THURSDAY MAY 13TH

A day to explore Georgetown. Georgetown was settled sometime around 1729, although the Spanish first visited the area in 1526.

The marina had these minnows for sale in an old claw footed bathtub.

First stop, The Kudzu Bakery. Besides being a bakery it also had many gourmet food items ranging from wines, marinades, jellies and chutneys, even frog legs.
















I’ve been willing to try many local foods on this trip, but these kinda made my stomach do a flip flop. Maybe it had something to do with dissecting that frog way back in biology class!

We did purchase some bakery treats though. Ross picked out a cinnamon roll and so did I till I spotted the gingerbread muffin with lemon filling. We keep blaming the dryers in the marinas for shrinking our clothes. Ha!

Indigo was Georgtown's primary crop back in the 1700’s. It is a plant, which was made in to blue dye and sold to England for Navy uniforms. You could get 2 crops a season from a plant so it was a profitable crop to grow. The Winyah Indigo Society formed and its membership dues made them able to construct this building. It held a library and was the first free public school. That was back in 1757. Life was good for the Indigo growers until after the revolutionary war. They lost their primary client…the British Navy!

We stopped at the Rice Museum located in what had started as the Rice Exchange and then became the town hall with the jail located downstairs. 

Rice took over as the staple crop. There is much fresh water from streams and rivers that flow in to the low county. The tides that occur cause the freshwater to back up and flood in certain areas. The Dutch had the knowledge of building a dike around a field and using a trunk gate to allow the water level in the diked area to be raised and lowered. All this took an incredible amount of labor. And so began slavery. It was not the growing of cotton that started slavery, but rice. 

The Africans had the knowledge of growing rice and were also somewhat more resistant to malaria. So the slaves were forced to first clear out cypress swamps and build earthen dikes around the area. The labor required to complete this task has been compared to the building of pyramids. 

After the Civil War the rice market collapsed being there was no longer the workers to produce this labor-intensive product. 

This boat, or maybe I should say its remains, was also on display. It is the Browns Ferry vessel. Built in the 1700’s and sank in the 1730’s. It is thought it was set on fire by flaming arrows, as there are burn marks on areas of the remaining hull. It was discovered and raised in 1976. It is the oldest known colonial built boat discovered in the United States. The ribs of the boat are made from the curved branches of Live Oak trees.

This small boat is a replica of what it had originally looked like.

There were many artifacts found near the ferry. I thought the most interesting one was this Davis Quadrant. It can be used to navigate with. Despite being submerged for 200 years, you can still see the calibration marks on it. It worked something like this, I think. You held it out vertically toward the horizon with the sun at your back. The sun shines through a slit and you read the calibration. A pretty smart person figured this gizmo out. It’s the only Davis Quadrant ever found on a ship in the United States and was generally used for ocean travel. So it’s thought that maybe this ferry ventured down to Charleston on occasion. 

Miss Ruby was a local black schoolteacher. And nobody gave this lady any lip. Also in the museum is her infamous red paddle. It was her main form of discipline. She said the embarrassment and fear of the paddle was worse than the hurt.

She expected her students to always say please and thank you and yes ma’am and no ma’am. Bad words by students produced “the bottle”. This was Ruby’s special mix of Listerine, peroxide and water. Really foul words were met with her recipe of horseradish powder and Tabasco. Ah, the good ol’ days!!!

The museum had numerous ledger books that we could browse through. Here is a page from 1884 and the purchases made to the account. The handwriting is beautiful and would have been done with a quill pen.

Replicas of Christopher Columbus’ sailing ships, the Nina and Pinta, were tied up by the boardwalk in town. We passed them as we took a ride in our dinghy. They are only about 50 feet long. I don’t think I’d care to cross the ocean with no idea of where I was going. Maybe over the edge of the world. You can tell by the photo that there wasn’t much freeboard. We could see along the hull how a space was left at deck level so waves that would wash over could just drain out along the sides.