The sugarcane plant, indigenous to southern Asia, was first used for the production of sugar between the 7th and 4th century B.C. in northern India. Cane cultivation eventually spread westward to the Near East and was introduced to the Mediterranean region by the Arabs, giving rise to a cane sugar industry that flourished there until the late 1500's. Columbus introduced sugarcane to the New World on his second voyage in 1493, when it was first planted on the island of Hispaniola. During the 16th and 17th centuries, the Spanish, English, and French established sugar production in their Caribbean island colonies. The French colony of St. Domingue (present-day Haiti) was, by the late 18th century, one of the most important sugar producers in the Caribbean at a time when world demand for sugar was rising rapidly. Shipments of raw sugar from St. Domingue such as those recorded on the displayed bills of lading were destined for the European market by way of refineries in France.

In the early 1700's, Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville had sugarcane from St. Domingue planted along the lower Mississippi, but his attempt to cultivate it failed. A little over a decade later, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, the first administrator of France's Louisiana colony, succeeded in growing sugarcane brought from Martinique in his garden at New Orleans. Cane from St. Domingue was introduced anew by the French Jesuits, who raised several crops of it at their New Orleans plantation (today the site of the Central Business District) during the 1750's. A few colonists successfully produced sugar commercially in the New Orleans area in the late 1750's and early 1760's, having planted cane brought from St. Domingue or obtained from the Jesuits. After the transfer of Louisiana to Spain, indigo became the favored cash crop, and although some planters continued cultivating sugarcane, there is no evidence of further attempts to produce sugar in Louisiana until the 1790's. In 1791, slaves and free people of color in St. Domingue launched a violent revolt against the French planters. Many sugar plantations were destroyed, and thousands of colonists ultimately fled the island. Some of the exiles sought refuge in New Orleans, and the experienced sugarmakers among them brought valuable knowledge and skills to the nascent Louisiana sugar industry. One of these sugarmakers was employed by Etienne de Boré at his plantation located in the area of present-day Audubon Park, where in 1795 the cane crop produced about 100,000 pounds of sugar. Encouraged by Boré's success, more Louisiana planters undertook cane cultivation, and as early as 1797 more than 550,000 pounds of sugar were shipped from New Orleans. By 1801 there were 75 sugar mills in Louisiana, and the region was well on its way to becoming a significant producer of cane sugar on the North American continent

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    The sugarcane areas of Louisiana developed first along the Mississippi, both downriver and upriver from New Orleans. Sugar plantations were also established along the banks of Bayou Lafourche, Bayou Teche, and Bayou Terrebonne, and in the Red River valley of present-day Rapides Parish. Since waterborne transportation was the primary means of moving goods before the advent of railroads, nearly all the early sugar plantations fronted a navigable waterway. Planters soon learned what adjustments were necessary for cultivating a tropical plant in a semitropical climate and how to face the challenges posed by Louisiana's low-lying terrain. Word spread quickly of the profits to be made in sugarcane, and Anglo-Americans from other areas of the South and from the eastern seaboard joined the Creole planters after the United States acquired the Louisiana territory in 1803.

The method of producing cane sugar in early 19th-century Louisiana was largely derived from the 18th-century European sugar colonies in the Caribbean. Each cane plantation in Louisiana had its own sugarhouse. The cane was crushed using an animal-powered three-roller mill. The extracted cane juice was heated, clarified, and evaporated in a set of large open kettles of decreasing size which were enclosed in brickwork over a furnace. Lime was the substance most often used to clarify the cane juice, and the impurities that rose to the surface were skimmed off. After a syrup resulted from the evaporation of the juice, the sugarmaker, using rule-of-thumb techniques, determined when sugar crystals had formed. This was called a "strike" and was the point at which the concentrated syrup was turned out into shallow wooden tanks and left to cool. The crystallized mass was then placed in large barrels (hogsheads), each of which had several holes at the bottom that allowed the molasses to drain out. Molasses was collected in cisterns and later packed into separate barrels for market. The cane grinding season, or roulaison, was a festive time on most plantations. Social gatherings, dances, and candy pullings took place after the cane was ground, and visitors to plantation sugarhouses were often treated to "hot punch," a drink made of partially boiled cane juice and French brandy.

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    Antebellum Louisiana accounted for 95% of the sugar produced in the South. Although a few refineries existed, including the Louisiana Sugar Refining Company in New Orleans, refining was not a significant part of the antebellum sugar industry. Louisiana's product was chiefly raw sugar, most of which was shipped to cities in the upper Mississippi Valley either directly from the plantations or by way of New Orleans. Some of the sugar from the Teche region was shipped directly to East Coast ports. Packed in hogsheads marked with the name of the plantation on which it was made, the raw sugar that arrived in New Orleans by steamboat was sold daily at auction on the levee. Planters usually consigned their sugar to commission merchants, or factors, who often also played the role of financiers. Since sugarcane required greater capital investment than other crops and was unpredictable as well, planters were dependent on their factors for credit and on banks for the financing of plantation operations. Several planters' banks existed, including the state-chartered Consolidated Association of Planters of Louisiana, established in 1828. Planter-members who bought shares in the bank could be reasonably certain of obtaining loans.

Throughout the history of the Louisiana sugar industry, import tariffs on foreign sugar have affected the profitability of Louisiana sugar. Increased tariff protection in the 1820's and 1840's, for example, led to dramatic rises in the number of sugar plantations. Louisiana's sugar interests sought to persuade federal officials to maintain favorable tariffs since the early years of the industry. Tariffs were often a contentious issue in national politics throughout the 19th century, and tariff reductions for imported sugar always drew negative reactions from Louisiana planters concerned about the profitability of their own product.

