

Lucas’s achievement was timely. By 1787 the rice market had stabilized following the erratic price activity after the Revolution. Also, the traditional rice marketing associations among Charleston merchants, New England merchantshippers, and British trading houses had been restored. In addition there was an increase in rice mill construction prompted by the availability of capital in South Carolina and the new technological innovations incorporated in the Lucas rice mill design. Among Lucas’s technological innovations was the construction of a rolling screen for sifting rice. He was zealous in defending his claim and brushed aside the aspirations of James Dillet, who had actually received a patent for the screen. In 1789 Dillet advertised that he had obtained a patent for a rolling sifter, and he warned planters of legal consequences for using Lucas’s mill. They were to apply to his attorney, Theodore Gaillard at 53 Meeting Street in Charleston, for a license for which they had to pay a royalty or else incur a penalty of paying a threefold price. Lucas retorted with a published article telling rice planters to ignore Dillet’s advertisement, since he, Lucas, had been the first to suggest the application of a rolling screen for sifting rice. Not only that, he had constructed a rolling screen years before Dillet received his patent.*

In a more mundane venture, Bowman also had Lucas build a brick wind-powered sawmill for him at Cape Romain. Family correspondence indicates that the Hog Island mill was taken down and reassembled on Mill Island. Bowman intended to raft logs down the Santee River to be sawed on Mill Island near Cape Romain.†

Lucas soon needed additional machinists’ labor to capitalize on his enterprises. The aggressive Briton ran an ad in the Charleston City Gazette on February 5, 1790, in which he advertised for a few well-trained black apprentice carpenters and wheelwrights.

The wind-powered sawmill continued in operation for years. It was also used as a navigational landmark for coastal vessels until the first lighthouse was built at Cape Romain in 1827.‡ Initially Lucas’s windmill’s construction had alarmed port authorities in Charleston, because it was perceived to be a navigation hazard.

It was while the sawmill was being built that the couple’s first son, William, was born, on September 15, 1789, in a severe storm during hurricane season at Cape Romain. The difficulties of transportation and communication on these remote islands prompted Lucas to move his family to the construction sites where he was working.

FIG. 8. Mill Island. A scattered brick ruin and a partial curved brick wall are all that remain of the circular base upon which the mill structure could be manually rotated 360 degrees, allowing its sails to be aligned directly into the wind. Lucas Family Collections. Map adapted by Lynne Parker.

As Lucas built his sawmill at Cape Romain, Thomas Bennett and Daniel Cannon, listed as carpenters in the 1790 Charleston city directory living at 22 Queen and 74 Church Street, respectively, were building one in Charleston. Three days before Lucas published his request for mill apprentices, Cannon and Bennett reported in the City Gazette that their sawmill was open for business. Wind-powered sawmills were growing in number.

This wind sawmill of Thomas Bennett marked the beginning of the Bennett family’s rise to wealth and power in Charleston. The careers of Lucas and Bennett followed similar paths, and in succeeding generations the families intermarried.

Jonathan Lucas II came to America a few years after the birth of his brother William and assisted his father in building rice mills. Working under the talented elder Lucas was a challenge, and the younger Lucas must have experienced frustration. In his letter on December 12, 1795, to his father at Haddrells Point concerning a Pinckney plantation, Jonathan II exhibited the confident authority he had mastered buttressed by his expertise:

The wheel is all done, but in a way that I am not acquainted with. They are all face wheels and work in a droll manner. But he has come to the speed very well; it comes very nigh the same as ours. The lantern* I have given directions to make the same as ours and I will lay them out and the cogs of wheel that drives it. The other wheel was made long ago. They want a pair of millstones for it, and are depending on you to choose them for the intended mill.

I am very sorry you are displeased with my misconduct in regard to framing the wrong way. Perhaps you misrecollect the diameter of the water wheel for the shaft comes level with the plate and the plate next to the wall is but 7 inches thick and it would cut off if the studs had remained as before. The wheel is 13 feet and the buckets 12½ inches wide; the flash board, 3/4 inch thick. And the raceway is 6 feet 9 inches to the top of the plate. It is 2 feet above the head that the old mill ever had and if they bring down the water that they speak of, we must raise it 3 feet or more at least. But we can very well do that when we see it done. I made his raceway 11 feet 6 inches wide to have a wide wheel.

His father’s expertise as a mill builder was transforming rice production from a slow, labor-intensive, primitive, inefficient process, which captured the attention of lowcountry rice planters. Lucas’s rice milling revolution ushered in a golden era of rice culture during which planters garnered magnificent fortunes.

*  J. J. Lucas to Jonathan (John) Lucas, May 25, 1882. Jonathan Lucas Sen., your grandfather, was a native of Beckermit Parish, Cumberland, England. He and his family are from Carleton about ¼ miles from Egremont in above Parish.

†  Evans, Letters from Robert Mills, 120.

