The Lucas Family

Born Into Freedom The Locus Lucas Family is based on actual events. It covers over 200 plus years of family history. Many know the history of slavery in America, but not the story of such a family as this, born free in a slave society. Be prepared for plot twists and drama, betrayal, murder, intrigue, romance and, most of all, a family standing firm amid adversity. We the authors are both descendants of this family, who were the 3rd largest of 500 free families in the Upper South during slavery. Open the pages and step back into the early years of America, a time well before our own. Feel as if you are with each character as they live, breathe, love and, most of all, survive to have thousands of descendants alive today.

When a lovely lady and a very kind man long for the perfect family, they ask for help from two very special Family Fairies. As time goes by they start to wonder if they'll ever have a family of their own. Will the Family Fairies really be able to grant their wish? Join them on their journey to find out if all their dreams finally come true.

There are various Lucas families in the United States. The first on record is William Lucas of Cornwall, England who emigrated in 1625 or 1626 and settled in Surrey Co., Virginia. Lucas families later settled in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Texas, Illinois and elsewhere.

Nathaniel Lucas, son of John Lucas, was born in 1764 in England. He was transported to Australia in 1788. He married Olivia Gascoigne in 1788. They had eleven children.

The saga of the precipitous rise and ultimate fall of the Jonathan Lucas family's rice-mill dynasty In the 1780s Jonathan Lucas, on a journey from his native England, shipwrecked near the Santee Delta of South Carolina, about forty miles north of Charleston. Lucas, the son of English mill owners and builders, found himself, fortuitously, near vast acres of swamp and marshland devoted to rice cultivation. When the labor-intensive milling process could not keep pace with high crop yields, Lucas was asked by planters to build a machine to speed the process. In 1787 he introduced the first highly successful water-pounding rice mill--creating the foundation of an international rice mill dynasty. In Rice to Ruin, Roy Williams III and Alexander Lucas Lofton recount the saga of the precipitous rise and ultimate fall of that empire. Lucas's invention did for rice, South Carolina's first great agricultural staple, what Eli Whitney did for cotton with his cotton gin. With his sons Jonathan Lucas II and William Lucas, Lucas built rice mills throughout the lowcountry. Eventually the rice kingdom extended to India, Egypt, and Europe after the younger Jonathan Lucas moved to London to be at the center of the international rice trade. Their lives were grand until the American Civil War and its aftermath. The end of slave labor changed the family's fortunes. The capital tied up in slaves evaporated; the plantations and town houses had to be sold off one by one; and the rice fields once described as "the gold mines of South Carolina" often failed or were no longer planted. Disease and debt took its toll on the Lucas clan, and, in the decades that followed, efforts to regain the lost fortune proved futile. In the end the once-glorious Carolina gold rice fields that had brought riches left the family in ruin.