Rice Museum marks 45th year with gala dinner

The first day of May always means a great day for The Rice Museum in Georgetown. This year, though, a 45th anniversary celebration will mark its milestone in another place that highlights history, Hobcaw Barony’s Hobcaw House.

At 6 p.m. Friday, the museum will welcome the public to a gala dinner overlooking Winyah Bay, just north of Georgetown, with a catered meal from a Pawleys Island chef, Anne Hardee, and a keynote speech from Jonathan Green, a Gullah artist who founded The Rice Culture Project, a nonprofit that teaches schoolchildren about black people’s vital role in the evolution of the Lowcountry’s rice culture (www.lowcountryriceculture.org).

Jim Fitch, director of The Rice Museum since 1976, looked back and ahead, in preparation for this celebratory supper for a place on Front Street also known as the Town Clock, with a clocktower that itself remains part of the identity of Georgetown’s historic downtown landscape.

Question | How special was the planning and time to prepare for this 45th anniversary, and its setting at Hobcaw House, with all its history and special guests during World War II?

Answer | It started last fall. … Everything kind of fell into place all by itself, and I don’t mean that literally. It was as if this was foreordained, and it just so happened I met the new director of development at Hobcaw Barony, and she said, “How about if we have this event at Hobcaw House?” She offered that idea. I said that would be a neat place, because it’s an old rice plantation; that’s what it is. It’s a perfect spot. It’s also a convenient spot for people who live in the Waccamaw Neck or Georgetown area.

Q. | In your almost four decades as museum director, what major changes and transitions have you witnessed?

A. | When the museum was dedicated in 1970, it was a one-room museum of about 750 square feet, and that was the second floor of the town clock building, which still has the original exhibits … the dioramas and things like that are now artifacts … they don’t make things like that any more. … Now, everything is interactive and videos. … Now we have two buildings, with more than 10,000 square feet of exhibit space, with permanent and changing exhibits.

The woman who started the museum, Charlotte Prevost, had an idea of the museum expansion. She had a gallery in 1973, and when I first came here in 1976, it was still a hardware store, and I collected the rent, which was $250 a month.

Q. | How ideal was lining up Jonathan Green for this occasion?

A. | That’s a perfect fit, isn’t it? I called him on the phone and asked him … and he said he would. Jonathan has come to the museum, and he has scheduled the “Lowcountry Rice Culture Forum Focusing on the Arts!” and that’s going to be in Georgetown this September, so this is really sort of an introduction for that, as well as being the keynote speaker for the museum’s 45th anniversary celebration.

Q. | As things and technologies change, how does operating a museum go with that flow?

A. | With old exhibits vs. new exhibits … we had to up our game, and in 1989, I made a film about the rice culture, which we show today. It’s aged very well; now it’s a DVD. We’ve had to go more in that direction. Now we have that film showing every day, plus we have other films that I’ve made. … So we’ve gone down the road of the interactive exhibit and stuff like that.

Q. | What special exhibits are planned in the near future?

A. | We’re developing some new permanent exhibits. We’ll honor Genevieve “Sister” Peterkin; she was part of a big family in Murrells Inlet … and her husband’s mother, Julia Peterkin, won the Pulitzer Prize for her book, “Scarlet Sister Mary.” … Also, we’re going to be redoing the gallery buildings from top to bottom. … And we’re going to be doing a program on Joseph Rainey. He was the first African-American congressman in the United States, in the House of Representatives; he came from Georgetown. You’ll see that he spent the Civil War years in Bermuda, and he was a very well-known figure in Bermuda.

This story was originally published April 26, 2015 at 3:00 AM with the headline "Rice Museum marks 45th year with gala dinner."