*  Gregorie, Jonathan Lucas (1754–1821), 486.

*  Chaplin, Anxious Pursuit, 278, 312–14.

*  Bacot, Culture of Rice in State.

†  Doar, Sketch of the Agricultural Society of St. James Santee, 15.

‡  For generations McClellanville residents such as Bobby Graham talked of removing the mill’s metal shaft from Mill Island to McClellanville. In 1997 the process to recover the shaft and display it at the Village Museum in McClellanville was initiated by Mayor Rutledge B. Leland III and Richard S. Kanaski with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Lucia H. Jaycocks served as local coordinator. The sixteen-foot shaft was moved on a full-moon tide in 1999 by Horry and Michael Morrison of H. R. Morrison and Sons with the cooperation of George Garris of Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge. The conservation process was spearheaded by Brad Rodgers, John Leader, Martha Zierden, Deborah Osterberg, Robert Morgan, Olga Caballero, and Ralph Bailey Jr. in their areas of expertise. Selden Bud Hill, director of the Village Museum, secured a hub from a Jonathan Lucas Mill at Wambaw Plantation through Alexander Lucas Lofton to complement the shaft display. Lyle Engesser, a heavy-equipment operator, placed the shaft and hub on the museum site in 2000. Letter from Rutledge B. Leland III to Richard S. Kanaski, June 22, 1998; Hill, unpublished interview with Roy Williams III, September 10, 2003.

*  Lantern or lantern wheel: a kind of pinion or wheel having cylindrical trundles instead of teeth.

 2 

FIRST TIDAL RICE MILL

Starting even before the decade of the 1790s, Jonathan Lucas’s career and fortunes were extraordinary. His clients were a who’s who of the rice-planting aristocracy in South Carolina, and they and their minions sought his favor and advice. Simultaneously he was establishing a great antebellum dynasty that eventually stretched to India and Egypt.

Closer to home from Mill Island, Lucas was directing töe building of a mill powered by a reserve at the five-thousand-acre Washo Plantation near the mouth of the Santee Delta. It was managed by Frances Middleton, widow of John Middleton. The late Middleton had been the son of William Middleton of Crowfield Plantation, St. James’ Parish, Goose Creek, and Crowfield Hall, Suffolk, England. He was educated in England but came to America at the outbreak of the Revolution. He joined Lee’s Legion, commanded by Light-Horse Harry Lee, father of Robert E. Lee.

Shortly after the war, Middleton married Frances Motte, daughter of Jacob Motte Jr. (1729–1780) and the legendary Revolutionary War heroine Rebecca Brewton Motte (1737–1815). On June 7, 1784, he purchased Washo, but he died five months later, on November 14, 1784. His infant son, John, was born the year of his father’s death. Frances Motte Middleton later married her brother-in-law and neighbor, Thomas Pinckney, in 1796.

At about the same time, Lucas was building mills in Prince George Winyah Parish: one for Revolutionary War hero Gen. Peter Horry (1747–1815) along a reserve on the south edge of Winyah Bay at his Dover Plantation and another for William Alston (1756–1839)* on his reserve pond at Fairfield Plantation along the Waccamaw River. George Washington, on his 1791 southern tour, visited Alston’s rice plantation. Later, after he had seen Lucas’s rice mill, Washington had a conversation with Gov. Charles Pinckney in which he confessed that he had no idea that such perfection of cultivation existed in America.*

During this period Lucas’s mechanical innovations created the first tidal rice mill, at Andrew Johnston’s (1748–1795) Millbrook Plantation on the North Santee, a few miles from Peachtree. While Lucas’s first water-powered rice mill at Peachtree set off a revolution in rice culture, it had a significant drawback. It and its generation of water mills were dependent on water captured in reserves that were at the mercy of inadequate rainfall. Gravity drove the movement of water, but if there were no water, the mills were useless.

Lucas’s tidal mill for Johnston made the vagaries of rainfall irrelevant, since the tidal mill operated on the unlimited water power provided by the tidal action of the lowcountry’s rivers, creeks, and bays. Planters may not have been able to depend on the rain, but the ebb and flow of the tides was as certain as the waxing and waning of the moon.

Lucas brilliantly adapted the tidal method of rice cultivation to his milling operations. Before the Revolution rice had been grown primarily by the reserve system, where a creek or a swamp had been dammed to create a reserve to irrigate and cultivate the crop. Uncertain rainfall or drought threatened the rice crop, however. After the Revolution rice was gradually grown by the more efficient tidal method, negating the effect of insufficient water. The tides pushed fresh water inland at high tide, and the fresh water rode atop the salt water. Thus twice a day the tides worked for the planters.

