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Elizabeth Pringle depended on the land to yield enough

rice to pay her mortgages and taxes. While her brother
and other men questioned her ability to succeed due to
her lack of agricultural experience and, no doubt, be-

cause she was a woman, she remained determined to
make the plantations profitable.
Portrait than half the nation’s rice crop. Numerous rice White House or Casa Bianca. Pringle endured

Georgetown County once produced more
the death of her infant son and, in 1876, her

and fields from her husband’s family. Following
using primarily slave labor to cultivate the
of a Rice plantations lined the waterways of the region, husband, at which point she bought the home
crop. Barges full of Carolina Gold rice floated
her mother’s death in 1896, Pringle bought her
downriver to the sea where the rice was loaded
childhood home, Chicora Wood.

onto ships and taken to markets in Europe and
With rice production facing decreasing
Planter the northern United States. Then came the War profits, Pringle began using scientific
agricultural methods, planted fruits such as
Between the States, or the Civil War, when the
peaches, and rented property to hunters to
Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves and
the South’s economy crumbled.
supplement her income. She also convinced the
It would be easy to think the war that
in ended slavery also ended the plantations editor of the New York Sun newspaper to buy
weekly articles she wrote about being a female
and rice production, but that would not be
rice-plantation owner.
Georgetown true. The plantations continued. Rice the Sun printed Pringle’s essays from 1904 to
Using the pen name Patience Pennington,
production continued. Things were the
County same, and yet different. 1907. Pringle then edited her essays to resemble
Some of the stories of plantations after the

a diary, and they were printed in a single volume
in 1913: A Woman Rice Planter. Her vignettes
war was lived and told by Elizabeth Waties
Allston Pringle, a rare female plantation owner. describing plantation life provided insight
Born in 1845 in Pawleys Island, Pringle grew into African-American folklife, inter-racial
by Teresa Greer
up on Chicora Wood plantation by the Pee Dee communications, and racial attitudes of her
River near Georgetown. She went to school time. The book became a best-seller and eased
in Charleston when the Civil War broke out. her financial state. She began to write another
After the war and her father’s death in 1864, book about her childhood and the life of
her family was reinstated to her family home of women during the Civil War and Reconstruction
Chicora Wood. She went on to marry John Julius which was published posthumously. She died in
Pringle, her neighbor, in 1870. She left Chicora December 1921 at the age of 76 and was buried
Wood and the couple lived at his plantation, in Magnolia Cemetery in Charleston.

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