‘I didn’t realize the role rice played’: the ingenious crop cultivation of the Gullah Geechee people

As a former deputy state underwater archaeologist, Mark Wilde-Ramsing can’t help but look down. While rowing around North Carolina’s Eagles Island, at the tip of the Gullah Geechee corridor, he noticed signs of human-made structures, visible at low tide. Though he’d retired, he was still active in the field and knew his former agency hadn’t recorded the structures – which meant he had come across something previously undocumented. The next step was figuring out exactly what he’d found.

Wilde-Ramsing knew the area had once been full of rice fields. His neighbor, Joni “Osku” Backstrom, was an assistant professor in the department of environmental sciences at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington whose specialty was shallow-water sonar, and he had the skills and technology to explore the area. Using a sonar device, the duo detected 45 wooden structures in the river, and the remote sensing tool allowed Backstrom and Wilde-Ramsing to acoustically map the canal beds.

“The side-scan sonar system that Mark and I put together and put on these vessels has been really important in finding these artifacts because if you went diving, you wouldn’t be able to see anything,” Backstrom said. “That’s really the advantage of this custom, shallow sonar system and being able to go up through these known rice canals and irrigation areas.”

Spanning 2,000 acres (809 hectares) of the northern end of Eagles Island, the 45 irrigation devices were developed by enslaved people, who would later come to be known as the Gullah Geechee. The devices were used to control water flow for the rice fields in conjunction with earthen dams and levees, Wilde-Ramsing said. Their existence provides further evidence of the engineering and technological skills that Gullah Geechee people used for rice cultivation, beginning in the late 1700s at the latest. Backstrom and Wilde-Ramsing documented their findings in a study published earlier this year. “The use of the island for this endeavor prior to the Civil War, in large part rested on the shoulders of transplanted and enslaved Africans and their descendant Gullah Geechee tradition,” the study reads.

The team’s discoveries, which came after two years of research in and around Eagles Island, have helped further shed light on the ingenious, skilled work of the Gullah Geechee people. Though Gullah Geechee people have been studied for centuries, Backstrom and Wilde-Ramsing’s research is the first to focus on their irrigation systems. The research couldn’t come soon enough: Eagles Island is environmentally vulnerable, both because of climate change and ongoing development. The duo registered their sites with the state, making development more difficult as a means to ensure the protection of cultural artifacts.

“The whole area was originally swamp. It was cleared mostly in the post-colonial, early 1800s period for tidal rights cultivation because that area was freshwater,” Wilde-Ramsing said. “They were able to actually use, regulate, introduce the water and drain it with the tides instead of having these big ponds and using the traditional way.”

The work the Gullah Geechee people did would have been exhaustive. Wilde-Ramsing says it required removing the cypress forests, then building dams and levees. Growing rice necessitated the use of water, so they created long wooden boxes, or “trunks”, with gates on either side, that allowed them to let the water in by opening the gates.

The area, Wilde-Ramsing said, is desolate, difficult swamp terrain, which makes it good for rice cultivation, but hot, buggy and humid – “really not a nice place to work in the summer”. Everyone got around via boat, and most of the boat drivers were enslaved Africans. The enslaved populations throughout the Gullah Geechee corridor – which spans the coasts of North Carolina to upper Florida – were isolated in such a way that they developed and maintained a culture different from that of most plantations.

“Originally, they were sought out as slaves from coastal regions of west Africa, an area that had similar environs to those along the southern Atlantic seaboard centering on Georgia and the Carolinas, where rice agriculture was a mainstay of the economy,” the study reads. “Traditional knowledge and skills, as well as the ability to tolerate humid, mosquito-infested conditions, made this group critical to the success of rice cultivation in the Americas.”

Eagles Island has a long history of slavery: formerly known as Cranes Island, it was featured on John Ogilby’s 1672 map of Carolina, and around 1737, King George II granted much of the “grand island” opposite Wilmington to Richard Eagles, an attorney and plantation owner from Bristol, England, for whom the island is named. The Eagles plantation was one of many on the island. Via Wilmington, a port city founded in 1739 that developed in large part due to its participation in the slave industry, Eagles Island was used for shipping cotton, shipbuilding and rice cultivation. That rice cultivation made Wilmington wealthy, at the expense of the enslaved Gullah Geechee, who received no wages for their labor.

“I didn’t quite realize the role that rice played. It rivaled cotton during the 1840s and 50s,” Backstrom said. “It was all over Europe and the US and it was all run by African Americans. A lot of it was developed based on their skills. I’m just happy that it’s coming to light and they’re getting their – I won’t say new – but recognition that this was an amazing thing, amazing work.”

Even though Wilde-Ramsing and Backstrom’s discovery likely won’t permanently stop either development or climate change, not least because the island is owned by multiple private entities, the existence of historic, cultural artifacts can ensure that the Gullah Geechee structures are at least documented instead of simply being razed and forgotten.

The researchers have been in communication with East Carolina University’s maritime program, and the school plans to send a contingent to the site to study some of the characteristic types. People from the school will be able to work on noting the various structures, trying to figure out how they operated and taking samples. Backstrom said that they’ve also been in contact with researchers at George Mason University in Fairfax county, Virginia, including a professor who had ancestors in Wilmington.

In terms of further discovery, a mix of approaches best suits the complicated terrain. “We’re thinking about using drone imagery,” Backstrom said. “We have some preliminary drone footage, which gives us access to these areas at dead low tide, areas that we had a lot of difficulty with, even with a very small vessel.” The area is remote, full of tight nooks and crannies. It’s “particularly challenging because of the tides and the timing”, he said. The different combinations of drone imagery and sonar mean the researchers aren’t limited by turbidity in the water.

Backstrom hopes to go to west Africa, specifically to Senegal or the Senegambia region, where many Gullah Geechee people were from, to learn about the history of rice farming, including the roles women and children played. Children, for instance, tasted the water to ensure too much saltwater wasn’t being let in, and women helped in the actual cultivation of the rice, using skills from their home countries that were passed down throughout generations.

The methods that the researchers used for Eagles Island can be transferred elsewhere, and Wilde-Ramsing and Backstrom will apply their discovery techniques to finding other such sites in the area. They anticipate finding others around Cape Fear, a nearby former slave center, and in places farther south in the Gullah Geechee corridor.

“South Carolina was kind of the center of rice cultivation compared to here, so we’re hoping to link up with the Gullah Geechee researchers, [maybe] down in South Carolina or even Georgia,” Backstrom said. Their work will continue to expand knowledge around historic Gullah Geechee practices for generations to come.