Page 54 - a-columbia-county-boys-recollections-and-memories-of-columbia-county-florida-(2012)-lenvil-h-dicks

A Columbia County Boy's Recollections and Memories of Columbia County Florida (2012) Lenvil H. Dicks

CANE GRINDING

As described at other places in this book, my dad was a Baptist Preacher, but he was also a full time
farmer, and was known to make the best cane syrup in the County at the lime that I was growing up.

We would go around to all of the bars, and some other stores, in Lake City and gather all of the empty
bottles we could find, and take them home and wash them good in the sugar boiler full of hot water and
lye soap, and slack these bottles by the hundreds on shelves out under the sugar shelter, which is what
we called the place where we converted the cane juice into cane syrup.

We always had the biggest cane patch in the County, as my daddy found selling syrup to be a good
source of income, and we would usually start grinding cane as soon as the first frost came, usually
around Thanksgiving, and we would grind cane and cook syrup 6 days a week, and hope like hell to be
through by Christmas.

A boiler full of cane syrup, which we called the sugar kettle, would hold 60 gallons of cane juice, and
when it would boil down to syrup there would usually be around 9 gallons of syrup.

It was my job to feed the cane into the cane mill, which in-turn was pulled by a mule walking around in
a large circle and pulling the “sweep” of the cane mill which caused the rollers to turn and crush the
cane. The juice from the cane would run down into a dish like affair under the cane juice rollers, and
there was a small metal channel which would channel the juice off into a large barrel. These barrels held
60 gallons, and whenever we had ground enough cane to make that much juice, we would move that
barrel and put another one in its place.

The task of getting the cane ground, and providing the juice to be cooked, was my responsibility. I
would have to get up and start operating the cane mill at about 5:00 in the morning, and there would be
already two barrels of juice ready to use in the sugar boiler from cane I had ground the night before. My
working hours were from about 5-7 am, grinding cane, and then as soon as the school bus got me home
at about 3:30 or 4:00, then I would again grind cane until about 11 pm that night. We would change
mules, so that one poor old mule did not have to pull that mill to produce all that cane juice. We had
three mules, named Bill, Scott, and George, as my daddy had a habit of naming his mules the same
name as the man from whom he bought that particular mule. I remember that our mule named Scott was
purchased by my dad from Mr. Scott Feagle. I don’t know who Bill and George were named after, since
my dad had those mules when I got big enough to know their names.

Anyway I would provide the juice and my daddy would provide the wood to fire the boiler with (he
usually chopped wood all summer in preparation for cane grinding season) and together we produced
hundreds and hundreds of gallons of syrup, which was quite good.

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