Beginning in 1740, experiments by Miss Eliza Lucas, who later married Charles Pinckney, and a few others helped lead to the successful cultivation of indigo in South Carolina. The indigo plant produced a rich blue dye prized by the English textile industry, which offered bounties for successful crops. Historic documents identify the Ark as a large indigo plantation in the 1700's. The plantation came into the possession of Elisha Tillman in the late 1700's, and after his death in 1825 it was inherited by his eldest son, John M. Tillman. According to Sabe Rutledge, whose parents had been enslaved at the Ark, indigo was planted there before rice became common, and the plantation used a driver rather than an overseer. A 1785 Charleston Evening Gazette advertisement for a valuable plantation of 600 acres of rice, indigo, and timber land on Long Bay may have referred to the Ark around the time Elisha Tillman acquired it. Indigo was harvested before the stems became woody, soaked in vats to ferment, transferred and beaten to speed oxidation, then allowed to settle before the blue sludge was drained, dried, cut into small cubes, and packed in barrels for shipment to England. Indigo production created enormous wealth for many South Carolinians in the last half of the 18th century, especially around Winyah Bay in Georgetown District, but the American Revolution made it less profitable by ending both the English bounty system and access to the English market. Statistics for the estate of John M. Tillman in All Saints Parish, Horry District, from the 1860 Agriculture Survey, show the Ark Plantation had 250 acres of improved land, 3,000 acres of unimproved land, and produced rye, Indian corn, rice, wool, peas and beans, sweet potatoes, and molasses, with livestock including horses, mules, milch cows, working oxen, cattle, sheep, and swine. In addition to these products, the Ark probably participated in the naval stores industry, producing materials from southern pine forests used in building and repairing sailing vessels. Sabe Rutledge also recalled salt making at the Ark, where ocean water was pumped, carried in vessels made by plantation carpenters, and boiled until it thickened. During times of war, salt was highly profitable, and coastal salt works were encouraged but were attacked and destroyed during both the American Revolutionary War and the War Between the States. Indigo complemented rice because it grew well on higher ground between marshy rice fields, and its labor-intensive dye manufacture took place after the rice fields had been flooded but before the rice harvest.