Charleston Tea Plantation - Wadmalaw Island Charleston County South Carolina SC

Charleston Tea Plantation – Wadmalaw Island
Charleston County



Note: We define a plantation as a large farm on which most of the work was done by slaves. Thus all the plantations we catalog were established before the Civil War.

The Charleston Tea Plantation was established in 1960 on a tract of land on Wadmalaw Island. It was never a plantation according to our definition, but we include it here because of public interest.

Basic Information

Timeline

  • 1960 – The Thomas J. Lipton Company purchased Pinehurst Tea Plantation in Summerville, South Carolina. The plantation had been abandoned since 1915. Thomas Lipton rescued the surviving tea plants and moved them to a research facility that had been constructed on Wadmalaw Island.

    Mack Fleming, a horticultural researcher at Trident Technical College, was in charge of the operation. Lipton concluded, as the federal government had almost 150 years earlier, that the unstable climate and high costs of labor in South Carolina made American tea production unfeasible.

  • 1987 – Mack Fleming and William (Bill) Hall purchased the tea farm from their former employer, the Thomas J. Lipton Company.

  • 2003 – Due to differences of opinion and financial stress, Fleming and Hall decided to sell the tea farm. The Charleston Tea Plantation was auctioned off to R.C. Bigelow who paid $1.28 million.

Land

  • Number of acres – 127

  • Primary crop – Tea

Owners

  • Alphabetical list – R.C. Bigelow; Mack Fleming and Bill Hall; Thomas J. Lipton Company

Buildings

  • ?

Web Resources

Print Resources

Contact Information



SC Plantation Inns
SC Plantation Tours
SC Plantation Pictures
SC Plantations by Place
SC Plantation Weddings



Abbeville County
Aiken County
Allendale County
Anderson County

Bamberg County
Barnwell County
Beaufort County
Berkeley County

Calhoun County
Charleston County
Cherokee County
Chester County
Chesterfield County
Clarendon County
Colleton County

Darlington County
Dillon County
Dorchester County

Edgefield County

Fairfield County
Florence County

Georgetown County
Greenville County
Greenwood County

Hampton County
Horry County

Jasper County

Kershaw County

Lancaster County
Laurens County
Lee County
Lexington County

Marion County
Marlboro County
McCormick County

Newberry County

Oconee County
Orangeburg County

Pickens County

Richland County

Saluda County
Spartanburg County
Sumter County

Union County

Williamsburg County

York County


Flower photographs by Virginia Saunders, Columbia, SC. Please click flower for more info.

HOW YOU CAN HELP

Are you able to correct
an error?
Please click here.


SouthCarolinaPlantations.com
is maintained as a public service by

South Carolina

Home Edit Info Contact

HomeCorrect InfoSearchContact