On a wintery day in 1916, African American workers on the Mulberry Plantation outside Charleston, South Carolina, used a peculiar, hand-carved wooden shovel with a paddle-like blade to clear ditches around rice fields. This article explores the origins and proliferation of that shovel, from the fulcrum shovel of West African rice farmers, to the long-handled scoops that enslaved rice workers used in the Lowcountry in the 1840s and 1850s, to the artifacts kept in museums in South Carolina today. While many questions about the evolution of the wooden shovel remain to be answered, this exploratory essay uses a wide array of sources to examine the transmission of a vital piece of material culture from the subsistence farms of West Africa to the massive rice labor camps of the South Carolina Lowcountry. As the article demonstrates in this journey through the archives, the historiography, museums, and even the old rice fields of Mulberry, the shovel fills a gap: from ditching to sowing, harvesting, and processing, historians now have evidence of West African origins of every stage of rice’s life cycle in the Lowcountry.
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