The Charleston Tea Plantation, at one time the nation’s only commercial tea farm, has a new owner.
R.C. Bigelow Tea bought the 127-acre plantation on Wadmalaw Island at a court auction today for $1.28 million, The Associated Press reported.
The plantation had been owned by Mack Fleming and his former business partner, William Hall, until it stopped operating last spring. Fleming, a horticultural researcher at Trident Technical College, had hoped to buy it but was outbid, according to the AP.
Eunice Bigelow runs the Connecticut-based company with her daughters and her husband, David, son of company founder Ruth Campbell Bigelow. She said the company plans to keep cultivating tea on the island.
“We are very happy,” Bigelow said after the auction. She called the plantation “something we’re very proud to own.”
The Bigelows have known Hall, a trained third-generation tea taster, for more than 30 years and plan to have him run the plantation. Hall said he is working on a business plan and does not yet know when the property will reopen for tours.
“There are no definite plans as to the whats and the whens,” Hall said.
Bigelow has not decided whether the tea will be sold under the Charleston Tea Plantation name, although “it will have Charleston reference,” Eunice Bigelow said.
Fleming and Hall bought the plantation in 1987 from Fleming’s former employer, the company that makes Lipton tea. At one point their American Classic Tea was sold at more than 1,000 retail outlets, and the plantation employed 40 people. But profit margins on tea are low, and the company had trouble selling consumers on American-grown tea, the AP reported. Fleming has said the two partners had different visions for the company.
Bigelow Tea started in 1945 with its “Constant Comment” tea. It now offers dozens of flavored teas and also sells honey and gift sets.