By building a dike alongside a river, such as the Santee, and installing swing gates that opened to the movement of the tidal flow and then closed as the flow reversed, Lucas tapped into unlimited water power for his mills. When the tidal flow reversed on the Santee at Millbrook, the water would be released from the tidal reservoir through a gate to the waterwheel. Approximately twenty-two feet in diameter and thirteen feet wide, the wheel was turned by the flowing water. It turned one way when the tide flowed in and the opposite way as the tide receded and the water was being released through a control gate. The mill’s action was regulated by a system of gears: a differentiated gear, for example, permitted the use of both ebb and flow tides to drive machinery.†

On June 19, 1792, T. Butler wrote to Jonathan Lucas to discuss construction of a rice-pounding machine for his plantation Sheldon in Prince William Parish. Butler was aware of the demands on Lucas’s time and the people anxious to garner his services. He wrote Lucas that whatever the time of his arrival, he would be willing to see him. Word of Lucas’s mill construction and his whereabouts spread quickly among the planter elite; Butler wrote, I have been informed that your business will call you shortly to this part of the country. He even wrote to Jonathan Lucas that, if rather than by land, should it suit you to take a jaunt by water, Benjamin Villepontoux Esquire in Charleston can enlighten you when Capt. Salters makes trips.*

About two and a half months later, on September 5, 1792, the merchant-planter Plowden Weston (1739–1827) expressed appreciation over Lucas’s supplying hydrology advice for placement of rice trunks and wrote, It certainly is the best mode of securing a field against the salt I have heard of and [I] shall follow it.† Weston also informed Lucas that the machine wheels had arrived safe at his plantation and were well secured.‡

Weston was not only an important client of Lucas; he was also a wealthy lowcountry rice planter who became a trusted confidante. He had established a successful and influential career. By 1768 he was in partnership with Charles Atkins and maintained stores in Charleston and at the Stono River. Later he developed the firm of Weston and Mazÿck with Isaac Mazÿck and was co-owner of two trading vessels.

Prior to the American Revolution, Weston received grants for 1,400 acres in the back country. In addition he acquired 85 acres on the Wando River in Christ Church Parish and 250 acres on Waccamaw Neck in Georgetown District. Through marriage and purchases, he secured other tracts on the Wando. Other Weston properties included Long Bay and Sea Shore plantations, a lot in Hampstead near Charleston, a home on Queen Street and lot on Meeting Street in the city, and a lot in Georgetown. He had 223 slaves in Christ Church Parish, 233 slaves in All Saints Parish, and a staff of 38 slaves at his Charleston home.§

John Hume, of Hopsewee on the North Santee, had wrestled with the idea of building a windmill or a water mill and had been thwarted in his attempts to secure land for the latter. He asked Lucas’s opinion of putting the water mill on the river and working with three and a half to four feet of water in preference to the windmill, but he had not heard from him. Lucas’s health must have given Hume concern from a practical business standpoint: iron castings had just arrived from Liverpool, and Hume admitted he did not know what to do with them. The shaft, which weighed two tons, was accompanied by a one-ton piece and other smaller pieces. I will just land them on the wharf and wait for your information, whether I must send them up or you will build a water machine for me and take the castings off my hands.*

FIG. 9. Winnowing house on Hopsewee Plantation. From David Doar, Rice and Rice Planting in the South Carolina Low Country (1936). Courtesy of the Charleston Museum, Charleston, South Carolina.

This steady flow of letters to Lucas only partially reflected how busy he was. Other planters tracked him down when he was in Charleston, and several bemoaned they had narrowly missed seeing this man who was constantly on the move. A letter dated September 15, 1792, from Anthony Simons, discussed six pigeons Lucas had ordered to communicate with the mainland.†

Colonel Horry was in great want of his wind fan, which he requested be shipped either shipped to Charleston or to his plantation at Santee, where he would send a cart from Dover to pick it up. On September 24, 1792, another wind fan customer, Edward Lynah, requested that Lucas send a wind fan down to Charleston at the first opportunity, even though he would not be able to pay him before January, as cash runs low with planters at this time of year.*

In the meantime Weston accumulated materials for the mill construction. He had just put three pieces of iron—a hoop, a gudgeon (a socket for a rudder pintle), and a boss (the enlarged part of a shaft)—onboard a vessel going to his plantation. He had also included a spindle. Weston did not seem upset by the delays and confusion since he wanted Lucas to build his mill. He was, however, troubled by the possibility of Marshall’s unwillingness to leave the Charleston area.† He told Lucas, you may depend, I will do all I can to prevail on him to go, for your sake, but if he will not go, I must then depend altogether on you. A disappointment would be ruinous to me, for I have only my small machine standing; having taken down my old ginning machine that goes with horses.‡

Among the local gentry who stood in line to hire Lucas was George Washington’s cousin, Gen. William Washington (1752–1810) of Revolutionary War fame, who had come from Virginia in 1779 and, in 1782, married Jane Riley Elliott, a South Carolina rice heiress.§ The couple lived at Sandy Hill, one of his wife’s family properties about five miles northwest of present-day Ravenel. According to Henry A. M. Smith, a lowcountry historian who later owned Sandy Hill, the plantation house stood in a cluster of magnificent live oaks at the end of an imposing avenue that opened onto a lawn graced by an ornamental pond.**

Washington was a successful rice planter who produced two barrels of rice per acre and sold his crop for three times the prewar price. He bypassed Charleston merchants and avoided middleman profits by shipping his rice directly to England.†† To increase his profits further, he sought to build a rice mill. On November 4, 1792, he wrote to Lucas to set up a meeting at his plantation.‡‡

FIG. 10. A 1786 plat showing lands of Gen. William Washington at Sandy Hill Plantation on the Stono River and Rantowles Creek. Courtesy of RMC Office, Charleston, South Carolina. Map adapted by Lynne Parker.

