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Visit Medexpress.co.uk slash podcast to get started today. Since the early 18th century, the port of Georgetown, South Carolina has been a busy and immensely important center of trade for the low country.

Set along Wynia Bay at the meeting point of several rivers, it was a natural outlet

for everything moving in and out of the interior of the colony. Sure enough, by the mid-1700s,

ships were coming and going non-stop, arriving with finished goods from Europe and departing

with the raw materials drawn from what was then colonial South Carolina.

Today, however, Georgetown carries a quieter reputation. It's the kind of place people visit for its historic homes and coastal scenery, but back in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, this was a working port tied directly to a much larger agricultural system, one built on the cultivation of rice.

Plantations spread out all along the river banks.

Marshlands were divided into fields, and a network of canals, levees, and floodgates were designed to work with the

natural rise and fall of the tides in a carefully engineered agricultural operation.

It was precise and demanding work, and by the early 1800s, the region surrounding Georgetown had become one of the most productive

rice-growing areas in the country. Often referred to as Carolina Gold, this rice was shipped out in

large quantities, and the wealth that came from it really helped shape that

grandiose image that folks now associate with the antebellum south, just as much as cotton had elsewhere.

The large homes, the formal gardens, and estates that appeared orderly and self-contained.

But look, as y'all know from listening to Southern Gothic, that image was just an image.

There's always something heavy underneath the surface, right?

You see, rice cultivation required constant labor and

maintenance, work that was done entirely through enslaved labor. So when the Civil War brought an

end to slavery, the economic foundation of those plantations collapsed with it.

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