“Carolina Gold” began when Captain John Thurber brought rice seeds from Madagascar and gave them to one of Carolina’s founders, Henry Woodward, sometime before 1694. By 1698, one of the Lord Proprietors, Lord Ashley, shipped to England 60 tons of rice from Charleston. For the next century England imported some 150,000 barrels a year and nearly wiped out America’s rice industry during the British occupation of Charleston in 1780 by sending the entire harvest
