From Santa Elena to Datha Island: The Early American Journey of Oranges
Intro
I love oranges. The trees, the fruit, the fragrance, and the juice have always been favorites of mine. Years ago, we lived in Florida, between Melbourne and Cocoa Beach. We loved stopping at the vendors’ roadside stands with the kids. So I was surprised when I learned that…
Oranges are not native to anywhere in the U.S.; not California, not Florida, and certainly not South Carolina.
Who do we have to thank for their arrival here? The Portuguese in the 15th century and the Spanish in the 16th century. Oranges were planted here in the Beaufort area on Santa Elena, now Parris Island, before 1577. We know this because of a man from Michigan.
Herbert John Webber (1865-1948)
Herbert John Webber was a 20th-century pioneer in citrus research. He was born on a farm in Lawton, Michigan, and grew up on a farm near Marshalltown, Iowa. He earned his PhD from Washington University in St. Louis, focusing on citrus research in Eustis, Florida. Webber spent much of his career in California, where he co-wrote the first edition of “The Citrus Industry” with his colleagues. Published in 1943, the first two volumes, to which he contributed four chapters, became known as the “Bible of the Citrus Industry” and globally impacted citrus farming. It has since been edited and republished several times by other botanists and is now called the “History and Development of the Citrus Industry.”
Chapter 1 has a fantastic treatment of the history of citrus going back thousands of years. The “Cliff Notes” go something like this…
- Citrus is not native to the U.S. “That no Citrus species is indigenous to America is a fact now recognized by authorities.”
- Citrus was known in Europe about 310 B.C.
- Sweet oranges became popular across Europe by the 16th century, thanks to the Portuguese.
- Portuguese explorers first brought oranges to the Americas (the island of Hispaniola / Haiti) in the 15th century.
- The Spanish brought oranges to our Carolina Province and La Florida in the early 16th century.
- By the 18th century, in what would become the U.S., orange groves proliferated into any area warm enough to support their cultivation.
Oranges were grown in our area long before the Sams arrived in 1783. How do we know they were grown on Datha Island? We have it on good authority. Let’s start first with Lula Sams Bond.
Lula Sams Bond (1898 – 1996)
Lula Sams Bond and Laura Sams Sanders collaborated for a lifetime investigating the genealogy of the Sams family. It culminated with what is considered today the most comprehensive body of knowledge on the Sams of South Carolina. Their genealogy research results were published in “The South Carolina Historical Magazine, Volume 64” in 1963. The genealogy starts with Bonham Sams, II, the progenitor of the Sams family of South Carolina, and meticulously documents his family tree from his birth in Somerset, England (1663) to his arrival in America (1681) and ends five Sams generations (almost 300 years) later in about 1933.
In this publication, Lula & Laura say about Lewis Reeve Sams (1784-1856),
“Lewis Reeve Sams inherited half of Datha Island. His plantation home was on the island, overlooking the Morgan River…On his Datha plantation, he cultivated rice, indigo, cotton, and oranges (believed to be the first grown in the United States for commercial purposes).”
The South Carolina Historical Magazine, Volume 64, page 49
The other half of Datha Island had orange groves also.
Reverend James Julius Sams (1826-1918)
Berners Barnwell Sams (1787 – 1855) also grew oranges, according to his son, the Reverend James Julius Sams. In his remembrances of Datha, written in about 1905, he says,
Northwest of the house was the orange orchard—Southwest was the fig orchard, and beyond that, the apple orchard. There were pear, fig, apple, and orange trees elsewhere. The Island was well supplied with fruit. West of the orange orchard was our family’s burying ground. It was shaded all over by the spread of the largest live oak tree I ever saw.
And I recently came across another first person account of oranges on Datha Island.
Barnwell Stanyarne Sams (1845 – 1928)
Barnwell S. Sams was the grandson of ‘our’ Dr. B.B. Sams, MD. In 1927, he was one of very few Sams living in Beaufort, S.C. Journalist N.L. Willet of The Beaufort Gazette wrote extensively about the history and sites of Beaufort County in this era. For reasons long lost to history, one of her (or was it his?) articles included an interview with Barnwell Sams entitled “Dathaw Island, Oranges and Two Brothers of the Sams Family.”
