Brookgreen River Boat Tour 7 '14

I think I remember being told that the sculpture gardens, open to the public,  comprise only about 450 acres out  of Brookgreen's 9000 total acreage. Much of Brookgreen property is in preserve .  The preserved areas can only be viewed on prescheduled tours such as their riverboat cruise which takes you up and down the tidal creeks within the Brookgreen Preserve. 

As part of it's' Cool Summer Evenings' program, Brookgreen Gardens has extended its  boat cruise tour schedule into the early evening hours.  Bruce and I decided this would be the perfect time to see  this lesser known  side of Brookgreen , so we hopped on board  a 48-foot pontoon boat  for a hour long cruise along historic ricefields now home to alligators, waterfowl, and osprey.

Our tour guide, Don Spriegel,  interpreted the distinctive landscape of the rice plantations and helped us to understand the role of enslaved Africans in the cultivation of the rice crop.

Small Cyprus tree 

First,  the massive cypress trees were dug up by young male slaves from, what was at that time, a mature old forest cypress swamp.

Dykes  held back the tidal waters

Once the swamps were rid of the forest, the branches of the cypress were pounded into the mud to make  a dyke, and soil dug out of the swamp to build up the rice beds fields behind it. 

Trunk opening

Openings were left in the dykes  to called 'trunks'.  On the earliest plantations, hollowed out cypress tree trunks were place in these openings, with gates at either end, to control the flow of tidal water in and out of the fields. A later design looked like the Rice gate below..  

Rice Gates control water flow in and out of the rice fields

Shortly before the civil war, Georgetown county was the richest county in all of the colonies.  Except for the oaks in the residential areas, all of the land had been denuded of trees and converted to rice fields

Trees  grown since the civil war

After the war,  the slave labor force need to maintain this industry was no longer available, and the destitute landowners did not have the means to pay for the labor intensive farming.  The land began its slow  return to its natural form.  Today the Bald Cyprus and

Tupelo trees are once again reclaiming the land that was once theirs.

The hour went all too quickly, and soon we were seeing the sun playing peek a boo with the edges of the  horizon.  It was promising another beautiful sunset over the peaceful tidal creeks.