ISSUE 21, SUGAR & SORGHUM, Part 4: Sapelo Sugar - the beginnings
Sugar cane comes to Sapelo Island
Ruins of the Sapelo Island Sugar Mill
The Beginnings of Sugar Planting on Sapelo Island
Granulated sugar only became cheap when it began being produced in quantity in the United States, in Georgia and Louisiana. 1825 was the tipping point year, when the price of processed sugar became sufficiently low to enable people to use it to preserve fruit crops. You could consider it the natal year of the era of jams, jellies, candy, and fruit wine. From 1825 middling households could afford to make these things that had long been the preserve of the upper classes. Sapelo Island’s sugar works played an important part in this culinary revolution.
In 2014 Cornelia Bailey invited the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation to Sapelo to assist in her initiative to create income for the island residents using heritage ingredients of the Saltwater Geechee who lived there. She had begun the project growing and selling sea island red beans. She wanted to know what else was exploitable. Dr. William Thomas was the intermediary and guide for our visit. We viewed the ruins of the Spalding Sugar Plantation and the remnant of the mills. I left the island wonder whether sugar might be the ingredient that could supply what Cornelia Bailey wanted. There were basic questions: what sugar was grown there? why? was there any particular virtue to it.
Here is the chronology of early sugar planting on Sapelo as I could determine it:
The first report, in 1809, indicates that Thomas Spalding viewed cane as an alternative to cotton culture (notoriously draining on soil nutriments), that the initial planting was three acres in extent, and that the variety of cane cultivated was Otaheite (a name derived from the island of Tahiti).
[A note about Otaheiti sugar cane] This cane came into the western hemisphere as a consequence of the Bougainville’s Pacific voyages in the 18th century. It was planted on the island of Martinique. In 1792 it spread to other West Indies islands, supplanting the old Creole Cane that had derived from India in the 16th century. Compared to Creole Cane, the Otaheite was “of a lighter green; and its stems is higher, thicker, and more succulent. The whole plant displays a more luxuriant vegetation.” It yielded 1/3 more juice than Creole cane and its thicker stalks made them more useful to fuel the fires needed to keep sugar vats boiling. [Clament Caines, Letters on the cultivation of the Otaheite Cane, 1801]. The variety was sometimes confused with another variety collected by Bougainville, the Bourbon cane, and in parts of British American the confusion remained in place throughout the first half of the 19th century.
In 1813 Spalding notes that his first years of planting were limited—from one to ten acres—and that he did not process sugar from the plantings until 1812. He also notes how cold injured his planting stock of canes. This problem points to the issue that would lead to the embrace of the Purple Ribbon variety after its introduction to Georgia in 1814. The Purple Ribbon cane was substantially more cold tolerant than Otaheiti, and more resilient in the face of the variable weather of the U. S. mainland north of central Florida.
In 1813 Spalding indicates that he will erect a sugar works and go into production in a substantial way. 1813 also marks the ignition of a desire among other Georgian planters for cane stock for planting. By 1815 Sapelo sugar had become a successful article of commerce.
Spalding in the 1820s grew both ribbon cane and Otaheite, but in different landscapes, and with different growing seasons. While the Otaheite (which Spalding in his later letters calls green sugar cane) is not present in US plant collections, there appears some likelihood it might still exist in African plant collections. Yet we should not ignore the justice of Spalding’s own decision to move away from Otaheite to Purple Ribbon. Purple Ribbon was the one cane agronomically that made sugar planting on a large scale possible in North America—its cold tolerance made it workable.
So—in late Spring of 2014 we determined that if sugar were going to be planted on Sapelo, it should be the Purple Ribbon. Now the question that faced us was did it still exist? And if it didn’t, could it be back-bred into existence.