Corsicana Daily Sun, Corsicana, Texas January 19, 2008 Bill Young - Molasses, buckwheat production in Navarro County in 1860 By Bill Young According to The American College Dictionary, molasses is any of various thick, dark-colored syrups, as that produced during the refining of sugar, or that produced from sorghum. Sorghum is a cereal grass of many varieties which may be divided into four groups. Sweet sorghum is used specifically for the making of molasses or syrup or forage. On the 1860 agricultural census, there wasn’t a specific column designated for molasses or syrup but penciled in under one of the other categories were four notations specifying molasses. Those four individuals who manufactured molasses did not state how they made the syrup but I would venture a guess they used sorghum grass for their molasses production. A few years ago while visiting my mother-in-law, Hazel McCandless, in Nacogdoches County, I decided to go look for Native American archeological sites along one the smaller spring-fed creeks in the area. At one road crossing over the creek, I found a small field which had been recently deeply plowed. I spent the next few hours walking back and forth in the furrows picking up sherds of Native American pottery and an occasional chert flake. The crop which was planted in the field looked almost like young corn plants but the leaves on the stalks were slightly different. About a month later, we made another trip to East Texas and I returned to the same plowed field where I found the plants were now head high. At this point I could tell these particular stalks were sugar cane plants. For the next few months we made several more trips to my mother-in-law’s and on each trip, I would return to the sugar cane field to see what possibly washed out of the deep furrows. Late in the fall, I went to the site and found two men cutting and cooking the sugar cane making cane syrup. They told me they had leased the small tract of land for three years and planned to produced sugar cane each year. They further stated the soil in this small field was called chinkapin sand and this particular sandy soil was good for growing sugar cane for only three years, Once the three years had expired, they would have to move to another chinkapin sand field if they wanted to continue producing sugar cane syrup. It was interesting to sit there and watch them slowly crush each stalk of cane squeezing out the juice. The juice ran down a small channel into a flat pan which had a fire continuously burning under the pan. The pan was slightly tilted away from the channel and it had baffles which forced the juice to moved very slowly from side to side in the pan as it cooked and proceeded towards the discharge end. Every now and then they would skim off the impurities as the juice continued to cook. By the time the juice arrived at the discharge end, it had changed into a beautiful honey-colored sugar cane syrup and the aroma in the air was delightful. It was a good learning experience for me both in watching a very old process for making syrup and archeologically speaking, what residue was left after they abandoned the field two years later. Since then, there have been several sites found in East Texas which eventually were determined to be sugar cane processing sites. However, most of the material discarded at one of these locations will not tell the researcher what time period the site belonged to since the same process has been almost identical for several hundred years. A few years ago, my wife Bobbie Jean and I attended the annual Rusk County syrup festival held in Henderson. At their fair grounds, they have a slightly larger sugar cane cooking facility exactly like the one I witnessed earlier. At this facility, the workers used a horse to pull the jaws open and shut on the cane crusher and with this added horsepower, the quantity of sugar cane they could produce in a day was impressive. Not only do you get to see the process in action, you can buy as much ribbon cane syrup as you want. For anyone who has never watched a sugar cane producing operation, plan to make a trip to Henderson in the fall. The festival is usually well advertised on the Internet. One word of caution, plan on walking a lot if you want to see everything going on at the fair. Some things are held downtown while the fairgrounds are several blocks to the northeast. They do have tractors pulling flat trailers which anyone can hop on and ride to another area but you still have to walk a lot. I estimated they had 6,000 to 7,000 people attending while we were there. I mentioned at the very beginning the fact there were four individuals who produced molasses in 1860. The reason I think they produced sorghum syrup and not sugar cane syrup is because sugar cane does not grow well in this area, but I cannot prove this statement to be true or false, only speculation. The quantity of molasses these four individuals produced was measured in gallons and, to me, one gallon of molasses is a lot of molasses. At the top of the list was John Booth with 80 gallons of molasses. Next on the list was A.J. Smith with 32 gallons followed by a two-way tie of 20 gallons each produced by Robert Gregory and R.P. Oliver. I may be wrong but I think this is the first time these four farmers have appeared on the census as the top producer of an item. Once again it shows how each individual farmer contributed something to the local economy. In this case, I would bet they could easily sell every gallon of molasses they could produce since there was a huge decline in the total number of pounds of honey produced from 1850 to 1860 and with the ever-growing population in Navarro County, anything sweet which could be purchased had to have been popular. Another item penciled in under another category was buckwheat. Once more I had to turn to the dictionary to the definition of buckwheat even though I have heard the term all of my life. The definition is as follows: a herbaceous plant cultivated for its triangular seeds, which are used as food for animals and made into a flour for pancakes. Somewhere in my past I have eaten buckwheat pancakes which I remember as being a little stronger tasting compared to regular white flour pancakes. However, with a large dose of molasses, any strong taste was totally covered up by the sweet molasses flavor. Today we have looked at two products which somehow are related to each other. Only one person, H.J. Cage, told the census taker he had produced 30 bushels of buckwheat. Without a doubt, it must have been extremely difficult to grow buckwheat in this region probably due to our hot dry summers.