3rd Place Winner of the Agriculture Heritage Photo Contest
Molasses Making in West Virginia
There was a molasses mill which belonged to my grandfather Hash and another man named Arch Smith. Anybody who raised sugar cane, called them to come in the fall of the year when the cane was ripe and make molasses. In the days before we were such a moblie society, things like molasses making were occasins for a kind of social get together. People would walk for a quite a distance to the mill, both to buy the mollasses, and to socalize a bit. I seem to remember pale, flickering light when it got dark, so I assume lanterns filled with lamp oil provided the light for after dark stirring.
There was always a horse, which went round and round in a circle, turning the mill, into which someone fed the stalks so that the turning of the mill squessed the juice out of the cane. The juice was collected in big buckets, then put into a cooker, and stirred until it had evaporated into the sweet syrup. And Daddy would always take a stalk of cane, strip the leaves back, and cut it into pieces at the joints. That made a very adequate spoon, and also was good for sucking the juice, if you weren’t the granddaughter of the mill owner, and not privileged
Matthew Morrison
Cabell Midland FFA
Molasses Making in West Virginia
There was a molasses mill which belonged to my grandfather Hash and another man named Arch Smith. Anybody who raised sugar cane, called them to come in the fall of the year when the cane was ripe and make molasses. In the days before we were such a moblie society, things like molasses making were occasins for a kind of social get together. People would walk for a quite a distance to the mill, both to buy the mollasses, and to socalize a bit. I seem to remember pale, flickering light when it got dark, so I assume lanterns filled with lamp oil provided the light for after dark stirring.
There was always a horse, which went round and round in a circle, turning the mill, into which someone fed the stalks so that the turning of the mill squessed the juice out of the cane. The juice was collected in big buckets, then put into a cooker, and stirred until it had evaporated into the sweet syrup. And Daddy would always take a stalk of cane, strip the leaves back, and cut it into pieces at the joints. That made a very adequate spoon, and also was good for sucking the juice, if you weren’t the granddaughter of the mill owner, and not privileged
Matthew Morrison
Cabell Midland FFA
X