HARDEEVILLE, S.C. — In late October, Marion Lauren Chalmers stood next to a rice field surrounded by pine and palm trees. He pointed with apparent satisfaction to roseate spoonbills soaring from a perch, alligator tail tracks across the bank and shoots sprouting from stalks of Carolina Gold rice. The farmer had harvested the field more than a month ago but didn’t uproot the seedlings. So after rewatering and fertilizing, a second crop, called regenerators, had begun to sprout.
“These fields are exactly as they were in the 17th and 18th centuries,” said Chalmers, 60, a fourth-generation rice farmer in a centuries-old Lowcountry family.
Many Americans have tried rice grown by Chalmers, even if they didn’t know it. Chalmers, a longtime collaborator with Anson Mills founder and traditional grain advocate Glenn Roberts, has been the driving force behind South Carolina’s rice revival for nearly two decades. Chalmers grows organic rice and other crops at Turnbridge Farm, where Richard Schultz Sr. revived the nutty-smelling Carolina Gold rice in the late 1980s.
Get the recipe: Carolina Gold Rice Grits Risotto with Mushrooms
More than just a seed sower, Chalmers also serves as a crop formulator, agronomist, hydrologist, forester, field and fence builder and ancestral knowledge keeper. “There are lots of farms that grow rice, and there isn’t one that Lauren hasn’t visited and advised,” says Roberts.
Come spring 2023, Chalmers will add a new title to his diverse resume: rice distributor. With his wife, Frances, Chalmers has launched Lauren’s Raw Grains, his own brand of rice, peas and grits, which he sells online, at farmers’ markets and at the couple’s storefront in Hardeeville. “I’ve been wanting to do something like this for years, and I’m involved in a lot of other projects,” Chalmers says of his late-in-life public debut. “It’s a big accomplishment.”
The previously unknown farm now has a fanbase of chefs (BJ Dennis, Pierre Thiam, Bernard Bennett, Mashama Bailey, etc.) and a growing legion of loyal home cooks. For Chalmers, the state’s best-known black rice farmer, every pot he produces is a quiet triumph of culture.
South Carolina planters got rich on rice. By 1774, the coast was exporting about 66 million pounds of rice a year, all of it sown and harvested by slave laborers in water moccasins and dangerous, mosquito-infested fields. Planters specifically sought out West Africans for their rice-growing and processing skills. “Enslaved Africans taught Americans how to grow rice,” says Bailey, chef and co-owner of Gray’s near Savannah, Georgia. Posters for slave auctions in the Lowcountry advertised workers from the “Windward and Rice Coasts” and gangs of 25 men “trained in growing cotton and rice on the Sea Islands.”
After the Civil War, many planters sold or abandoned their land, and commercial rice farming in South Carolina declined in the face of mechanization (the region’s sticky mud was unsuitable for tractors), labor shortages, and outside competition. By the time Chalmers began farming, the rice fields that had powered the state’s antebellum economy were largely ghosts, their soil memories imprinted on the landscape. Researchers now use aerial photography and lidar (an advanced image-processing technique) to map the fields’ artificial boundaries.
But rice has long been cultivated by the Gullah Geechee people, descendants of enslaved West Africans who settled in the swamps and islands of the Southeast after emancipation. Until the 1940s, Chalmers’ maternal grandmother grew and milled rice for her own consumption, that is, for survival. “After slavery ended, everyone in this area, especially African-Americans, had their own little rice field,” Chalmers says. “But now you can’t tell it’s a rice field; it’s overgrown with trees.”
Chalmers believes his grandparents’ generation stopped farming because they could no longer get seeds. Francis Chalmers speculates that when people got jobs in factories or pulp mills, they didn’t have time to farm on the side. They could also afford to buy rice from the store, which was a sign of growing family wealth. “Growing your own rice was seen as low-income, low-income. It was a derogatory term,” Roberts says.
The association with slavery, poverty, and self-sufficiency rather than prosperity has helped bury the history of rice cultivation in the Lowcountry, even for modern adherents like Lauren Chalmers.
In the fall of 2022, Chalmers got a call from Mary Socci, an archaeologist with the Palmetto Bluff Conservancy. Over the centuries, the land on which Palmetto Bluff sits has been home to Native American settlements, antebellum plantations, vacation homes for Northern industrialists, and hunting clubs. Today, it’s a luxury resort and homes surrounded by moss-draped oak trees and the salty waters of the May River. Guests drive up to the front door, crossing a former rice paddy bank.
