Charleston Tea Plantation

By Sandra Scott

John and I spent three days exploring the lovely city of Charleston. We toured Fort Sumter, where the Civil War began, and visited all the historical places including the Charleston Museum, American’s very first museum. We dined at Bubba Gumps, which was inspired by the “Forrest Gump” movie and spent an evening listening to a free Gullah concert at the Circular Church where we were invited to “clap yo’ hans’ an’ stump yo’ futs.”

There was one thing we hadn’t done. We had not visited a plantation. Looking over the list of the area’s plantations I spotted The Charleston Tea Plantation. “John, it’s the only tea farm in the United States. That’s the one. We can stop on the way to Beaufort. OK?”  John agreed and off we went to Wadmalaw Island about a 30-minute drive south of Charleston.

Actually the Charleston Tea Plantation is not a “plantation” in the strictest sense of the word. A plantation is usually defined as a “large farm on which most of the work was done by slaves.” That means that all plantations were founded before the Civil War.

Tea came to the United States in 1799. A French botanist named Francois Andre Michaux planted tea plants called “camellia sinesis” near Charleston. Throughout the years, several attempts to market tea commercially ended in failure until 1963 when the Thomas J. Lipton Company established a research station on Wadmalaw Island on a plantation that had been abandoned in 1915. Lipton rescued the surviving tea plants from the area and moved them to a research facility. The research station operated for 25 years, proving that a high-quality tea could be grown commercially in South Carolina.

The Lowcountry climate with frequent rain, high heat, and humidity proved to be the ideal climate for growing tea. In 1987, Mack Fleming, a manager at Lipton, and his partner Bill Hall, a third-generation English tea taster, purchased the 127-acre tea farm in order to create The Charleston Tea Plantation. Their tea, American Classic, is the only tea produced commercially in the United States. In 2003 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. Based in Fairfield, Conn., Bigelow Tea Company has been in the tea business for more than 60 years producing a variety of teas.

We arrived at the Plantation just as the trolley was loading for their Field Tour. The narrated bus tour offers up-close views of America's only working tea plantation. Mike, our guide, explained how tea is planted, grown, nurtured and harvested. He explained, “The tea plant is naturally resistant to insects and disease so we don’t have to use insecticides or fungicides.” I was surprised to learn that all tea comes from the same plant but there are three types: black, green, and oolong. The amount of oxidation that the crushed leaves receive is what determines the type.

At the end of the tour we watched the gigantic one-of-a-kind machine designed specifically for Charleston Tea Plantation harvesting the tea. In most parts of the world tealeaves are picked by hand because it is grown on hillsides, but South Carolina’s coastal plain is flat, allowing for mechanization.

Inside the newly built factory we walked along the 125-foot window gallery overlooking the processing. We learned how the leaves are broken down in the roto-vanes, oxidized, and dried. We did some shopping in the gift shop, relaxed in the rocking chairs drinking our free cold tea before heading down the road to explore more of South Carolina’s Lowland.

Bisit www.bigelowtea.com and www.charlestoncvb.com.

Sandra Scott is a frequent contributor to travel publications and to Copley News Service and has co-authored two books on local history. She lives in Mexico, NY.

Images courtesy of Sandra Scott, J.J. Scott.

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