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Bunce Island, Sierra Leone, ca. early 2000s (top), 1726 (bottom), images courtesy of Comet Multimedia and The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. The Bunce Island slave fortress was a major supplier of enslaved West Africans to rice plantations in the British colonies of South Carolina and Georgia. Slave trader Henry Laurens was Bunce Island's business agent in Charleston.

Ashley Ferry Landing
Image courtesy of Jane Aldrich

Old Exchange Building
Image courtesy of Jane Aldrich

Old Slave Mart Museum, photograph by Jane Aldrich, Charleston, South Carolina, ca. 2000.

Old Slave Mart Museum-Aldrich.jpg

Sullivan's Island Historic Marker, photograph, Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, ca. 2000, courtesy of the U.S. National Park Service. Marker notes history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and pest houses on this island near Charleston. Queen Quet of the Gullah Geechee Nation stands to the left of the marker with a small child. Over forty percent of enslaved Africans forced to North America arrived through Charleston Harbor.

Drayton Hall

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Rice burning

Sprout flow in rice fields, Middleton Place, Summerville, South Carolina, ca. early 2000s, courtesy of the Middleton Place Foundation. During the colonial period, rice proved to be the South Carolina Lowcountry's most lucrative cash crop. Lowcountry planters primarily used enslaved African skills and labor in inland and tidal rice cultivation. Tidal rice plantations involved enslaved workers digging extensive systems of dikes, ditches, and fields, such as the one shown here at Middleton Place.

Carolina Gold Rice

Fanner baskets, used for winnowing rice, courtesy of Drayton Hall. In October, enslaved workers on Lowcountry rice plantations fanned the threshed grain in wide, flat baskets made by African basket-makers. These three baskets look strikingly similar, and demonstrate the continuation of this agricultural technique and art form from West Africa to the Lowcountry. The light brown basket on the left is from Senegal; the dark brown basket on the right belongs to the Drayton family and was made before the U.S. Civil War; the white basket at the top of the picture was made by an African American sweetgrass basket maker in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina in the early 2000s.

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