Steeped in history

Written by Ann Mitchell
Photos courtesy of the South Carolina Historical Society
Museum artifacts photographed by Bill Thrash, Courtesy of the Summerville Dorchester Museum

Tea has its American origins in Summerville.

South Carolina is the only U.S. state to have ever produced tea commercially — and Summerville is steeped in that delicious distinction.

In 1888, Dr. Charles Upham Shepard, a biochemist, established Pinehurst Tea Plantation on 100 acres of a 600-acre tract that had been part of Newington Plantation near Summerville. Today the Tea Farm Plantation and Salisbury Acres neighborhoods, developed by the Sebring and Salisbury families, respectively, cover the Pinehurst site. Most of the original tea bushes are gone, but cuttings from them were used to establish Pinehurst’s modern-day successor, the Charleston Tea Gardens on Wadmalaw Island, which produce American Classic tea. American Classic is the only tea grown in the United States — and although the federal government won’t comment, reliable sources say it’s the “official” tea of the White House.

The first tea plants (scientific name Camellia sinensis, formerly known as Camellia thea) arrived in America at the port of Charleston in 1799. It’s possible that the plants ended up here by mistake, mixed in with others that French botanist Andre Michaux had procured for the gardens at Middleton Place Plantation. If it was an accident, however, it was certainly a fortune one.

By the mid-1800s, tea plants were being grown around the state, but attempts to produce tea commercially were star-crossed, to say the least. A Greenville-based effort — the first commercial tea garden in America — ended in 1848 when the owner, Dr. Junius Smith, was shot to death. In Georgetown in the 1870s, another gentleman planting tea met an unfortunate end: Dr. Alexis Forster, who was trying to establish a crop at his Friendfield estate, was killed when marauding “rascals” accosted him and his buggy flipped over while he was trying to escape.

In 1880, the U.S. government took an interest in trying to promote tea cultivation in America — in Summerville, to be exact. The Department of Agriculture wanted to buy 20 acres of land for a test plot at Newington Plantation, so Commissioner of Agriculture William G. LeDuc contacted the landowner, the esteemed Henry Middleton, to personally negotiate the deal — and immediately found himself in a delicate situation.

“Venerable Henry A. Middleton, living in Charleston, (was) eightyfour years old, and yet vigorous in disapproval of ‘Yankees’ and all pertaining to them,” LeDuc later wrote. At the time of their talks, it had been less than 20 years since the first shot of the Civil War had been fired across Charleston Harbor – and Middleton flatly refused to sell the federal government what it wanted.

“I expressed my sincere regret,” LeDuc recalled, “as it would interfere with my efforts to help the people of the South to acquire a new industry that in time might be of equal importance with cotton raising and, by thus diversifying the industry of the Southern states, might go a long way toward restoring their prosperity; that when I found the Newington Plantation belonged to one of the Middleton family, one of whom had signed the Declaration of Independence and whose honorable public services were well known matters of history, I felt certain of making some arrangement by which I could obtain the land or the use of it for the purpose of proving the profit of tea culture in the South.

LeDuc also managed to work into the conversation the fact that he was from Minnesota — concluding correctly that Middleton would thereby consider him less objectionable to deal with than a Yankee from the Northeast would have been.

As LeDuc recalled, Middleton responded, “You are a Minnesota man, from the extreme Northwest, and are trying to help the South, and a Middleton would like to have his name associated with this attempted beneficence.” Middleton then agreed to lease (not sell) the property to the government for 20 years for the sum of $1 — “One silver dollar,” he specified. “No greenback.”

LeDuc hired John Jackson, a native of Scotland who had grown tea in India, to run the Summerville experiments. But a new administration took office in Washington and the project was abandoned after only a few years.

In 1888, Shepard acquired 600 acres of the Newington property and founded the Pinehurst Tea Plantation. He obtained tea plants from India, China, Ceylon and Japan, cultivating about 100 acres and building a factory to manufacture and package the tea. Shepard was in business by himself initially, but in 1889 the government showed interest in resuming the tea experiments and the seeds of cooperation were planted. In 1892, Shepard marketed his first Pinehurst Tea with the slogan, “From Bush to Cup, Quality, Purity and Economy.”

Producing tea was labor-intensive. The three top leaves of the plants — the most tender — had to be plucked by hand, and the labor costs Shepard faced were eight times higher than those of his competitors in the Orient. Shepard’s solution was to set up a free school for black children whowere trained and paid for their work on the farm. The school opened in 1890. The youngsters — an average of about 30 boys and girls ages 12 to 16 — were paid according to how much tea they picked.

In 1899, the U.S. Congress appropriated $1,000 for the Summerville tea experiments and another $700 for experiments with irrigation systems at the site. That year, Shepard — who had been named “Special Agent in Charge of Tea Investigations” by the U.S. Department of Agriculture — wrote a report for the government on the status of his experiments.

“It was well-known that the tea plant, Camellia thea, would thrive under the local climatic conditions; and that the tea made therefrom possessed excellent cup-qualities, if somewhat weak — possibly owing to faults in cultivation and curing,” Shepard wrote. He stated that under the right blend of circumstances – the necessary rainfall or irrigation, cheap labor, effective pruning of bushes and a protective tariff from the government — “pure commercial tea may be profitably raised in the Southern States, thereby supplying an easy and healthful livelihood to idle thousands and imparting a value to immense tracts of now waste land.”

He added, “The demand for (Pinehurst tea) has easily kept pace with the supply, in spite of its peculiar taste. But without a characteristic fl avor, American tea can have no special advantage.”

Whatever gave the tea its distinctive fl avor, it was a winner: In 1904, Pinehurst oolong tea captured first prize in a competition at the World’s Fair in St. Louis. The Pinehurst Tea Plantation — and its lush fl ower gardens — became must-see attractions for visitors to Summerville’s popular resort inns. President Theodore Roosevelt himself called on Shepard to see the tea-making operation during a trip to the Pine Forest Inn in Flowertown.

Unfortunately, Shepard’s death in 1915 essentially spelled the end of the tea farm, although production continued for a few more years. The Lipton Tea Co. purchased a small number of acres there, worked to rejuvenate the plants, and in 1963 took cuttings from those bushes to plant at the company’s experimental site on Wadmalaw Island.

In 1987, Mack Fleming, a horticultural researcher for Lipton, and William Barclay Hall, a third-generation tea taster, bought the 127- acre property from Lipton and established the Charleston Tea Plantation to produce American Classic Tea. Reportedly, 315 of the 320 varieties of tea grown at Wadmalaw had their roots at Pinehurst — and as Fleming once said, “Anything that’s worth anything came from Summerville.”

American Classic eventually made it onto the shelves of more than 1,000 retail outlets, including Sam’s Club stores. In 2002, however, Fleming and Hall parted ways over their differing visions for the company, and the plantation closed.

The R.C. Bigelow Tea Co. bought Charleston Tea Plantation at a court auction in April 2003 for $1.28 million. Bigelow — creator of the popular tea “Constant Comment” — has refurbished the site, now called Charleston Tea Gardens, and continues to produce American Classic, with Hall remaining on board. The gardens are scheduled to begin offering public tours in the latter half of 2005.

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