City Directories and History: “Alston, Charles, Sr. of “Fairfield” plantation, “Crabb Hall” on seashore, Plantersville, and Charleston. Born Aug. 27, 1796 (S.C.) ; married July, 1824, Emma Clara Pringle (Jan. 23, 1803-Apr. 23, 1889) ; died Jan. 6, 1881. Education: Yale College (?). Church: Episcopalian (Vestryman, All Saints’, Waccamaw). Other: Member, Winyah Indigo Society. Slaves: 208 (Lower All Saints’ Parish) and 201 (Prince George, Winyah, Parish, Georgetown District).”
The Last Foray, C. Gaston Davidson, SC Press – 1971
This rice mill chimney is significant as one of seven known extant rice mill chimneys in Georgetown County, for its unusual construction, and for its association with Fairfield, one of several productive plantations on the Waccamaw River. Fairfield was originally one of the holdings of Joseph Allston, one of the wealthiest and most successful planters on Waccamaw Neck. Allston also owned The Oaks, perhaps the largest and most productive rice plantation of its day. At his death in 1784 he left Fairfield to his son William, who had been a captain under Francis Marion in the American Revolution and was later a member of both the South Carolina House of Representatives and Senate. The younger Allston changed the spelling of his name from Allston to Alston to avoid confusion with other William Allstons in the Georgetown area and made his home at Clifton, a large plantation about a mile south of Fairfield. One of the first pounding mills in South Carolina, run by water power, was built at Fairfield c. 1790. That mill was built for Alston by Jonathan Lucas, who was one of the pioneers of the rice milling industry. It is not known whether this extant rice mill chimney served an early mill which was converted from water power to steam power. After Clifton burned c. 1800 Alston moved to Fairfield, where he remained until his death in 1839. His son, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney Alston, most often referred to as Charles Alston, Sr., inherited the plantation and planted rice there until his death in 1881. He produced 900,000 pounds of rice with 190 slaves at Fairfield and at Beliefield, also on the Waccamaw River, in 1850. The two plantations produced 950,000 pounds of rice in 1860. “Fairfield was a model plantation,” Alston’s nephew, J. Motte Alston, recalled in the 1890s. In the 1930s the Fairfield rice mill, with its steam engine, boiler, and other machinery, was dismantled and removed from its site on the Waccamaw River. It was taken to Dearborn, Michigan, reassembled, refurbished, and put back into operation as a museum exhibit in Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village. Fairfield is now part of Arcadia Plantation. (NR Nomination data – S.C. Dept. of Archives and History)
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