American Tea Culture.
During a period of at least 40 years, tea plants have been
cultivated by a few experimenters in the southern United states,
and American tea, grown South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, has
satisfactorily supplied the family needs of a hundred or more
persons, at a cost not exceeding the retail price of good foreign
tea.
When Mr. Wm. G. Le Duc, Commissioner of the Department of
Agriculture at Washington, seriously recommended systematic tea
culture in the southern States, press writers and press readers
found a new subject of mirth and standing jokes which lasted for
several years. To be sure, those who laughed so long and loudly
did not know the difference between a Chinese tea plant and a
China Aster, and few of them had ever heard that in certain tea
growing districts of China, ice and snow were familiar associates
of the hardy Chinese tea plant. Enquiry would have taught them
that here in the United States individual tea plants had for many
years withstood a freezing temperature in winter. Better informed
persons fell back upon the objection that Americans could never
learn the secrets of curing tea, and finally that the very low
cost of Chinese labor would be fatal to American competition. But
the mills of the Gods grind right along, regardless of individual
opinions or precedents. Foreign tea plants have been so
acclimatised in South Carolina that a plantation of tea has
withstood a winter temperature of zero, the lowest recorded
degree for 150 years; the secrets of curing the leaf have been
disclosed and successfully practiced by Americans, and a cheap
form of child labor for picking the tea leaves has resulted in
commercial success for American grown tea.
This result is due to the encouragement of the U. S. Agricultural
Bureau, and the persistent efforts of Dr. Charles U. Shepard, at
Summerville, S. C., who continued his exertions to found a
permanent tea plantation on a large scale long after the
Government authorities had ceased to hope for success. In Dr.
Shepard's tea gardens the deficiency in rain fall is made good by
deep pulverization of the soil and artificial irrigation; the
natural shade of jungle or forest under which the seed germinates
and grows where the plant is indigenous, is supplied by
artificial shade; and the expensive process of picking the leaves
is cheapened by employing children, who are paid in money, and
also by being taught to read and write in a school maintained on
the premises by Dr. Shepard. Machinery has supplanted some of the
tedious hand-manipulation of tea in Dr. Shepard's factory, and
further progress in this direction is constantly being made.
The Pinehurst tea--for Pinehurst is the designation of Dr.
Shepard's plantation at Summerville--sometimes disappoints those
accustomed to the strong flavors and pronounced fragrance of some
foreign teas, but it contains a full proportion of that
stimulating, sustaining constituent of all genuine teas, theine,
as consumers all discover. Like our American grapes and wines,
American teas will doubtless improve by continuous cultivation
upon a given soil, and probably will at length develop
characteristics of their own, as precious in the estimation of
tea drinkers as those of the exceptional foreign teas.
Impressed by the importance of Dr. Shepard's success, and the
latent possibilities of this new field of American enterprise,
Messrs. Francis H. Leggett & Co., of New York, have purchased
from Dr. Shepard the entire crop of American Pinehurst teas for
1900, amounting in quantity to several thousand pounds.