Carolina was meant to make money for the Lords Proprietors who received this land from England's King Charles II. Across the creek from where you stand, forty acres were cleared and experimental crops were planted in a quest for agricultural wealth.
Badly misjudging the climate, the Lords hoped to raise exotics like sugarcane, which was enriching landowners in Barbados. However, profitable crops proved elusive and the Proprietors soon focused on trade with native peoples, abandoning the plantation.
Within twenty years, coastal planters would discover the profitability of cultivating rice, thereby validating the Lords Proprietors' dream of an agriculture-based economy.
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Next to a diagram of the plantation and palisade wall: By 1671, a star-shape palisade wall protected homes and outbuildings of the Lords Proprietors' Plantation where some thirty farmhands worked. This 1673 rendering shows the formal experimental gardens immediately east of the palisade.
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