Powder Blue

Southern history may revolve around "King Cotton", but before there was cotton, there was indigo. The cultivation of varieties of Indigofera brought one of the earliest cash crops for European settlers in the Lowcountry, grown and produced by Africans sold into slavery from West Africa or shipped to South Carolina from Caribbean plantations. The plant's cultivation and use had been long known to African peoples who brought their knowledge with them into captivity. Highly prized by the fashion-conscious elite in Europe, the dye's rich color soon acquired the designation of "royal blue."

Indigofera caroliniana

Indigo has been entwined with human history for thousands of years, thought to have been first grown and processed by ancient peoples on the Indian subcontinent. (The Hindu god Krishna is always portrayed with deep blue skin.) The plant arrived in medieval Europe via the Silk Road and soon replaced woad, a plant of the cabbage family that also produced a blue dye that was more labor intensive to create and less colorfast. Indigo had arrived in the Carolinas by the mid-17th century; a hundred years later, it had become the Lowcountry's second most profitable cash crop, after rice, shipped to Britain as dried cakes for the country's textile industry.

Placing indigo "mud" into wooden forms for drying

Indigofera caroliniana was (and still is) the dominant species used here, although other varieties were found to grow equally well in the Lowcountry's semi-tropical climate. Charleston's Eliza Pinckney is usually credited with almost single-handedly creating the Lowcountry's indigo industry with seeds she obtained from friends in the Caribbean, although many other plantation owners were experimenting with the crop at the same time, planting it along with cotton and rice. The backbreaking work imposed on the enslaved required the construction of systems of vats, presses and other apparatus to crush and ferment the plant's leaves, stir the slurry to improve oxidation, and then drain off the liquid to leave behind a deep blue mud, which was allowed to dry in linen bags and placed into wooden forms to form the cakes. At least fifteen slaves were required to tend every fifty acres of indigo, and another twenty-five "hands" to transform the leaves into dye.

The remains of a Lowcountry indigo vat

By 1800, the arrival of mechanized farm equipment like the cotton gin soon made cultivating cotton far more profitable and less labor-intensive than indigo, even more so after chemical experiments led to an easily produced synthetic dye. Abandoned brick-lined vats soon crumbled into the Lowcountry soil; but today, there's a burgeoning cottage industry on Johns Island and elsewhere, using traditional techniques to color the Lowcountry blue.

(Images courtesy Charleston County Public Library and The Post And Courier)

Travelers

This time of year, our Lowcountry skies are graced with flashes of orange, black and yellow as butterflies take to the air on their seasonal migrations. Most well-known, of course, is the Monarch (Danaus plexippus), famous for the species' thousand-mile flight from the midwestern United States and Canada

A male Monarch butterfly

to overwinter in Florida or further south in Central Mexico. The annual southward and northward migrations are multi-generational; no individual butterfly makes the entire journey.The common name is thought to have been bestowed in honor of King George III of England, who also carried the title Prince of Orange, the color that most distinguishes the Monarch.

The Gulf Fritillary

But there's another butterfly also arriving in the southeast this time of year, and one easily mistaken for the Monarch. the Gulf Fritillary (Dione vanillae). Also brightly orange-colored, it's distinguished from its more famous cousin by its black wing spots and silver wingtip coloring. Its wings are longer and narrower than the Monarch's, too. Sometimes called the passion butterfly, the Gulf Fritillary overwinters here in the Lowcountry and further south, in Florida and Texas, before returning north, sometimes as far north as northern New York; and like the Monarch, these migrations spawn many generations from start to finish.

The Cloudless Sulphur

What about the small, flitting yellow butterflies that we're seeing frequently these late summer days? These have the delightful common name of Cloudless Sulphurs (Phoebis sennae), and while seen as far north as Canada, are most common to the southeast, Florida and Texas. The Latin nomenclature comes from the Latin for light, phoebe, and from the fact that adult females lay their eggs, and the larvae feed on, senna and pea plants.

Planting a butterfly garden is a great way to enjoy these colorful visitors. Learn more about what to plant, and where, here.

Everywhere Jenkins

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As you travel around Johns Island, you've no doubt noticed the prominence of the name Jenkins, one of the most common Lowcountry names. It appears all over Johns Island and, of course, here on Seabrook Island's Jenkins Point. This thumb-shaped peninsula jutting into the marshes on the northwest of the island, once home to herds of dairy cows, has been known by that name since before the Civil War, cited as such in an 1863 land sale in which descendants of William Seabrook sold most of Seabrook Island to the Gregg family but retained Jenkins Point for their herd's grazing. Cattle were still present as late as 1955 and had to be moved elsewhere as early development efforts got underway.

The progenitors of the far-flung Jenkins clan were three Jenkins brothers who emigrated to Beaufort County from Wales in the early 18th-century and promptly set about marrying into the handful of wealthy prominent landowners already present, from the Fripps of Beaufort County to the Legares and Seabrooks of Edisto and Johns islands. By the turn of the 19th-century, Johns Island's Walnut Hill and Hickory Hill plantations were owned by Jenkins descendants.

Johns Island's Esau Jenkins

The surname was given to the enslaved who worked the plantations, whose descendants settled onto their own farms with Emancipation. Closer to our own time, during the Civil Rights era, Esau Jenkins (1913 - 1972) became a driving force in the movement to register Black voters, provide educational equality for Black children (the original Haut Gap high school near Maybank Highway was built largely due to Esau's efforts) and create the Progressive Club, a cooperative market for Johns Island Blacks on River Road. Its cinderblock ruins still stand next to a commemorative plaque.

Esau's Volkswagen minibus, in which he ferried his neighbors and their children to polling places and schools, became so famous it's now on display in the Museum of African-American History in Washington, D.C. Esau's statement that "Love Is Progress. Hate Is Expensive" appeared on the rear of the bus, a sentiment carried on by his children who have all been active in voting rights campaigns and have served in county government positions. Esau is also remembered by the bridge over Church Creek that connects Johns and Wadmalaw Island bearing his name that's been a familiar Lowcountry one for centuries.