Field Days

The official start of spring is almost upon us, but the agricultural year is already in full swing on Johns Island. Fields are being readied for planting to yield the late spring and summer bounty of vegetables and leafy greens.

1928: The Annie Moore heads up the Stono River to market

Truck farming is a relative newcomer to the Lowcountry, which until the Civil War was famous for its long-staple cotton and for rice. The intense labor and high toll on soil quality associated with rice cultivation soon led to the decline of the crop. As for cotton, the devastation of the Civil War and the boll weevil infestation of the 1920's put an end to the cotton economy. Among the victims was Mullet Hall, which had been so profitable in its heyday that it warranted its own post office and commissary. Its fields had successfully produced bumper crops of cotton for the many decades of the late nineteenth century that the Legare family farmed it; the weevil brought foreclosure in 1923, when Julian Limehouse bought the property at auction and began growing vegetables for local kitchen tables. Soon, he was loading his produce onto trucks, or onto boats docked on the Kiawah River or Bohicket Creek, for shipment to downtown restaurants. Limehouse Produce still transports the fruit of Lowcountry soil all over the greater Charleston area.

During the Depression, potatoes were a lifesaver for many truck farmers

Some farmers in Limehouse's day tried shifting to more weevil-resistant short-staple cotton, but prices fell too low to make the business profitable; the last major cotton crop was harvested on Edisto in 1918. The Andells, who owned much of Seabrook Island in the early years of the last century, farmed a small plot of sea island cotton as late as 1930, in addition to their cattle and dairy operations, but gave it all up shortly after William Andell's death in 1932. Not long after, the Andells sold the island to Marjorie and Victor Morawetz as a private beach retreat.

Truck farming has never reached the economic heights of either cotton or rice, but it still defines much of Johns Island south of Maybank Highway, not to mention Edisto and Wadmalaw islands. Even so, the islands' rich agricultural heritage is in danger of disappearing to development and competitive pricing from corporately-owned agribusinesses. As one longtime Johns Island farmer observed, "The land is grown up because many of the natives are not farming." Even so, as summer's crops begin appearing at farm stands all over the islands, shopping local can help keep the Lowcountry green.

Spring Song

Even though the arrival of spring is officially not for another two weeks, the change of season is already palpable as wildlife stirs from winter's scarcity, birds begin arriving from southern wintering grounds, and trees begin their spring blossoming. It's likely to be a noisier spring than usual, too, for a rare event is about to take place - the simultaneous emergence of two broods of periodic cicadas, something that hasn't happened since 1803, when Thomas Jefferson was president.

The two broods that will emerge late this month or early in April are known as Brood XIX, which will emerge in the Southeast, and Brood XIII which will appear in northern Illinois. Other broods will take their turn next year, usually just one brood per year, but every 221 years, two broods will emerge at the same time, much to the excitement of entomologists. One such scientist - Charles Marlatt, who worked for the Department of Agriculture in Washington - was the first to standardize brood numbers in 1893, designating all cicadas emerging that year and every seventeen years thereafter as Brood I; those emerging the next year were Brood II, and so on. Cicadas on the thirteen-year cycle who emerged in 1894 were Brood XVIII. It's Brood XIX, first designated as such in 1895, that is emerging in the Southeast this spring.

These harmless insects have an unusual life cycle. Immature cicadas, or nymphs, spend the next 17 or 13 years after hatching underground feeding on roots, emerging from the earth as adults after more than a decade hidden from view. The males are the singers, attracting mates with sound-producing organs called tymbals on either side of their abdomens. Adults don't consume solid food, but subsist on on fluids from leaves and tree bark. Females lay their eggs in the bark of trees, which can be harmful to young saplings but otherwise doesn't hurt mature trees. Cicadas don't sting or bite and are not known to carry diseases harmful to humans.

They are, in fact, beneficial to the ecology. Their underground tunneling aerates soil, and once above ground, they serve as an important food source for birds and other wildlife - and for humans in some cultures, where they're consumed fried or steamed and are said to taste like cold canned asparagus. But if you choose not to partake, you can at least enjoy the singing on a warm Lowcountry spring evening.

The Woman's Touch

March is National Women's History Month. Charleston and the Lowcountry can claim a significant place in the list of pioneering women who shaped the region's social, cultural and agricultural heritage. From Septima Clark's tireless campaigning for equality during the civil rights era, to the Charleston-born Pollitzer sisters' efforts toward women's suffrage, and the Grimke sisters' outspoken opposition to the slave economy during the Civil War period, women have been at the forefront of historically significant changes in in Lowcountry life.

The ruins of Comingtee's plantation house.

Lesser known are women who lived during the Colonial and Revolutionary War years, all the way back to the 17th-century, when Affra Harleston arrived in the Lowcountry from England in 1669. With her family's fortune ruined during the English Civil War, Affra took ship for the Carolinas with a two-year indentured labor contract in Charleston, on the completion of which she was promised one hundred acres of land. A budding shipboard romance with John Coming resulted in marriage and, on her release from her contract, a plantation along the Cooper River which the couple named Comingtee. By the time of Coming's death in 1694, the couple had acquired over 700 acres along the river, part of which was donated for the growing new city of Charles Towne, and which would eventually become the city's Harleston Village neighborhood. Before her own death in 1698, Affra had moved into town, built a house at Wentworth and Philips streets and donated seventeen acres to St. Philip's Church, the beginning of the church's downtown property holdings.

Johnston's portrait of Henriette Chastaigne (courtesy Gibbes Museum)

Charleston was home to America's first professional female artist, Henrietta Dering Johnston, who arrived in Charleston from Britain with her clergyman husband in 1706. The couple struggled financially, leading Henrietta to revive an earlier talent for drawing and painting and to build a reputation for society portraits done in pastel. Her commissions took her as far north at New York and saved the couple from penury. She and her husband are buried in the cemetery of St. Michael's Church downtown.

Martha Logan, early American botanist

Martha Daniell Logan, born in 1704 in St.Thomas Parish just outside Charleston, was the country's first female botanist, collecting and exchanging plants and seeds native to the Lowcountry with colleagues in Philadelphia and elsewhere in the colonies. By 1751, she was writing one of the nation's first horticultural columns, The Gardener's Kalendar, for the South Carolina Gazette.

Much of this history has been documented by the city's Preservation Society, itself founded by a woman, Susan Pringle Frost, in 1920 as the Society For The Preservation Of Old Dwellings. And as historian Harlan Greene once pointed out, even the city's official seal and motto, "She guards her buildings, customs and her laws," acknowledges Charleston's debt to her female pioneers.