Socci invited Chalmers to Palmetto Bluff, ostensibly to discuss rice-field establishment with farmers, but also to test a hunch. Earlier that year, she had attended a lecture on rice cultivation by Chalmers and couldn’t help but suspect he might be connected to the gravestones she was entrusted to care for. Over lunch, Socci asked about his family’s history in the area, and after the meal, she told Chalmers she had something else she wanted to show him. They drove to the cemetery a short distance away, and she led Chalmers to a small gate. “There I saw, plainly, ‘Maria Chalmers, wife of William Chalmers,'” Chalmers recalled. “I was so astonished I could neither move nor speak.”
Because of slavery, it’s extremely rare for black Americans to be able to trace their ancestors back to before the Civil War. But planters John J. and Esther Caroline Corey Cole of Bluffton, South Carolina, kept a family Bible inscribed with the names of their children born into slavery. “They recorded the birth of a girl named Maria,” Socci says. “Her birth date matches the date on the gravestone.”
Socci explained that Maria was Chalmers’ great-grandmother. In 1871, she married William, who grew up in Bluffton, and the couple had four children: Errol, Sarah, Sabina and Chalmers’ grandfather, William. “It’s incredible,” Chalmers said. His paternal grandfather died young after being injured while leveling land he had recently purchased. “Nobody in his family knew about them.”
Socci also found that the 1880 agricultural census showed that 27-year-old William Sr. rented four acres in what is now Palmetto Bluff township, and that he and Maria grew 108 pounds of rice that year. “It’s great to know that Lauren has this connection to the land and that he’s carrying on this tradition,” Socci said.
Chalmers now has a stand at the Palmetto Bluff Farmers Market, and resort chefs have added his rice to their menus. Resort naturalist Cathy Beato talks about the hikes and eco-tours led by Chalmers.
“I saw people who were thrilled to hear his stories and people who were really moved to meet him,” Bailey said of Chalmers. She also took a team from Gray to Hardeeville to interact with Chalmers and learn about Lowcountry rice culture.
Bailey says rice is the foundation of her cooking: “I grew up eating rice. I love cooking with rice. I ate rice every day as a kid.”
Similarly, Frances Chalmers, who grew up in Hardeeville, remembers having rice on the table for almost every meal. If there were leftovers, her mother would make them into patties and fry them for breakfast. In addition to casseroles of white rice, Chalmers family favorites included red rice, chicken bog, chicken and rice, and hoppin’ John, all staples of the Gullah Geechee purloo (also spelled purloo, perlo, pilau, and pilaf).
But Lauren Chalmers’ fragrant Carolina Gold and Charleston Gold grains don’t require much effort: “You just slice off a little bit of butter, drop it on top, give it a little stir, and then you sit down and eat it with a fork. It’s delicious,” he says.
What surprised Chalmers the most was the popularity of rice grits, or middlings. “They’re super popular among chefs,” he says. When rice is milled, the broken kernels are separated and sieved out. During slavery, these leftovers were given to animals or slave laborers. Even with modern milling techniques, 10 to 15 percent of Chalmers’ crop breaks into middlings. But he sells these “second-hand” items as rice grits, which fetch a higher price than whole wheat flour. At home, Francis Chalmers likes to make a creamy risotto with chicken stock, Parmesan, and mushrooms.
But Lauren’s Raw Grains is about more than just food: In May 2023, when Chalmers’ Carolina Gold rice plants were just a few inches tall, he posted a video to Instagram with the text, “Perspective: Living our Ancestors’ Wildest Dreams.”
He and Frances run Lauren’s Raw Grains on their own, on the family land they originally purchased during the Jim Crow era, and are training their daughter, Maranda Chalmers Walker, and her husband, Randy, to eventually take over the family rice business.
At Turnbridge Plantation, now owned by Richard Schultz Jr., enslaved men cleared swamps to create rice fields that Chalmers restored centuries later with the help of bulldozers, tractors and excavators.
As he walked through the fields, Chalmers’ cell phone interrupted the relative quiet of the farm five times within an hour: a burst pipe needed to be fixed, someone’s boat needed to be moved.
Later, a new crayfish farmer stops by the store to ask when Chalmers will be growing his symbiotic rice with the crustaceans. Chalmers tells him about his research with Clemson University into salt-tolerant rice, which could benefit farmers as far away as Bangladesh. “I’ll be honest, I dabble in a little bit of everything,” Chalmers says. “But this rice thing is fun. I enjoy watching it grow and produce seeds for next year.”
Get the recipe: Carolina Gold Rice Grits Risotto with Mushrooms