Also in Prince George Winyah Parish, a young South Carolinian, Cleland Kinloch (1760–1823), returned from England in 1784 not only to reclaim but also to expand his patrimony at Weehaw Plantation on the Black River.* During a visit to Holland, Kinloch had observed how the Dutch harnessed the tides to flood and drain diked fields.† It was knowledge he utilized for his rice fields with flood gates and rice trunks to grow rice in a much more efficient way than the widely used inland swamp method. Kinloch was one of the first rice planters to adopt Gideon Dupont’s system of flooding river rice fields by tidal movement, making use of trunks and flood gates similar to those he had seen in Holland. Kinloch did not have Lucas build his rice mill but received advice and guidance from him as to how to build a tidal rice-pounding mill similar to Andrew Johnston’s.

FIG. 11. A Tidal-powered rice mill showing how it received its power. Drawings by William Robert Judd.

Shortly after completion of Johnston’s innovative tidal mill at Millbrook, Lucas, whom the antebellum rice planter Robert Allston later described as the indefatigable and ingenious mechanic, built a more sophisticated mill furnished with rolling screens, elevators, and packers so that paddy rice could be brought in and milled and polished rice could emerge in sacks and barrels with little or no contact with human hands. This mill was built on the eastern branch of the Cooper River for Henry Laurens.

In these operations and others, the rough rice, that is rice that had been winnowed or had the chaff removed, was carried by a set of elevating buckets from the lower to the upper story of the mill. This rice was dumped into an elevated bin where it was fed onto a rolling screen, which separated out sand, gravel, and other particles from the grain and poured it into a hopper.

From the hopper the rice passed to the millstones, which further separated the grain from the chaff. Afterward the chaff was blown away by a wind fan as the rice moved from the millstones into a bin placed above the mortars. The bin fed the rice through funnels into the mortars where the grains were beaten or polished.

Above each mortar, of which there were often six but sometimes as many as eleven, was suspended a pestle weighting approximately 230 pounds, which struck the rice thirty-two to forty-four times per minute. After the beating the rice moved from the mortars into more elevating buckets, which carried it into more screens, where the flour and broken rice were separated.

The whole rice then passed through a funnel where any remaining flour was removed by the friction of the brush. Then the rice fell into a wind fan that winnowed it clean and dropped it into a bin. From the bin it passed through funnels into barrels to be sealed, labeled, and readied for loading aboard a ship. Mills such as this could be run by three people and could produce an average of one hundred barrels of rice a week, each barrel weighing six hundred pounds.*

Later in the 1830s, Fanny Kemble (1809–93), the famous British actress married to a Georgia rice planter, was amazed that the Lucas mills not only were completely automated but also could be operated by such a small labor force. She was also astounded that the rice mill labor force, the operators and supervisors, were slaves at her husband’s plantation.†

In addition these tidal rice mills invented by Lucas, unlike the ones driven by animal power, could work day and night. It was a significant accomplishment. Lucas’s expertise elevated him to the top of his profession. He was in a class in which he had little competition. Another letter from Plowden Weston, dated January 24, 1793, illustrated the special place Lucas occupied among those who desired his mill building services:

I had the mortification to find that a few days after you left Mr. Marshall, he came to Santee to take a new sketch of Major Pinckney’s machine, a proof to me he does not clearly understand what he is about, from whence I am afraid I shall suffer in the construction of the mill. It would have been better for me to have paid you any sum to have had yourself, son, or Mr. Elmore to have done this job for me. Do pray sir; make another visit as soon as you can to put things to rights, for without your assistance I shall be badly off.

Not only had Lucas built a rice mill for Frances Middleton at Washo Plantation on the Santee River, but he also was to build two mills for Mary Middleton at Hobonny Plantation on the Combahee River. Apparently she was impressed not only with Lucas’s reputation but also with his price, which she had learned from William Horry. At about the same time, on January 1, 1793, Horry paid Lucas two hundred pounds for erecting a rice mill fed by a reserve at Cedar Creek on Wambaw Plantation.*

FIG. 12. Millrace waterwheel hub at Wambaw Plantation, based on ruins recovered in 1995 from Wambaw Mill, now at Village Museum in McClellanville, South Carolina. Drawings by William Robert Judd.

