Between Two Rivers · Episode 3
Indigo and Fire
1739: sixteen-year-old Eliza Lucas is left in charge of her father's plantations and spends years making indigo pay. Plus the revolt against the Proprietors, the Dock Street Theatre, the Great Fire of 1740, and St. Michael's Church.
Now playing
Loading episodes…
Click any section or line to jump there in the audio.
Carol 1739. A plantation on Wappoo Creek, just across the Ashley River from Charles Town. The man who owns it has just sailed away to the Caribbean, called back to his post in the army.
Shannon And he's left someone in charge.
Carol His daughter. She's sixteen years old. Her name is Eliza Lucas.
Shannon Sixteen.
Carol Sixteen. Running three plantations, looking after a sick mother and a little sister, writing her father long letters about crops and prices. And she's about to change the whole economy of South Carolina.
Shannon Welcome back to Between Two Rivers. A history of Charleston, one era at a time.
Carol Last time, Charles Town was a small walled town, fighting off pirates. This time, the town grows past its walls, gets rich, burns, and builds itself again in brick.
Shannon Episode three. Indigo and Fire.
Shannon Let's set the scene. Right after the pirate years, in 1719, the people of Carolina had had enough of the Lords Proprietors. Those eight distant owners from episode one.
Carol They weren't protecting anybody from pirates, or from anyone else.
Shannon That was the complaint. So the colonists rebelled, peacefully, and asked to be ruled directly by the king instead. Within a couple of years a royal governor arrived, and by 1729 the king had bought out the Proprietors. South Carolina was a royal colony.
Carol And the town?
Shannon Started spilling out. Within about fifteen years, the old earthen walls had crumbled away, and new streets were laid out beyond them. The money was coming from rice.
Carol Rice grew well in the wet, low country around Charleston. So well that people in Europe called Carolina rice some of the best in the world.
Shannon Ships left the harbor full of rice for England and Europe. Merchants built big houses. And Charles Town started acting like a real city.
Carol With a theater.
Shannon With a theater. In 1736, a new playhouse opened on Dock Street, which today is Queen Street. Its first play was a comedy called The Recruiting Officer.
Carol And it's often called one of the first buildings in America made just for staging plays.
Shannon The Dock Street Theatre. Hold on to that name. It comes back at the end.
Carol So, back to Eliza Lucas. She was born in the Caribbean, on Antigua, and went to school in England. Her family moved to South Carolina in 1738, when she was about fifteen.
Shannon And then her father was called away.
Carol Britain and Spain were going to war, and he was an army officer. So he went back to Antigua, and Eliza ran things at home.
Shannon What was she like?
Carol We actually know, because she kept copies of her letters. She got up at five in the morning. She read, she studied music, and she taught her little sister, and two other girls on the plantation, to read. And she was always trying new crops.
Shannon Like what?
Carol Figs. Oak trees, to sell for ships' timber one day. And the one that mattered. Indigo.
Shannon For anyone who doesn't know, what is indigo?
Carol A plant that makes a deep blue dye. The blue in old navy uniforms, the blue in blue jeans, before chemists learned to make it in a lab. In the 1700s, Britain bought most of its indigo from the French and Spanish colonies.
Shannon And Britain would have liked to buy it from its own colonies instead.
Carol Exactly. So Eliza's father sent her indigo seeds from the West Indies, and she started planting.
Shannon Did it work?
Carol Not at first. Frost killed one crop. Worms got another. And growing the plant is only half the job. You have to soak the leaves, beat the water, and get the dye to settle out into little cakes. That part is hard to get right.
Shannon So she needed an expert.
Carol Her father sent one, a man from the island of Montserrat. And the story goes that he ruined the dye on purpose, because Montserrat made indigo too, and he didn't want Carolina competing with his home.
Shannon (laughs) Sabotage.
Carol That's how Eliza remembered it. She sent him away, and kept going. And by about 1744, after years of trying, she had a crop good enough to sell.
Shannon And then?
Carol She gave seed to her neighbors. So it spread. A few years later, in 1748, Parliament started paying a bounty on indigo grown in its colonies, and Carolina planters rushed in. By the eve of the Revolution, the colony was shipping out around a million pounds of it a year.
Shannon A million pounds of blue dye.
Carol Second only to rice. Carolina's blue gold.
Shannon And Eliza?
Carol In 1744 she married Charles Pinckney, a widower and one of the leading men in the colony. She became Eliza Lucas Pinckney. Two of her sons became leaders of the new nation. One of them signed the Constitution. And when she died, in 1793, George Washington asked to help carry her coffin.
Shannon Not bad for a teenager on Wappoo Creek.
Shannon Now, while Eliza was fighting frost and worms across the river, something terrible happened in town.
Carol The fire.
Shannon November eighteenth, 1740. Early afternoon. A fire starts in the middle of town, and the wind is blowing hard from the northwest.
Carol And the town is mostly wood.
Shannon Mostly wood. Wooden houses, wooden roofs, warehouses packed with goods. The fire ran down toward the waterfront, burning everything in its way. By evening, around three hundred houses were gone. Stores, warehouses, wharves.
Carol In one afternoon.
Shannon In about six hours. Some say it was the worst fire in America up to that time. Ships at the wharves were in danger too.
Carol And people across the river could see it.
Shannon You'd have seen the smoke from Wappoo, for sure.
Carol So what did the town do?
Shannon Rebuilt. But it learned a lesson. The colony passed a law saying new buildings in town had to be brick or stone.
Carol Did people follow it?
Shannon Not really. Brick was expensive, and the law was hard to enforce. But a lot of the rebuilding was in brick anyway, and the fire changed what the town looked like.
Carol And then it got a new landmark.
Shannon St. Michael's Church, on the corner of Broad and Meeting Streets. The cornerstone went down in 1752, and the church opened about ten years later. Its white steeple rises more than 180 feet, and for a long time it was the first thing sailors saw coming into the harbor.
Carol Its bells came over from England.
Shannon They did. And they've had quite a life since. They crossed the Atlantic more than once. But that's a story for another day.
Carol So, if you're in Charleston, where can you find this episode?
Shannon Start at St. Michael's, at Broad and Meeting. It's the oldest church building still standing on the peninsula. Stand on that corner and look up at the steeple.
Carol Then walk a few blocks to Church Street, at the corner of Queen. That's the Dock Street Theatre. The building you see is newer, an old hotel restored as a theater in the 1930s, but it stands on the spot of that 1736 playhouse. And it's still putting on plays.
Shannon And if you cross the Ashley into West Ashley, you'll be near Wappoo Creek, where a sixteen-year-old with her father's seeds decided to try something no one else could make work.
Carol And there's a historical marker for her over in Mount Pleasant, at the Charles Pinckney National Historic Site.
Carol That's Charles Town in the middle of the 1700s. Rice and indigo, a big fire, a new skyline, and a girl who wouldn't give up.
Shannon And by the end of this era, the town is rich, proud, and a little tired of being told what to do by London.
Carol Next time, it's 1776. A fort on Sullivan's Island built out of soft palmetto logs, and a British fleet that finds out what that means.
Shannon Palmetto Logs. That's next time, on Between Two Rivers.