About | Santee Delta Project

The Santee Delta Project

Mission Statement

To document, protect, and preserve the cultural landscape of the Santee Delta with emphasis on the African descendant experience.

Introduction

Beginning in the late 1600s and continuing through the mid-nineteenth century, the Santee Delta was developed primarily for tidal rice production. The lush marsh lands and vibrant swamps of the Delta were developed into plantations predominantly owned by white European settlers who exploited the labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants, as well as enslaved Native Americans, for their own personal gain. Over the course of almost 200 years, enslaved laborers converted thousands of acres of swamp and marsh into productive rice fields which created much of the economic wealth of the Carolina Lowcountry. They lived between the rivers, building several large settlements including Tranquility, Crow Island, and Murphy Island, in addition to smaller settlements along the banks of the Santee River branches.

In the latter part of the 19th century, emancipation meant that rice ceased to be a lucrative commodity in the Santee Delta. Most of the formerly enslaved people of the Delta left to find work elsewhere and the settlements they had inhabited were gradually abandoned. Many of these settlements have succumbed to weather events such as hurricanes and tropical storms, or have been dismantled by new generations of plantation owners. Though the Santee Delta is no longer the nexus of commercial tidal rice production, and the settlements and fields have been abandoned, the remoteness of the Santee Delta has provided a measure of protection to these historic lands. The majority of these former plantation lands have not been impacted by modern development and are formally conserved either by conservation easement or public agency ownership.

The Delta Project team proposes a large-scale, multi-year survey and investigation of the Santee Delta to provide a framework for the sustainable conservation of its cultural resources. Collaboratively, the team will construct a cultural landscape history of the Delta; we seek to show how the Delta changed over time from European settlement in the late 1600s through emancipation. This project will be executed in a series of phases; the first of these phases is centered on African and African descendant lifeways.

The project area includes public and private lands beginning at the Santee River split at Chicken Creek, continuing east to the Atlantic Ocean, and loosely bounded at the north and south by the river roads. Also included in the scope of this project are the Smith Hill inland rice fields. Phase I of this project, to be completed by 2028, will result in a book tentatively titled, A Cultural History of the Santee Delta. This phase begins with the advent of non-indigenous habitation of the Santee Delta in the late 1600s and continues through the end of slavery in 1865. The next phase of this project will be outlined under separate cover & will consist of post-Civil War documentation through present day.