63 



SOUTH CAROLINA AND GEORGIA. 



The pre-eminence in rice cultivation in the United States which 

 South Carolina iias enjoyed for two hundred years has been won by- 

 careful attention to the selection of seed and by thorough cultivation. 



EFFECT OF CIVIL WAR ON RICE INDUSTRY. 



Rice culture in South Carolina and Geor<2:ia had so developed 

 through a long series of years that delta lands, improved and ready for 

 rice cultivation, were worth, prior to 1860, from $200 to $300 per acre, 

 and were considered among the most profitable investments for capital. 

 From 1861 to 1866 most of these lands were uncultivated and in many 

 instances the improvements were destroyed. This, with the high price 

 of labour since 1866, has reduced the value of the lands to less than the 

 cost of improvements; in some cases to $25 or $30 per acre. Promi- 

 nent planters, in speaking of the condition of the rice industry at the 

 close of the war, describe the situation in the following terms : 



The industry had been remanded to its infancy. The planters had 

 returned to their estates to find buildings, machinery, and implements des- 

 troyed; the appliances of a wonderful system of irrigation and drainage mu- 

 tilated or wrecked; the long-abandoned fields grown up in tangled wilds of 

 brush, vines, and trees; the once disciplined and supremely efficient labour of 

 the country turned into a mob. It should be no marvel that the great ma- 

 jority of the planters recoiled from an industry which seemed only a des- 

 perate adventure. A few who undertook the work of recuperation succeeded 

 at the risk of the little capital or credit left to them and often at the peril of 

 life itself. Many failed ; none so wretchedly as those who were unfamiliar 

 with a culture demanding peculiar experience and skill, or who were 

 unable to adapt themselves successfully to the new regime of labour and to 

 the unexpected character of employees who had yet to learn the severe 

 lesson of quickly earned and untried liberty. In short, relegated to its 

 earliest historical conditions, the rice industry of the South was practi- 

 cally commenced anew, and. if it had any encouragement at all, it was in the 

 protection afforded by the import tax on foreign rice. The crops were culti- 

 vated for many years at extraordinary cost and great hazard. The embarras- 

 ments were diminished in process of time, and meanwhile, as labour became 

 more efficient and less costly and the consumption of rice increased, so the 

 area of cultivation and production expanded. 



VARIETIES GROWN. 



The gold-seed rice, justlv famous for the quality and large yield of 

 the grain, stands, in the estimation of the market, among the first rices 

 in the ^ world. Along the Atlantic coast it has practically superseded 

 t iir- white rice introduced and generally cultivated in the earlier periods 

 ot the industry. The two varieties of gold-seed appear to difi'er little 

 except that one variety has a slightly larger grain than the other. 

 White rice is valued for its early maturity. The accompanying table 

 illustrates the difference between the grains of gold-seed rice and 

 white rice : 



