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ยง (male speaker) R is for rice.
Rice was the most important colonial export commodity
from South Carolina. In fact, it was so important that the emperors
of China wanted it, ordered it, and ate it.
'Carolina Gold' rice is known the world over and is the most important rice crop
because it set the standard worldwide for quality in long-grain rice.
Because the rice itself was revolutionary in its quality,
it maintained the top of the European rice market
and also in Indonesia and Asia for over 150 years beginning in 1700
and continuing to our Civil War. The rice reputation for Carolina rice
was so pervasive on the planet that it even was the name
of long-grain rice around the world up until at least 1920.
And they were still calling long-grain rice around the world
"Carolina rice" up until the '50s. To make rice to eat, first you grow it.
Then you harvest it, and it was harvested by hand early on.
Then you take it to the threshing barn and thresh it.
They used flail threshers here, which were canes with sticks on top and ropes.
They beat the rice to get the grains off the stalks.
Rice, like a sunflower seed, has a hull and the inner kernel that we eat.
The way they hulled the rice was to take a cypress stump,
then take a cypress pounder, a long stick with a big, blunt end,
and put rice in the hole in the stump and pound it,
and the hulls break. Then you take a fanner basket,
toss the rice in the air with the hulls. The hulls are light.
They blow away in the air, and the rice comes back.
Those farms that studied this sustainable horticulture
combined the most elegant African rotation systems
that are still prevalent in primitive Africa today in agriculture
with modern European farming methods for rice. That rotation became known as the sun cycle
rotation for rice horticulture and was maintained on the coast
all the way up till the Civil War. Rice belongs to South Carolina.
It's part of our culture.