Cotton Hope: The Origins of Sea Island Cotton on Hilton Head Island

Abstract

This article reexamines the origins of Cotton Hope Plantation on Hilton Head Island and its place in the early history of Sea Island cotton. Using eighteenth- and nineteenth-century plats, deeds, probate and equity records, federal direct-tax records, Loyalist claims, and contemporary accounts of early cotton cultivation, it challenges the received tradition that Squire William Pope named Cotton Hope after acquiring the property in the 1830s. Surviving surveys place the name Cotton Hope on Skull Creek in 1763 and again in 1787, before Pope was born. The article reconstructs the older 990-acre land complex from which Cotton Hope and the adjoining Fairlawn, later Fairfield, emerged, and traces its succession through the Barksdale, Pope, and Stoney families. It also examines the connections between Hilton Head landholding families, the Loyalist Deveaux family, cotton cultivation in the Bahamas, and the movement of Sea Island cotton seed through the coastal Southeast during the 1780s. The evidence places Cotton Hope within this early Atlantic cotton network while leaving unresolved whether improved Bahamian seed was actually cultivated there.