Eliza Lucas Pinckney. She is the lady who invented the indigo and married two men throughout her life. The first husband was a Colonel and the second husband was a lawyer. Her and her first husband started the rice growing in 1790’s for the planters to use in Georgetown. She moved away and married her second husband and decided to become a doting mother and enjoy her children. They moved back to South Carolina while her husband became governor. Eliza discovered that she had cancer and moved to Philadelphia where she heard through family members that a Dr. was famous for curing cancer. She died at the age of seventy-one on May 26.
In her father's absence, Eliza Lucas ran the plantation, taught her younger sister, as well as two black children, to read and write, studied music and art, wrote letters extensively, and studied enough law to draft legal wills for area residents.
The remarkable teenager is famous, however, for her successful experiments to make a high-quality blue dye from the indigo plant. South Carolina's economy was based on rice, and planters were hurting; they had over-produced, and their markets abroad dried up because of England's conflicts with Spain and France.
Eliza Lucas' father sent her indigo seeds from the West Indies, and she experimented for three years, eventually perfecting a method of making blocks of indigo cakes to be turned into dye. The dye, for which England had relied upon from French sources, was in great demand. It was used in military uniforms and in dress coats of the day.
She provided a new, lucrative business for South Carolina planters. Lewis Booker Wright in South Carolina, A Bicentennial History (1976) wrote, "So rapid was the development of the industry that by 1748, South Carolina shipped England 134,118 pounds of indigo cakes, and it remained a profitable crop until the Revolution. (http://www.knowitall.org/legacy/laureates/eliza%20lucs%20pinckney.html)