FIG. 13. Original note for bill to William Horry for the estate of Daniel Horry for erecting the rice mill at Wambaw. Courtesy of the South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, South Carolina.

FIG. 14. An inside view of a water rice machine, drawn by John Drayton, from the rice mill of Dr. Philip Tidyman of North Santee, as illustrated in Drayton’s A View of South Carolina (1802). Courtesy of the Charleston Library Society, Charleston, South Carolina.

Mary Middleton wrote Lucas that she wanted her two rice mills finished for the approaching crop but needed directions to send to England for the millstones.† Lucas must have felt as if he were being pulled from one river to another as one planter after another wrote to seek his advice, ask his opinion, correct the mistakes of others, offer him contracts, and, above all, implore him to visit their plantations.

The correspondent whose name appeared more than any other was Plowden Weston, the Waccamaw River planter. The growing friendship between the two men is evident as the letters flew back and forth. It may have been a friendship prompted by a fear of financial failure if Weston’s mill venture floundered. It was also a friendship he made clear he would not exploit at the expense of financial considerations owed to Lucas:

If you will go and set off early tomorrow, I think we may be back on Thursday night. I am uneasy for fear I may have a bad mill for want of your presence occasionally to give the necessary instructions. For I am persuaded Mr. Marshall is not equal to the task. I was the first person to engage you in building a mill and I really think I am able and willing to make you adequate satisfaction for anything you have, or ever may do for me.

If you can go, I shall be glad; if you cannot, let me know when you will go, for I really have the horrors about this mill—If it is not a good one it will be a constant plague to me.—I have lost a deal of time already by Mr. Marshall’s mistakes—We are backwards in our business; and if our best hands are taken off, we shall make nothing last year.*

*  William Alston was called King Billy. He owned four plantations, several seashore tracts, 26,590 acres (according to the 1786 tax returns), and just under eight hundred slaves. Alston originally spelled his surname Allston but dropped an l to avoid confusion with his cousin William Allston and his uncle William Allston.

*  Lipscomb, South Carolina in 1791, 11.

†   Dethloff, History of the American Rice Industry, 33–34.

*  Lofton, Lucases of Haddrells Point, 16. Villepontoux was a factor at 5 East Bay in Charleston; Hagy, People and Professions of Charleston, 21. Capt. Francis Salters was a prominent sailing master and cotton planter in Beaufort; Rowland, Moore, and Rogers, History of Beaufort County, 1:400.

†  Lofton, Lucases of Haddrells Point, 19.

‡  Weston had bought Laurel Hill, on the Waccamaw River, in 1775 from Gabriel Marion. Francis Marion Weston (1783–1854), one of Weston’s sons by his second wife, inherited Laurel Hill.

§  Edgar, Bailey, et al., Biographical Directory of the South Carolina House of Representatives, 3:758–59.

*  There was a long wait, or more likely, the Lucases built more than one rice mill for the Hume family at their various plantations. There is preserved in William Lucas’s business records an entry dated January 19, 1821, for building a Rice Mill for Mr. Hume for 2142 pounds and 85 shillings. Lofton, Lucases of Haddrells Point, 310; letter of Alexander Hume Lucas, May 21, 1883, Lucas Family Collections.

†  Simons, a Charleston factor, owned a plantation in St. James’ Santee Parish and property on the Pacolet River. He represented St. James’ Santee in both the South Carolina House and Senate. He served as tax inquirer and collector for St. James’ Santee (1778) and commissioner to cut a canal between the Cooper and Santee Rivers (1775). Simons died sometime before August 15, 1795, when an inventory was taken of his Charleston estate. At his death he owned twenty-one slaves. Lofton, Lucases of Haddrells Point, 26.

*  Lofton, Lucases of Haddrells Point, 30. Lynah, a physician and planter, lived in Charleston on Meeting Street but owned land in Colleton District. An 1824 tax return showed he owned 3,005 acres and forty-five slaves in St. Bartholomew’s Parish.

†   Marshal worked in mill construction but Weston felt Marshal [first name unknown] was out of his element and needed Lucas’s supervision. See Lofton, Lucases of Haddrells Point, 47.

‡  Lofton, Lucases of Haddrells Point, 35, 36.

§  Washington was born in Stafford County, Virginia. In 1780 he had engaged in combat with Col. Banastre Tarleton and his forces at Rantowles Bridge near Sandy Hill Plantation.

**  Smith’s description found in Lipscomb, South Carolina in 1791, 45.

††  Ibid., 47.

‡‡  Lofton, Lucases of Haddrells Point, 39.

*  Cleland Kinloch had been sent to England for his education and, at age twelve, entered Eton. He spent school holidays with his Kinloch cousins in Scotland, where the American branch of the family originated. Upon completion of formal schooling, Kinloch traveled to Holland to study commerce. Linder and Thacker, Rice Plantations of Georgetown County, 426; Rogers, History of Georgetown County, 160, 161.

