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Tea expert William Barclay Hall and a partner opened Charleston Tea Plantation in 1987, rescuing the rare garden from obscurity.
Photo by Mic Smith
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Teamaker Mike Kennerly spreads leaves from the "first flush" harvest onto the oxidation bed as a tour group watches.
Photo by Mic Smith
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The Charleston Tea Plantation is located at 6617 Maybank Highway, Wadmalaw Island.
Photo by Mic Smith
True to the Lowcountry landscape, Charleston Tea Plantation’s lush fields have a complicated and at times secretive past, even as the enterprise has been revived for the modern age.
Visitors will see something they can’t see anywhere else in the country as they tour the 127-acre working farm, with its fragrant rows of Camellia sinensis plants, and step inside the plantation’s factory to see how harvested leaves are processed for the American Classic Tea brand. A sign in front of the fields points the way to some of the traditional tea-growing countries: Argentina, 4,823 miles; China, 7,320 miles; Kenya, 7,816 miles.
This is “America’s only tea garden,” because attempts to transplant the valuable commodity to this continent during the 1700s and 1800s didn’t take root, except in South Carolina, and that success faded from public view until the late 1980s, when it was unearthed by third-generation tea taster William Barclay Hall.
Hall launched the Charleston Tea Plantation with a partner in 1987, and he still oversees its operations after teaming up with the New Englandbased Bigelow family, specialty tea magnates who bought the plantation in 2003. The Bigelows greet visitors during the video-guided factory tour, while trolley tour passengers learn the plantation’s history from Hall’s recorded narration. Hall is also available to conduct in-depth tours personally, when booked in advance.
Originally from Canada, Hall honed his expertise during a four-year tea apprenticeship in London, tasting 800 to 1,000 cups a day. He wound up on rural Wadmalaw Island after reading a trade article about the history of tea in America and what was supposed to be the final chapter in South Carolina. But the article’s conclusion—that tea wasn’t a feasible American crop—didn’t seem right. Hall’s suspicions led him to Summerville, where Dr. Charles Shepard grew award-winning tea on a sizeablescale at Pinehurst Tea Plantation from 1888 until his death in 1915. As Hall dug further, he learned that Shepard’s tea plants grew wild for decades and in 1963 were quietly transplanted closer to the coast for experimental research.
Charleston Tea Plantation’s official history doesn’t explain who the researchers were, but when pressed, Hall says they were employees of Lipton Tea, and it was so “hush-hush” that they wondered how he had found the place. “That’s how I came across this and, in the end, was able to convince them to sell it,” he says.
From the beginning, the Charleston Tea Plantation was set up with agritourism in mind. For example, the factory is designed so visitors—expected to exceed 65,000 this year—can view all steps of the manufacturing process, then proceed to the Plantation Gift Shoppe, where they can sample flavored favorites like Rockville Raspberry and Plantation Peach in a front porch rocker. Each May, the plantation puts on the First Flush FesTEAval to celebrate the harvest of the year’s first tea growth, prized through the ages for its flavor.
Coastal South Carolina’s climate — high humidity and temperatures with good rainfall —is well-suited for growing tea, says Hall. Tea does not like soggy roots, so ditches next to the field promote good drainage. For the tea plants, it is a similar effect to growing on a hillside, which is how they typically grow elsewhere.
A custom-built harvester called the Green Giant is another South Carolina innovation, requiring just one employee to harvest the flat fields. With these adaptations, Hall sees the potential for tea to be a profitable crop in the Southeast, and that’s not something he’s trying to keep secret. He grins. “I want to be the Johnny Appleseed of tea.”
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Get There
The Charleston Tea Plantation is located at 6617 Maybank Highway, Wadmalaw Island.
Hours: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday–Saturday; noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. Closed on major holidays.
Admission: Free access to the grounds, factory tour and Plantation Gift Shoppe, which offers complimentary cups of American Classic Tea. Tickets for the trolley tour cost $10 for ages 12 and up, $5 for children under 12. For group reservations, contact Bryn Riley at (843) 559-0383 or by email.
Details: To learn more, call (843) 559-0383 or visit their website.