Sugar making was a profitable activity in early St. Tammany Parish. Here's an article from 1878 that tells how Milton Burns went about the exacting process for the work. Click on the image to make it larger.
Text from the above article:
Sugar-Making in St. Tammany Parish
We paid a visit last week to the home of our enterprising young friend Mr. Milton Burns, which we reached after a delightful ride of about nine miles. We found him and his assistants as "busy as bees,'' for the grinding, season has arrived and these gar mill was in full operation.
He found time, however, to extend us a hart" welcome, and show us all the courtesies due to an "eminent visitor." Upon our I expressing a desire to be initiated into the mysteries of the manufacture of "short sweetness," he took us in charge and we inspected the entire establishment.
Passing up a short flight of stairs, through clouds of vapor from the boiling kettles below, we entered the grinding room, and witnessed the process of mashing the cane. Here the juice enters a small receiver which conducts it down to a large tank on the ground floor, near the kettles. The juice from the cane raised by Mr. Burns is very fine, the saccharometer indicating 11 degrees. He commenced grinding about a week before our visit, and up to that time had made six hogsheads of sugar.
Mr. Burns is of the opinion that it will pay much better to make sugar than molasses in St. Tammany parish. He has been assured by a gentleman of forty years' experience in sugar making, that it yields more and granulates better here than in the coast parishes. The process is simple and can easily be acquired by persons desiring to embark. in the undertaking.
Mr. Burns first runs the juice into a tank of 140 gallons capacity; from this tank he fills a smaller one holding 32 gallons, where he treats it to pure sugar lime as he puts it in the first kettle for boiling. The lime is not put in the small tank, but dissolved in a bucket of warm juice and slowly poured into the kettle while the juice is running in from the tank.
After passing through the third boiling kettle it is run off into large cypress coolers, where it remains until it is thoroughly granulated. This takes from twelve to twenty-four hours, according to the state of the weather, clear and cold weather being the most favorable. After granulation the sugar is put into perforated barrels and placed on a slanting platform to drip, a trough at the lower edge catching the syrup drippings and conveying them into a small tank or molasses barrel.
After being sufficiently dried the sugar is ready to be put into hogsheads for shipment. The greatest difficulty in the making of sugar is to know when it has been sufficiently boiled, and Mr. Burns assures us that any one, with a little practice, can soon acquire that knowledge.
After remaining as long as our time would permit, we returned, fully satisfied with our visit, and thoroughly convinced that if St. Tammany only had its full quota of such energetic young farmers as Mr. Burns our parish would soon be in a more prosperous condition.
St. Tammany Farmer November, 1878
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