†  Gregorie, Cleland Kinloch, 414.

*  Drayton, View of South Carolina, 123, 124.

†  Dethloff, History of the American Rice Industry, 32.

*  This was for the estate of Daniel Horry, who had died in 1785.

†  Mary Middleton, letter to Jonathan Lucas at Mr. Bowman’s, Santee, February 1, 1793. Lofton, Lucases of Haddrells Point, 50.

*  Weston, letter to Jonathan Lucas at Miss Lynches Marsh Plantation, February 20, 1793. Ibid., 54. Marsh Plantation was on the North Santee and belonged to Esther Lynch (1746–1825), sister to Thomas Lynch Jr. and sister-in-law to John Bowman. Esther Lynch had inherited Marsh Plantation after her brother and his wife were lost at sea in 1779.

 3 

FIRST RICE TOLL MILL

Jonathan Lucas’s correspondence indicated that during 1791–93 he was building mills on fifteen lowcountry plantations from the Waccamaw to the Combahee Rivers. His ceaseless pace of activity, with its constant travel and crisscrossing letters, combined with his series of innovative technological breakthroughs to reap a fortune for the new arrival in less than a decade.

By 1793 Lucas and Plowden Weston had become close friends bound by trust and mutual respect. Still headquartered at Cape Romain, where he was building a wind-powered sawmill for John Bowman, he forwarded instructions to Weston at Haddrells Point (part of present-day Mount Pleasant) to bid at auction on Jonathan Scott’s 471-acre estate. The land is yours, I got it for 500 pounds sterling, he boasted to Lucas in early spring of 1793.* It had been a triumph. A Mr. Hort had bid for a friend up to four hundred pounds, which made Weston uneasy at first for fear he might have bid it very high for his friend.†

Jonathan Scott’s estate in Christ Church Parish included ruins of an old sawmill and a long frontage on Shem Creek. The tract if laid out today would include most of 1950s Mount Pleasant.

The estate boundaries would extend from Shem Creek in the northwest to McCants Drive in the southeast and from Simmons Street in the southwest to Myrick Road in the northeast where Whitesides School was originally located. The land belonging to the estate of John Scott, son of Jonathan Scott, surveyed by Joseph Purcell on September 27, 1784, did not include the village and common of Greenwich, which contained one hundred acres.

Greenwich had been the first of the small settlements to become a village and had been established by Jonathan Scott on his home plot of one hundred acres between Jacob Motte’s plantation and the Hilliardsville section. Scott was an Englishman, and as Petrona Royall McIver notes in her history of Mount Pleasant, the village was typically English. He divided fifty acres on the waterfront into town lots with streets named for his sovereigns and his prime minister—King, Queen, and Pitt. The remaining fifty acres of woodland he gave for the common use in obtaining firewood and grazing cattle. This area is now bounded by Morrison, Pitt, McCants and Simmons Streets.

FIG. 15. View of Shem Creek area, Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. From postcard collection of Alexander Lucas Lofton.

FIG. 16. View of Shem Creek, including the site of Greenwich Mill, Mill Pond, and Lucas family cemetery. Lucas Family Collections. Map adapted by Lynne Parker.

In 1793 the tract of land to the southeast of Scott’s is shown as belonging to William Hort.* This property later became the village of Hilliardsville and included the grove of live oaks (now Alhambra Park) known as Hort’s Grove. To the northwest of the village of Greenwich were the lands belonging to the estate of Jacob Motte, which later became the village of Mount Pleasant. The Jacob Motte/Hibben House at 111 Hibben Street was originally the dwelling house on Jacob Motte’s plantation.

After the purchase of Haddrells, Lucas built a new water-powered rice and sawmill of his design in 1795 in the vicinity of the old Greenwich Mill ruins that stood on Shem Creek.† This became a combination rice mill and sawmill operated by tidal power, with a large holding pond along the eastern edge of Shem Creek. It was the first toll mill of its kind in the Charleston area.‡ He also constructed a foundry to make parts for new mills and docks for vessels to transport the harvest and supplies of the plantations. This location gave easy accessibility to Charleston Harbor and permitted convenient importation from Philadelphia and England of machinery that could not be built at Haddrells. This was an ideal location for Lucas’s flourishing business of designing and building rice mills.

By this time Lucas had finished building John Bowman’s mill at Cape Romain and had decided to consolidate his operations at Shem Creek.§ His seventeen-year-old son, Jonathan Lucas Jr. (hereafter referred to as Jonathan Lucas II), had come from England to help with the business. The growing family—which included Lucas; his second wife, Ann Ashburn; their children, Ann, William, and Eliza Lydia; and Jonathan II—soon had a permanent home on a high knoll overlooking the mill pond at Greenwich Mills.

