ISSUE 21, SUGAR & SORGHUM, Part 5: Purple Ribbon Cane
The Foundation Cane of American Sugar Planting
Purple Ribbon Sugar Cane
In order to find something, you have to know precisely what it was that you have lost.
Purple Ribbon cane was the variety that enable the commodity scale cultivation of sugar on mainland North America in the 1810s and 1820s. It was the chief cane grow throughout much of the South until the end of the nineteenth century. It was supplanted eventually by even more cold tolerant varieties, of purple ribbon’s offspring, such as Louisiana Purple or Blue Ribbon Cane.
Here’s the story of how into came into Georgia and Louisiana.
“The red or purple ribbon cane, as we have said, is a some other parts of India. The Dutch had already met with it in Batavia, in a state of cultivation. They introduced it about the middle of the last century to St. Eustatius, Curacoa, Guina and Surinam. It thence was spread over all the West Indian Islands and part of the American continent.
In 1814, or thereabouts, an American schooner from St. Eustatius, a Dutch colony, imported a few bundles of this cane into Savannah, Ga. They were planted by a Mr. King, not far from the mouth of the Savannah river, on St. Simon’s Island. They grew well, and Mr. King began the manufacture of sugar.
In 1817, a dozen or so of the plants were brought to New Orleans by John Joseph Coiron, who planted them in his garden at Terre-aux-Boeats. Having succeeded admirably with these, R. Coiron, in 1825, imported a sloop load from Savannah, which he planted on his estate, known as the St. Sophie plantation, about thirty-six miles below New Orleans. This property has since belonged to Laurent Millaudon. Thence originated the ribbon cane or Javanese, which is the one most generally grown in Louisiana.
The red or purple ribbon cane and violet (which is a degenerate species) are the two best varieties every cultivated in Louisiana. They are hardy, and not injured by a cold of two or three degrees of the centigrade thermometer. They are, however, not equal to the Otaheitan or the Salangor in the tropical regions. They are less juicy than the Malabar, Bengal Tanna, or Otaheitan, and although their juice is a little impure, it possesses excellent manufacturing qualities when mature. These [the red and purple] varieties have made the fortunes of the planters of Louisiana. “ J. B. Avequin, The Louisiana Planter (October 24, 1891).
In 2014 the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation and SICARS determined to seek foundation joints of Purple Ribbon cane to reboot planting on Sapelo Island. Almost immediately we ran into a difficulty: there appeared to be no listings in any of the cane plant repositories in the Western Hemisphere. Immediately we invited Dr. Steven Kresovich of Clemson University, the Coker Chair of Genetics, to rebreed the Purple Ribbon back into existence using offspring strains of Louisiana Purple and Blue Ribbon. Bradley Ruah collected 22 varieties of heirloom sugar cane and did genetic profiles of them in summer of 2014. These would be used to compare with whatever purple ribbon cane we secured.
Unfortunately efforts to find preserved plant material in museum and herbarium collections proved fruitless over the course of 2014. Then on November 5, 2014, we tracked down a single grower in George County, MS, who grew purple ribbon. We purchased all the material he was willing to sell, and Clemson University began genetic fingerprinting and replication. Dr. Kresovich had in hand the material that would enable the restoration of Purple Ribbon Sugarcane to Sapelo Island.
NEXT INSTALLMENT: Sugar Cane Returns to Sapelo Island 2015