Charleston Tea Plantation

Charleston Tea Plantation is a tea farm on Wadmalaw Island that spreads across agricultural land and grows camellia plants to produce tea for the local market. The facility includes cultivation fields, a processing building, and a visitor center where you can follow the various production stages.

Botanists brought tea plants to South Carolina in the late 1700s, where they were grown on local plantations and a fundamentally new farming culture emerged. The modern farm developed later from these early beginnings into an operation that today actually runs functioning tea harvests.

The place represents an important part of modern American agriculture and shows how traditional tea plants have taken root in a new environment. Visitors can see how daily work with these delicate plants unfolds and how a small community has formed around this harvest.

The farm offers guided tours through the cultivation fields and the processing facility, where you can see the individual steps of tea production. The visitor center has a small exhibition and a shop where local teas are available to take away.

This is the only commercial tea growing operation in North America, where the plants have been specially adapted to the subtropical climate of the region. The varieties that grow here differ markedly from Asian tea types because they developed under completely different conditions.

Location: South Carolina

Inception: 1987

GPS coordinates: 32.61970,-80.18560

Latest update: December 7, 2025 20:25