FIG. 17. Plat of Tibwin Plantation, St. James’ Santee Parish, of the rice mill and mill pond. Courtesy of RMC Office, Charleston, South Carolina.

In 1793 Lucas was not only busy setting up his business and home place on Shem Creek, but he was also still engaged in numerous mill-building activities. One of his prospective clients was the wealthy planter Joseph Manigault (1763–1843), who had inherited more than 22,000 acres.* Among his holdings was the 13,840-acre Awendaw Barony, which spanned Awendaw Creek in Christ Church and St. James’ Santee Parishes. The barony included 2,278 acres of fertile swampland. This may have been the property where Manigault proposed to build a rice mill. Whether or not a mill was built at Awendaw Barony is unknown. Later, after 1810, Lucas built a rice mill for Manigault after he acquired Dusty Hill Plantation on the North Santee River from William Grogen. He renamed the plantation White Oak.

FIG. 18. Plat of the town of Mount Pleasant, Christ Church Parish, Charleston District. Incorporated by an act of the legislature in 1837. Mount Pleasant comprised the villages of Greenwich and Mount Pleasant. Courtesy of RMC Office, Charleston, South Carolina. Map adapted by Lynne Parker.

During this period Lucas also built a rice mill at Tibwin Plantation on the coast in St. James’ Santee Parish. The date of this mill has not been pinpointed, so it could have been built for either Jonah Collins, who died in 1789, or William Matthews, who bought the property from the Collins estate.* The mill was purchased by Henry Ford in 1935 for his museum in Dearborn, Michigan.* A description of the mill appeared on February 1, 1931, in the Charleston News and Courier. The wheels were handmade, and so were the mortar and pestle, which were crafted out of solid oak. The mill pond covered from seventy-five to one hundred acres at high tide.

The acquisition of property that began with the buying of Haddrells Point in the spring of 1793 continued in the summer with the purchase of five nearby lots in Greenwich Village. T. Bowles at 82 East Bay Street in Charleston wrote to Lucas on August 25, 1793: In consequence of your application to Mr. Winstanley respecting some lots which Mrs. Scott has near Haddrells Point—Mrs. Scott has requested me to inform you that she wishes to part with them, the numbers of the lots are 12, 22, 21, 20, and 19—and also two large squares—the price is £20 each.† The negotiations were not concluded for almost ten years, and Lucas did not receive title to the properties until June 3, 1803. Under the terms he purchased in Greenwich Village the five lots and the two squares previously mentioned for 100 pounds sterling.

Each of the lots was one hundred feet in width and four hundred feet deep. The size of the two squares were, in one case, four hundred feet by four hundred feet, and in the other, three hundred feet by four hundred feet, according to a plat of the town of Mount Pleasant in 1835. One of the squares was bounded to the southeast by Queen Street. The other square was bounded to the southwest by Pitt Street.‡

*  Lofton, Lucases of Haddrells Point, 58.

†  Ibid.

*  William Hort (1750–1826), a native of Barbados, was one of the founders of the Charleston Chamber of Commerce, librarian of the Charleston Library Society, and a member of the General Assembly from Christ Church Parish. Hort married Alice Gibbes. Edgar, Bailey, et al., Biographical Directory of the South Carolina House of Representatives, 3:348, 349.

†  This mill was destroyed in 1865 by Confederate forces to prevent the supplies inside it and the other nearby buildings from falling into Union hands. The home built by Jonathan Lucas was also destroyed. The foundations of Greenwich Mill, built in 1795, are located at the bottom of Vincent Creek, near its confluence with Shem Creek.

‡  A toll mill charged a toll or fee, usually in kind, for the rice milled. Milling toll charges at the Haddrells Point Mill averaged 6 percent of net proceeds for milling, occasionally 7 percent, and in rare instances, 9 percent. Lucas also charged planters 25 cents per barrel for freight charges and 87.5 cents for the barrels, according to the William Lucas Account Book 1820 with Keating Simons & Sons, Charleston, So. Ca. A common error is that the first toll mill built by the Lucas family was either at Middleburg or in Charleston.

§  In a letter dated March 7, 1793, from Bowman to Dear Lucas, he wrote: In case of any accident to me, accept this memorandum, that no Limitation Act is to operate in bar of payment of what is due to you, by the agreement between us made several years ago. Lofton, Lucases of Haddrells Point, 74.

*  Manigault, the son of Peter Manigault and Elizabeth Wragg, was raised by his grandparents at Silk Hope Plantation on the eastern branch of the Cooper River.

*  Collins, a well-to-do planter and one of the leaders of the parish, had been one of the commissioners appointed to build St. James’ Santee Parish Church in 1768. Matthews owned considerable properties in Charleston and Berkeley Districts, including a handsome house on Charlotte Street in Charleston and one of the two tracts that make up present-day McClellanville. Mathis Ferry Road in Mount Pleasant is a corruption of his family name.

*  Museum officials did not know the whereabouts of the mill machinery when contacted in 2006.

