Background
Jonathan Lucas was born in 1754 in Cumberland, England, the son of John and Ann (Noble) Lucas. His mechanical genius is said to have been inherited from his mother's family, who were mill-owners in Whitehaven.
Jonathan Lucas was born in 1754 in Cumberland, England, the son of John and Ann (Noble) Lucas. His mechanical genius is said to have been inherited from his mother's family, who were mill-owners in Whitehaven.
About 1790, Lucas came to Charleston, South Carolina, where he attracted attention by setting up a small windmill on the gable of a wooden store in King Street, where he lived. A passing rice-planter, learning that the maker of the mill was in needy circumstances and desired work, took him to Santee. There the system of flooding rice fields by action of the tide was coming into general use; but a large crop was considered a dubious blessing because of the difficulty of removing husks from the grain. Much was pounded out by hand in wooden mortars with pestles, a slave's task being from a bushel to a bushel and a half a day. Crude mills turned by animals were in use: the pecker machine, which moved its pestle like the stroke of a woodpecker, and the cogmill, whose upright pestles were driven by a horizontal cog wheel. These could clean from three to six barrels a day.
Lucas set up a new type of pounding-mill, probably at first moved by wind. He built the first water-mill on Peach Island Plantation for J. Bowman, who as late as 1810 owed him £1, 500. For Andrew Johnston, on Millbrook Plantation, he built the first of his tide mills, which operated automatically with every ebb tide, day and night. In 1793, he built for Henry Laurens on Mepkin Plantation, Cooper River, an improved tide mill, with rolling screens, elevators, and packers. After the rice was threshed from the straw, it was lifted by the elevators (buckets on an endless belt) to a rolling screen in which it was freed of sand, and was then poured into a hopper above the millstones. A wind fan having blown away chaff, the milled rice passed into mortars where pestles weighing some two hundred pounds struck the grain from thirty to forty times a minute. It then went through a rolling screen to remove the flour, and after a winnowing fan had blown off the remainder of the chaff, the clean grain was placed in six-hundred-pound barrels by the packer. Three persons could manage such a mill, and, on a favorable tide, beat from sixteen to twenty barrels. Assisted by his son, Lucas installed his mills throughout the rice region, some early ones being on the reserves of Mrs. Middleton, General Peter Horry, and Colonel Wm. Alston of Santee. He prospered, and in 1793 he bought at auction a plantation on Shem Creek in Christ Church Parish. There he made his home and built a combined rice and saw mill, called Greenwich Mills.
Later, in partnership with two carpenters, he bought a large lot in Charleston, where afterwards the rice mills centered. In 1803 he acquired five lots in Mount Pleasant, and in 1804 he purchased fifty acres on Shute's Folly in Charleston harbor, where he is said to have built a windmill. In 1817 either he or his son built in Charleston the first steam rice mill; but in all essentials the later rice mills adhered to his plans, and the rice industry owed as much to him as the cotton industry to Eli Whitney.
On May 22, 1774, Lucas married Mary Cooke. After the death of his first wife, between 1783 and 1786, he married Ann Ashburn, of Whitehaven. He was the father of Jonathan Lucas.
