Dear Grandpa: Making sugar like making cider
The success of the sugar industry in south Louisiana in the early 1800s made planters rich and attracted scores of young men seeking their fortunes to the Teche country. One of them was Joseph W. Lyman, a young doctor who moved from his native New Hampshire to Franklin in 1830 or 1831.
He was not a planter, but he soon became versed in the sugar cultivation of the day, which he described in a letter to his grandfather in March 1831. He said corn, sweet potatoes, melons, and other crops were grown in the area, but “since sugar making has become such a rage” planters “shamefully neglected” anything but cane.
Ribbon, Creole, Otahite, and Brazil varieties were the most commonly grown, he said, “all essentially alike, but differing in external appearance.” Ribbon cane grew taller than the others, but he thought all of them produced about the same amount of sugar.
“Just before the time of sugar making the planter cuts a sufficient quantity of cane and lays it in piles (similar to shingles on a house roof) and partially or wholly covers it with dirt to protect it from frost. The stalks (called seed cane) are cut at different lengths,” he wrote.
Fields were plowed into furrows four to six feet apart and planting began in February, when the seed cane was laid horizontally in the furrows. The sprouting cane was cultivated “much like corn” until time for harvest.
At harvest, workers used knives “resembling the butcher’s cleaver” to cut the cane and strip the leaves off the stalks. Mule-drawn wagons hauled it to the mills.
Joseph told his grandfather, who was still living in New Hampshire, to envision a cider mill “with three instead of two cylinders.” In a sugar mill, he said, the cylinders were sometimes made of wood, but more generally of cast iron. They were “of different diameters, from two to three feet or more, and … perfectly smooth.” Horses were used to power the grinders.
“The first and second cylinder are very near together, but the second and third are still nearer,” the young doctor wrote. The juice ran into grooves as the cane was fed between the rollers and eventually drained into “a large reservoir ready for boiling.” Four kettles were used – Grande, Flambeau, Caro, and Grainer.
“The juice is turned into the Grande and made to boil, a small quantity of lime is added to separate impurities, and skimmers are busily employed to remove these.” The juice was moved from one kettle to another, all of them being kept “in constant ebullition” (boiling).
“When it has arrived at the proper consistency in the Grainer, which is readily known by a good sugar-boiler, one or two persons stand with ladles and dip it out as fast as possible into a trough, which carries it to the cooler. … The Grainer is again immediately filled from [the] Caro.”
The thickened juice was shoveled from the cooler into hogsheads that were placed on a narrow platform “elevated … so that the molasses may drain off … [into] a large cistern.”
Dr. Lyman had ample opportunity to view changes in the process over the next four decades. A newspaper account just before his death in 1872 said that he was “the principal physician in this town for nearly forty years, and has done a large practice, extending many miles beyond the limits of Franklin. … He and Dr. C. M. Smith for years did all the practice in a population … not short of three thousand inhabitants. Their practice extended to the large plantations in Irish Bend, and to the rear of Franklin, on the Harding Road, and down the Teche towards Centreville.”
His years of practice included dealing with several yellow fever epidemics, not only as a practicing physician but also as the chief medical examiner in St. Mary Parish and, for a brief time, as mayor of Franklin.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at [email protected] or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
