Sugarcane was grown extensively on 16th century Spanish and Portuguese plantations of the Caribbean Islands. Thousands of African slaves worked the cane fields to satisfy an almost insatiable European appetite for sugar. The sugarcane plantations of these islands established a blueprint for the agrarian, slave-based economy of the emerging British colonies.
Sugarcane has some history of cultivation on the southeastern mainland of the United States, but it was rice and indigo that dominated the commercial agriculture of colonial America. If not as a cash crop, motivation to grow sugarcane for personal use and the local market remained, as cane sugar and syrup were staple sweeteners into the 20th century. Today, the majority of sweeteners we consume in the United States are derived from corn sugar.
Blizzard Branch is a fully operational sugarcane milling and syrup company that grows its own sugarcane. Sugarcane, unlike corn, is renewable in that as long as it is cut above the root, stalks continue to regrow for many seasons. Blizzard Branch invites the public to smell “sweet success” at its annual syrup making events.
Visit: Blizzard Branch Cane Mill