written by David Shields

originally published in the Rice Paper Newsletter, Fall 2014

It is with great pride and delight that the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation announces publication of Richard Porcher & William Judd’s The Market Preparation of Carolina Rice, a history of the technology of rice processing. This landmark presentation of the many structures and machines developed from the 18th through the 19th century for the growth, harvesting, hulling, and milling of Carolina Rice supplies a comprehensive view of the immense expenditure of capital the exercise of mechanical ingenuity entailed in making Carolina Gold a world crop.

Professor emeritus of biology at the Citadel and board member of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, Porcher examined the material remains of virtually all of the significant plantations in the region. Judd, his collaborator, is a draughtsman who has performed miracles of interpretation, taking ruins and jumbled knots of rust and translating them to schematic drawings of a variety of machines. These illustrations are impressive in their clarity and detail. They contribute greatly to one of Porcher’s theses — that the old canard that the South lacked mechanical genius and industrial development was patently false. The Market Preparation of Carolina Rice traces the historical development of a vertically integrated scheme of processing the equal of any sugar refinery in Barbados or Jamaica.

The organization of The Market Preparation of Carolina Rice derives from the order of labors requisite siting, formation, irrigation, planting, weeding, harvesting, and soil renovation of a plantation, then the process of the harvest — the cutting, drying, threshing, screening, milling, and polishing of the rice. The authors recount both the processes involved and the material means by which they were accomplished. 

As Porcher demonstrates, only he has explored the several sorts of evidence needed to do this work: he alone of the several students of rice culture has visited the important historical sites, including the difficult-to-reach marsh islands in the Santee River, to record the remnants of the fields and the ruins of milling infrastructure there. Numbers of objects he photographed and measured 30 years ago have disappeared from the landscape. In parallel with these material evidences, Porcher delved into Southern archives for written commentary on the methods, examined U.S. Patent Office records for drawings of machines, and sifted through the extensive corpus of agricultural literature published in the many farming periodicals of the 19th century for his reconstructions. Having explored the literary evidence extensively myself, I can attest to the depth of the research involved here. All of the most informed contemporary commentators are given preference in citations, while the testimonies of a great number of experienced planters and inventors flesh out the narrative.

Rice culture as a subject has inspired several masterworks of historical interpretation. Porcher & Judd’s The Market Preparation of Carolina Rice joins that distinguished list of essential volumes. The monograph was published by the University of South Carolina Press and released in summer of 2014.