South Carolina Tea Rooms

  Tea is South Carolina's official Hospitality Beverage. It came to the United States in 1799 – by way of a French botanist named Francois Andre Michaux, who planted it near Charleston at Middleton Barony (today known as Middleton Place).

  By 1848, tea plants were being grown the state over – even so far as Greenville, where Dr. Junius Smith attempted to produce it commercially on his plantation, Golden Grove. Smith's attempt was successful, but it ended abruptly when he was shot to death in 1853.

  South Carolina's second attempt to grow tea commercially came in 1874, but it too was doomed. Dr. Alexis Forster planted a crop on his Georgetown plantation, Friendfield. Just a few years later, however, he was killed when his buggy flipped over while he was attempting to flee a group of rascals.

  About a decade after Dr. Forester's death, in 1888, Dr. Charles Shepard founded the Pinehurst Tea Plantation near the site of Michaux's original planting, in Summerville, South Carolina. A variety of tea known as Oolong was Pinehurst's claim to fame, and it even won first prize at the 1904 World's Fair. Sadly, like its predecessors, Pinehurst remained prosperous only until the death of its owner, in 1915.

  The tea growing at Pinehurst was important however, as it allowed for the creation of the American Tea Growing Company – South Carolina's fourth attempt to grow tea commercially, and its fourth failure.

  Early in the 1900s, two men named Major Roswell Trimble and Colonel Augustus C. Tyler transplanted thousands of Pinehurst's tea bushes, carrying them from Summerville to Rantowles, relatively nearby in South Carolina's lowcountry. Some sources say their venture's ill fate grew from a quarrel between Trimble and Tyler's son. Others say that it was caused by yet another death – Colonel Tyler in 1903 – and the repeal of the Spanish-American War import tax of ten cents a pound on tea. In either case, by 1907 the company had dissolved.

  Much later, in 1963, the Thomas J. Lipton company established a research station on Wadmalaw Island. It too incorporated plants from Pinehurst. The research station operated for 25 years and – at long last – proved that a high-quality tea could indeed be grown commercially in South Carolina.

  In 1987, Mack Fleming, a manager at Lipton, and his partner Bill Hall, a third-generation English Tea Taster, purchased the 127-acre tea farm in order to create the Charleston Tea Plantation. Their tea, American Classic, is the only tea produced commercially in the United States.

This information is consolidated from an article by Cynthia Price entitled Charleston's Tea Party (Adobe Reader), and from Max Tillberg's web site, The Way of Tea (no longer active).

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