Chimneysia

We routinely take for granted the easy fulfillment of our most fundamental necessities. Following the discovery of fire, few have ever been forced to endure the absence of its benefits, right up to the point of the modern heat pump. Or consider rehab. We didn’t have rehab in the early days. We had coping. If you broke your knee they just cut off your leg. Now, they give you a new, self-lubricating stainless knee and a physical therapist, and off you go.

Nowadays, we take sugar for granted. Sugar today is synonymous with one’s morning coffee. It’s in your cereal. It’s in your condiments. Sugar is unavoidable. Two centuries ago, on the other hand, granulated sugar was not widely available. Back then the price one paid for a sweet tooth was a bee sting.

But then sugarcane arrived on the scene. Two hundred and twenty years later, at a million and a half metric tons per year—enough to fill half the Superdome—the Louisiana sugar industry yields a third of the nation’s annual harvest.

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Sugar is, of course, a tropical commodity, not particularly well suited to growth within the frost zone. This was problematic for early Louisiana growers, to be sure, but not to an insurmountable degree. Timing was the critical element; enough being required for the interval of planting, the maturation of the crop, then the harvesting of the cane, all in advance of autumn’s chill. 

There were other impediments—pests, hurricanes, and the need for an army of forced labor (slaves, whose numbers exceeded 300,000 by Louisiana’s first half-century of sugar production).

Yet the rewards were irresistible. Following the Jesuits’ introduction of sugarcane into the southern parishes, every landholder with appreciable acreage wanted into the game. By the eve of the Civil War there were 1,291 sugar mills operating in the lower twenty-four parishes of Louisiana along the lower Mississippi River and the Atchafalaya—from bayous Teche to Lafourche. 

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Sugar production has always been a laborious venture. In the beginning, canes had to be cut and loaded onto wagons by hand, then drawn by mule team to the sugarhouse where the juice from the cane was milled between enormous iron rollers (initially powered by draught teams, then later by ironworks under coal-fired steam engines). The extracted juice was boiled in a succession of iron kettles placed in line, known as a Jamaican Train. The kettles, many of which can still be found throughout the South and beyond, were principally of four descending sizes—grande, flambeau, sirop, and batterie—into which the cane juice was expressed. Thereafter, lime was added, and the mix was successively evaporated over boilers with the impurities skimmed off as the sugar granules crystallized and the molasses by-product was laid aside for blackstrap. The bagasse, as the leaf and spent fiber were known, provided fuel for the next go-round.

The iron sugar kettle, so prevalent today as an antique footnote to the past, may be the most recognizable remnant from the heady days of Louisiana’s sugarcane eminence. They can be found throughout bayou country, in both high demand and at ruinous prices these days. 

Perhaps taken far more for granted, however, is another feature of Louisiana’s sugared past: the sugar mill chimney. A few still stand today; and for the astute weekender many sugar chimneys, so necessary to the successful operation of past sugar mills of the day, can still be found in domineering idleness, punctuating Louisiana’s skyline. What most clearly defines these chimneys is their sheer height. Why, one might ask, were these sugar chimneys so tall? The short answer is concerned with their “drawing power.”

Simply put, for the boilers to produce enough heat to bring the sugar to the point of evaporation, the chimneys required a great height.

According to Henry Steel Olcott, who wrote a treatise on cane sugar production in 1857, “Steam power also introduced a new requirement to sugar works—chimneys.” According to Olcott, “If this [chimney] should be too small, or should not draw properly, it puts a stop to everything. Steam cannot be got up in the boilers, therefore the mill cannot work; the sugar trains only partially boil, and general consternation prevails[.]”

Moreover, in an article from the December 6, 1902, edition of The Louisiana Planter And Sugar Manufacturer about the Ashton Plantation in St. Charles Parish: “Captain Dunn, the well known builder of bagasse furnaces and of tall chimneys, constructed at Ashton plantation the tallest sugar house chimney in the State, it reaching 150 feet in height.”

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Of those chimneys that remain, the northern limits of past sugar production offer visible ruins of old sugar chimneys just south of Lecompte along Highway 71 where the Meeker Mill, closed in 1971, is presently being dismantled. Eastward to Concordia Parish, arguably the most decorative of defunct chimneys lies along Highway 84 west of Frogmore in a cloister of guardian pecan and hackberry on Moro Plantation. Another sugar chimney in severe decrepitude can be found cloaked in poison ivy creepers, alongside Highway 65 above Goldman in Tensas Parish. Others stand out along Highway 1—from Batchelor in Pointe Coupee Parish, south to White Castle and the Evan Hall Mill in Donaldsonville.

Old foundations from past mills, having now given up their chimneys, can still be seen south of St. Francisville right beside U.S. 61 at Star Hill, so named by slaves for the multitude of sparks that flew from its chimney on moonless nights. The old Laurel Valley Mill, on Laurel Valley Road southeast of Thibodaux, is crumbling into dust but still visible from the road winding through the property; while the ruins of a most famous mill, the Burnside, from Houmas House fame, shows its enormous footprint along Highway 44, where it doglegs south to become River Road just upstream from the Sunshine Bridge.

The best time of year for viewing and photographing the chimneys is during the winter, when the leaves of trees and the vines of poison ivy and oak have given up their aspect for winter dormancy. All are on private land, so if you plan a trip to visit them, bear in mind you mustn’t tread nearer than the roadside without landowner permission. At the same time, the best views are from a distance. Be sure to pack a tripod.