MORNING GLORY HOMESTEAD Faith, Family & Farming BY ALLYSON JONES
Farm to Table is much more than a fad in the Lowcountry. It’s been a way of life for hundreds of years. The sea islands off the coast of South Carolina were once home to thriving antebellum plantations built and maintained by slave labor. In 1861, these wealthy planters abandoned their property following the Civil War Battle of Port Royal. Union forces then established the Headquarters for the Department of the South on Hilton Head Island. Thousands of formerly enslaved African Americans were suddenly free. The Penn School, now known as Penn Center and part of the Reconstruction Era National Park, was established on St. Helena Island in 1862 by Northern missionaries as part of the Port Royal Experiment. This program taught freed men practical skills, independence and selfreliance and enabled them to buy former plantation land at low 44
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prices. Thanks to the relative isolation of the sea islands, many families managed to maintain these farms for generations while Gullah, a creole culture and language with West African roots, thrived. When Tony and Belinda Jones met as political science and history majors at South Carolina State University, an Orangeburg HBCU, they had no idea their degrees would eventually be used for farming and sharing St. Helena Island’s Gullah past, present and future. Retiring after a 20-year Army career, the couple was given a 12.4-acre parcel of land on the island which Tony’s father had purchased from a relative in the 1960s. Once part of a plantation, the property had been in the Jones family since Reconstruction, although Tony grew up in Burton near the