The article is in the style of the times, part imagination, part reality, and it’s difficult to separate the two. This sentence sums up her feelings about the Sams brothers.
“The Sams family were of the English gentry—and the family still remains ‘of the Gentry’.”
Although the Civil War ended over 60 years earlier, the journalist seemed to take issue with all the statues and monuments erected to remember the war heroes. She felt that agricultural feats of distinction should be equally honored. Apparently, Barnum’s stories of his grandfather and great uncle’s orange cultivation on Datha Island fit that bill.
Barnwell S. Sams told her,
“At one time, the Orange Industry was large—whole schooners going out from Dathaw for Charleston for transmission North.”
I believe this 1927 article is the source of the rumor that the orange stock planted on Datha Island came from France. When read in context in the article, you can tell this was speculation on the journalist’s part, not fact.
The original article plus a transcription is accessible via the Sources section below.
Elsewhere in Beaufort and South Carolina
Given the state of agriculture in those days, most plantation owners always looked for more than one crop to grow. Farming is a bit inconsistent. You were subject to weather and insects. You could spread your risk by growing different crops. For a while, oranges seemed to be one of the backup crops. It could not compete with the profits realized from Sea Island cotton, but it was at least another source of income. And in town, orange trees were a sign of a well tended garden. In “Beaufort Memoirs, Old Beaufort Homes and Their Builders“, by Lena Wood Lengnick, published in 1936, she mentions several stately homes that prized the orange trees in their gardens.
It seems that oranges might have been a familiar sight to William Sams on Wadmalaw Island. A book about the town of Rockville on Wadmalaw mentions oranges on the Rockland Plantation as early as 1830. This discovery raises an intriguing question. We are aware that Sams descendant M. Seabrook Sams (born 1847 on Wadmalaw Is., SC – died 1913 on Merritt Is., FL) and three of his step-cousins undertook a remarkable journey from Wadmalaw Island, SC to Merritt Island, FL, a distance of over 400 miles, in the 1870’s to forge new lives. Could they have carried oranges with them for cultivation?
La Florida
Oranges were also grown in La Florida during the same period as in Carolina Province. They became more widely grown in La Florida than in South Carolina for a straightforward reason: the warmer climate.
As docents giving tours here on Dataw, we love to poke fun at our southern neighbors. Remember when Lula Sams Bond said in 1963, “believed to be the first (oranges) grown in the United States for commercial purposes.” How is this possible, given the dominance of the Florida citrus industry? Because South Carolina became a U.S. state in 1788 and Florida entered the union in 1845. So our oranges were “from the U.S.” about six decades before Florida became a state.
Post Script
The Orange Grove Plantation on St Helena Island dates to the mid-1700s. I do not know how the plantation got its name.
The Sams of South Carolina were pioneers in the Merritt Island, Florida area in the 1870s and were involved in the orange industry of central east Florida through the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Gerhard Spieler, a columnist in the Beaufort Gazette from 1972 to 2007, wrote several good articles about oranges on Datha. One story is that the original 19th-century orange tree stock in Florida came from Datha. I cannot substantiate this – yet.
The original “Did You Know?” article, authored by Joel Holden circa 2011, is below.
F-DYK-08-Exotic-Export-Business-on-Dataw1Sources
The Sams Family of South Carolina, published in The South Carolina Historical Magazine, Volume 64, 1963 by Lula Sams Bond and Laura Sams Sanders.
History and Development of the Citrus Industry, 1967 by Walter Reuther and Harry W. Lawton. Based on the work of H. J. Webber published in 1943. The Citrus Industry 1943
Dathaw Island, Oranges And Two Brothers Of The Sams Family, By N. L. Willet, The Beaufort Gazette, Beaufort, S.C., 27 October 1927, Page Two
For further reading, see http://www.homecitrusgrowers.co.uk/books/mybooks2.html