Edisto Island Branch Library and Edisto Island Open Land Trust present A History of Sea Island Cotton on Edisto Island

Description

Join us at the Edisto Island Branch Library as Tom Austin presents a History of Sea Island Cotton. Tom Austin is a professional conservationist working for the Edisto Island Open Land Trust. Through EIOLT's Hutchinson House project on Edisto Island, Tom has found himself amidst an effort to study, interpret, and re-introduce one of the State's most influential cash crops, Sea Island Cotton.

Sea Island Cotton was a cash crop grown across the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia for roughly 140 years. Not only did it shape the cultures and socio-political aspects of the Lowcountry, but also the hydrology and ecology of the landscape. By the latter half of the 20th century, it disappeared entirely from the United States and was thought to have been hybridized into extinction. However, two varieties from Edisto Island were recently rediscovered and are being returned to small-scale cultivation.