Drayton Hall on the Ashley River was one of the plantations where South Carolina's phosphate rush was dug. The state's phosphate industry began in late 1867 on plantations near Charleston, after Francis S. Holmes, St. Julien Ravenel and the chemists N. A. Pratt and C. U. Shepard found that the local stinking stones held unusually high levels of bone phosphate of lime, prized for fertilizer. Holmes and Pratt's Charleston Mining and Manufacturing Company quickly bought mining rights on several Ashley River plantations, and planters including C. H. Drayton, C. C. Pinckney Jr. and Williams Middleton mined their own land. Drayton Hall says the leasing of its land for mining saved the house from being dismantled.
After the war John Drayton, who managed the property for his nephew Charles, contracted with miners to work the river along it. By 1881 Charles H. Drayton and Company worked from Drayton Hall with a narrow-gauge railroad, worker housing and an office, into the early twentieth century. Most of the miners were young Black men, many of them freed from slavery only a few years before. By 1880 more than 1,600 men worked the land mines, for about $1.75 a day, and at least 1,000 more dredged the rivers in the early 1880s.
South Carolina dominated world production in the 1880s, and by the 1890s Charleston had passed Baltimore as the nation's largest fertilizer-producing city. A fight with Governor Benjamin Tillman, richer Florida rock and the 1893 hurricane broke it; the state's share of the national market fell from 95 percent in 1889 to 7 percent in 1910. River mining ended in 1909 and land mining in 1925.
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32.8709, -80.0763
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