Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, November 25, 1997

Iberia prairie supplies sugar for nation's sweet tooth

Crop remains important to parish today

by Jim Bradshaw

It was shortly after the turn of the century that events conspired to turn the Teche country sweet and green with sugar cane.

About that time, Louisiana planters mastered the art of granulating sugar, making the crop profitable.

The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 brought American settlers and improved farming techniques to south Louisiana.

At that time, thousands of people began to flee the slave revolution in Haiti, bringing with them new expertise in sugar cane cultivation and processing.

Louisiana's admission to the Union in 1812 opened new markets for sugar.

Meanwhile, the United States seemed to acquire a national "sweet tooth," pushing up demand and prices for sugar.

Because of these and other factors, sugar cane cultivation spread quickly from the Mississippi River to the Teche country after the turn of the century. Good crops and good profits created more interest in the crop and in immigration to the Teche. As Glenn Conrad and Ray Lucas report in "White Gold, A Brief History of the Louisiana Sugar Industry," magazine articles and reports by travelers began to depict Louisiana's sugar bowl as a planter's paradise.

"The prospect of cheap land and good soil encouraged many planters from Virginia to Mississippi to relocate in Louisiana for a chance to strike it rich with the region's "white gold," Conrad and Lucas report. Still, striking it rich in sugar was hard work, and it was hard work done mostly by black slaves.

First, the fields had to be leveled, leveed and drained. Then the field was ready for planting.

The soil of the fields was broken with crude plows pulled primarily by oxen, but horses and mules were sometimes used," according to the "White Gold" account. "Furrows were made in the plowed soil with a width of approximately six feet between them. Once this was done the process began of forming the row by repeated passes off the plow to throw the dirt into a bank or row. What was produced was an unusually large row, both in height and width, running the length of the field, or in subdivisions of the field delineated by unplowed strips called 'headlands.' The large rows were all part of the field's drainage system, and they can still be seen in today's sugar cane cultivation.

Once the rows were formed and a few good showers of rain had packed the soil and stabilized the row, a small furrow was plowed open on the top center of the row. It would be into this opening that the seed cane would be dropped and covered with soil and tapped down to prevent the soil from washing away from the cane during the next rainfall. ...

Planting cane, until recent times, was an especially long and arduous process because it had to be done almost entirely by humans. Until mechanization in the mid-to late 20th century, mule and oxen drawn carts full of seed cane were pulled through the fields (the axles of these carts being the exact same width as the furrows flanking a row). Field workers would then take cane from the cart and place the stalks, end to end, in the previously prepared planting bed atop the row. Planting cane was a skill of sorts and could not be done haphazardly because the sprouted cane needed to be straight down the middle of the row for cultivation purposes. Workers using hoes would then cover the seed cane with two to four inches of soil."

That was just the beginning. Cane doesn't compete well with weeds, so the rows would have to be hoed by hand until the cane had grown tall enough to block the sunlight the weeds needed to grow.

Harvesting was also done by hand, by gangs of men swinging machetes. They chopped the cane, stripped it of excess foliage and threw it into carts to be hauled to the sugar houses. These sugar houses were themselves fairly primitive at first, not much more than sheds covering the machinery used to crush the cane, extract the juice from it, boil the juice into sugar, and pack the sugar into barrels. In the early days, there were sugar mills on practically every plantation. Even until relatively recent times there were considerably more of them than there are today.

Within memory, for example, there were 11 sugar mills within six miles of Jeanerette alone: Adeline Sugar Mill in Adeline, Pecot Sugar Mill in Sorrell, Albania Sugar Mill, Provost Sugar Mil Linden Sugar Mill, Bayside Sugar Mill, Hope Sugar Mill, Orange Grove Sugar Mill, Bussey Sugar Mill, Patout Sugar Mill, an Monnot Sugar Mill. And these were not all of the mills in Iberia Parish.

Most of the sugar houses were on the waterfront, because most of the sugar was sent to market by boat.

When packed with sugar and molasses a hogshead usually weighed about 1,100 pounds, according to "White Gold." "After the molasses had drained, the weight was reduced to about 80 pounds (or less, depending on the molasses content of the sugar). Quite naturally, such weight would have been difficult to move and transport overland, especially in view of the condition of what passed for roads in antebellum Louisiana. Thus, a plantation's sugar warehouse was usually quite near a navigable stream. ...When time came to ship the hogsheads of sugar to market, they were usually rolled from the warehouse to a waiting flatboat, schooner, or steamboat, loaded aboard ... and dispatched to markets in Nev Orleans and on the East Coast."

In 1826, the sugar harvest in the Teche country amounted to 3,000 hogsheads. Nearly 60 plantations used 640 field hands or more than 1,500 acres of sugar land. The sugar output would triple in the years leading up to the Civil War.

Some planters sold the sugar directly to the steamboat captain. Others sold to buyers aboard the boats. Most often, however, planters paid the steamboat captains to transport the sugar to brokers in New Orleans who then put it on the market.

This article is copyrighted © by the Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser and is used with permission.  This web site was originated through a grant awarded to Carencro High School (Joel Hilbun/Bobbi Marino, Grant Administrators) by the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education from the Louisiana Quality Education Support Fund - 8(g).