Carolina Gold is another one of those stories that we kept coming back to, and that I now want to recap as part of our anniversary celebrations.
Before the U.S. Civil War, Carolina Gold was the dominant rice of the South Carolina Lowcountry, grown on vast plantations by enslaved Africans and generating much of Charleston’s wealth. The war, emancipation and a series of hurricanes then shattered that cruel system; commercial plantings dwindled and the last U.S. harvest is usually dated to 1927. But that wasn’t the end of the story, as it turns out.
I first wrote about the variety in 2007, asking where it had actually come from. New genetic evidence from a USDA study complicated the conventional story that it had arrived from Madagascar, pointing instead toward a West African source that fit rather better with the history of the transatlantic slave trade. Check out the string of comments on the post too.
I came back to the story in 2010, linking to an IRRI piece about how cultivation was revived in Carolina thanks to — wait for it — genebank samples. In 2016, there was an update on the revival. And then friend-of-the-blog Mike Jackson picked up the thread in 2017 with an account of “Civil War destruction … genebank redemption”.
He did us all a great service by telling the whole story in detail all in one place: the decline of rice cultivation after the Civil War, Carolina Gold’s near-disappearance, and its rescue when Savannah doctor Richard Schulze discovered seed in the USDA collection. Fourteen pounds supplied to Schulze eventually became 10,000 pounds by 1988. Mike checked Genesys and found 19 accessions carrying the Carolina Gold name, raising the next questions: how different are they, and which one was actually used for the rescue?
Along the way, I actually tasted the stuff! And Jeremy found a film featuring it.
By 2018, Carolina Gold had become the precedent for the comeback of another “lost” rice, this time in Trinidad.
For a blog about agricultural biodiversity, Carolina Gold, with its origin debates, near‑extinction, and then real‑world use of what genebanks kept alive, really is a near‑perfect subject. Can you find others in our archive?