THE STORY OF CAROLINA GOLD

The History of Carolina Gold Rice

Carolina Gold Rice is the original rice to the Americas.

This heirloom grain is the great granddaddy of most of the rice grown in America today. It is said that its American roots trace back to the late 1680’s in the port of Charleston, SC. The story goes that the captain of a merchant ship from Madagascar used his cargo of rice seed to pay for much needed ship repairs.

The seed landed in the hands of an ambitious farmer named Dr. Henry Woodward. He planted the first crop of rice in the Americas and it flourished. Soon, rice was the cash crop. Production took over the South Carolina lowlands. Rice plantations began moving north into the coastal plain, known as the Tidewater region. This stretch of coastal land went from Eastern North Carolina up into Virginia.

Rice farming in the Carolinas thrived for nearly 200 years due to the region’s fertile soil, river waters to flood the plain and nearby coastal ports to facilitate easy distribution to England and Europe.

With the end of the Civil War, the labor force for Southern coastal plantations, made up primarily of enslaved people, all but disappeared.

In the early 1900’s came market pressures, a series of destructive hurricanes and the boom of commodity farming, all of which combined to effectively end rice farming in North Carolinas.

That is until now. The Tidewater Grain Company is proud to announce that after a 120-year hiatus; Carolina Gold Rice production is back in Eastern North Carolina.