†  Lofton, Lucases of Haddrells Point, 80.

‡  Ibid., 101.

 4 

MILL BUILDER, TROUBLESHOOTER

Jonathan Lucas began his career in South Carolina as a builder of mills. He started building windmills for sawing lumber and cleaning rice; and as his milling operations expanded, so did his expertise and that of his son Jonathan Lucas II as troubleshooters. In less than four years after Jonathan II had arrived in this country, he had earned the trust of lowcountry planters, who sought his help when they could not contact his father. The acceptance of the son as his father’s surrogate is evident in Lewis Morris’s November 18, 1796, letter to the senior Lucas:

As Mr. Gay has promised to build me a sawmill, I will endeavor to have everything ready early in January for him. My overseer informs me that one side of the water wheel of my machine has sunk near two inches—as this may affect the machinery I would rush you to inform me what is to be done. Perhaps it may be convenient for your son to call and spend an hour at the place on the way to Mr. Blake’s.

I shall expect to hear from your son respecting the person who was in Mr. Andrew Johnston’s employ, a good manager, capable to keep my machine in order, would be a great acquisition to me.*

The previous year, Elias Ball III had engaged Jonathan Lucas to build a rice mill at Limerick.† Soon Ball had completely switched from the inland swamp method of rice growing to the far superior method of tidal cultivation.‡

FIG. 19. Wyatt’s windmill. Drawing depicted by Charles Caleb Cotton (1775–1848) in 1799. Courtesy of South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, South Carolina.

Lucas was the key to unlocking the backlog of production and opening the door to greater riches than ever for Ball. Like other planters, he knew that by hiring Lucas, he could cash in on what was becoming a golden era of rice production. The mill at Limerick freed Ball’s slaves from the inefficient process of cleaning tons of rice by hand, and in just a few years Ball’s increased profits enabled him to buy two more plantations on the western branch of the Cooper River totaling seven hundred acres.*

Henry Laurens, son of the Revolutionary War leader, was a factor for many well-known clients; he appears to have served as a middleman in several of Lucas’s projects. For example, in a February 26, 1798, letter, Laurens acknowledged from Mepkin that he had received from Lucas an order on Mr. Peter Wyatt in my favor for thirty two pounds, one shilling and nine pence. This was probably in connection with Lucas’s building of a brick windmill in Charleston for Wyatt at the western end of Beaufain Street in what is now Harleston Village.† The windmill was sixty feet high with a large circular base.

In the Charleston Courier for December 15, 1825, a notice appeared, offering for private sale that large Brick Wind Mill, situate on Harleston’s Green, adapted for the sawing of lumber. This may well have been the brick windmill also painted by Charles Fraser in his Charleston Sketchbook 1796–1806.‡ Thomas Bennett Sr. had a wind-powered sawmill nearby in the village of Cannonsborough just north of Harleston Village, but it was built of wood. Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, in the 1959 edition of the Charleston Sketchbook, wrote that windmills and watermills with vast undershot wheels, driven by tidal power, were common along the Ashley River.* Jonathan Lucas (1814–87), an engineer and builder who lived in Orangeburg the latter part of his life and who referred to himself as John Lucas to avoid confusion, wrote to family members that he had pulled down Wyatt’s Mill, the site of which he indicated on an enclosed map.†

FIG. 20. Wyatt’s windmill map. Wyatt’s Wind Mill of brick, built by Jonathan Lucas Sr. It was 60 feet high, pulled it down, it had a base, round or circular. There was one at Bennett’s [Mill] of wood. The above was written by Jonathan (John) Lucas (1814–87), grandson of Jonathan Lucas I. Lucas Family Collections. Map adapted by Lynne Parker.

Another of Laurens’s letters, date April 10, 1798, illustrates his middleman function. Writing again from Mepkin, Laurens talks of three rice mills built by Lucas in different parts of the lowcountry: I acknowledge to have received from Mr. Jonathan Lucas, orders on the following Gentlemen for amount of accounts due by them to him, viz: An order on General Washington for one hundred and twenty nine pounds, two shillings; an order on Thomas Corbett, Jr. for two hundred and thirty nine pounds, seventeen shillings; and an order on William Hort for two hundred and eight pounds.‡ Thomas Corbett Jr.’s account included thirty-eight pieces of live oak for wheels; screws and plates made at Haddrells for building his tide mill, castings included; one spindle and kind; one large, square 150-pound bar; and the hiring of a blacksmith at the plantation.§ William Hort’s account included charges for constructing his mill, castings included; the hiring of a blacksmith; screws and plates made at Haddrells; one mill spindle and kind; eight flat bars of iron; a large square bar; and 1.5 tons of coal.**

Lucas’s acclaimed reputation as a builder of rice mills was attested to even in local papers. Generally advertisements for rice mill sales did not mention the builder, but the November 6, 1799, edition of the Georgetown