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    During most of the 19th century, technical innovations were adopted slowly in the Louisiana sugar industry. Planters in antebellum Louisiana generally lacked scientific knowledge, and no local institutions existed to train people to operate or repair new types of devices. Progressive planters looked mainly to France for scientific and technical knowledge. Several French-educated scientists were instrumental in introducing early improvements in Louisiana's sugar industry. J.B. Avequin, a New Orleans apothecary, studied sugarcane chemistry to determine milling efficiency and published his findings in French scientific journals. De Bow's Review, an influential periodical published in New Orleans beginning in 1846, reprinted French articles on scientific aspects of sugar manufacture and espoused progressive views regarding the role of science.

Steam power, the first 19th-century innovation in sugar manufacture, was introduced to the Louisiana sugar industry in 1822 with the importation of the state's first steam-powered cane mill. Steam engines gradually began supplanting animal power for mills during the 1830's and 1840's. Steam vacuum pans, invented in England, were first used on several Louisiana plantations in the 1830's. Early vacuum pans were closed vessels with double bottoms, in which cane juice was heated and evaporated under reduced pressure. This was more efficient than the open-kettle method and also yielded a higher quality sugar. The vacuum pan design was enlarged and improved by Norbert Rillieux (1806-1894), a free person of color born in New Orleans and educated in France. Rillieux's invention was the multiple-effect evaporation system, linking several vessels by a series of steam chambers so that each vessel after the first was heated by the vapor from the preceding one. Rillieux's design significantly reduced fuel consumption and is considered the most important innovation in 19th-century sugar manufacturing technology. Multiple-effect evaporation was first used in Louisiana and then spread to other parts of the world.

Another fuel-saving innovation, introduced in Louisiana in the 1850's, was the bagasse furnace. Bagasse, the residue of milled cane, began to replace wood as a fuel in Louisiana sugarhouses. Just before the Civil War, a few Louisiana plantations also switched from the barrel drainage method of purging molasses to the use of centrifugals. Adopted from the European beet-sugar industry, these screened vessels rotated at high speed, retaining the crystallized sugar while allowing the molasses to escape. Centrifugals reduced the amount of time required for purging and yielded a drier raw sugar.

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    During the Civil War, most of Louisiana's sugar parishes came under the control of Union forces by the end of 1863. Some planter families fled to Texas, and wartime conditions in Louisiana caused such widespread physical destruction, financial ruin, and social disruption, that many plantations and other sugar-related enterprises did not survive the war. Some plantations passed to new owners, among whom were Northern investors as well as Louisiana businessmen not previously involved in the sugar industry. The transition from a slave economy to a wage labor system involved many struggles and adjustments. Beginning around 1870, immigrant laborers including Chinese, Swedes, Spaniards, and Italians were employed in the cane fields for brief periods. African Americans nevertheless still constituted the majority of cane workers, and their struggles for better wages continued into the 20th century.

Planting, cultivation, and harvesting of sugarcane continued to be done entirely by hand in the latter 19th century. Several new agricultural implements were introduced, including some developed in Louisiana, such as cane cultivators, stubble shavers and stubble diggers. Aids for loading, unloading, and lifting cut cane--slings and derricks--were also first used in the late 19th century. Milling and processing began taking place on a larger scale with the introduction of new mill designs and improved methods for cane juice extraction and clarification. Many of the advances in process equipment during this period originated in Germany's beet-sugar industry. German ideas introduced into Louisiana during the late 19th century included detailed record-keeping techniques and the application of chemical science to sugar production. Sugarhouse chemists initially faced considerable opposition from sugar boilers and other mill workers who employed only traditional methods handed down on the job, but ultimately chemical control completely transformed business practices in the Louisiana sugar industry.

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    The organization largely responsible for setting in motion the modernization of Louisiana's sugar industry was founded in 1877 by a group of prominent planters, among whom were John Dymond, Duncan F. Kenner, Henry McCall, and Edward J. Gay. The initial objective of the Louisiana Sugar Planters' Association (LSPA) was to lobby the federal government for favorable import tariffs, but the organization soon also became the chief proponent of scientific research and technological innovation in the Louisiana sugar industry. The LSPA espoused scientific and technological advancement as a means of facing increased foreign competition and it succeeded in attracting U.S. Department of Agriculture chemists to Louisiana in the 1880's to conduct studies on sugar production. In 1885, the LSPA sponsored the establishment of the state's first agricultural experiment station at Kenner and hired William Carter Stubbs (1846-1924) as director. The station's research was guided by agricultural and processing problems in the Louisiana sugar industry, and station staff frequently presented papers at the LSPA's monthly meetings. Following its move to Audubon Park in New Orleans in 1890, the Sugar Experiment Station was briefly at the forefront of research in sugar chemistry nationally and internationally. The first specialized school in the world for training experts for the cane sugar industry was founded at the Audubon Park station in 1891, with the station staff serving as the faculty. The Audubon Sugar School offered a two-year curriculum in agriculture, chemistry, and mechanical engineering that included both classroom and practical work. Financial difficulties forced the school to close in 1896, but its curriculum was incorporated into a degree program at LSU beginning in 1897.

Between 1880 and 1900, the Louisiana sugar industry underwent major transformations. Animal-powered mills and open kettles largely disappeared, and a sustained trend began toward fewer mills, larger cane acreages, and greater production using improved methods. Many sugar properties were incorporated as individual planters were unable to finance the operation of modern factories. Traditional plantation culture gave way to a separation of cane-growing from sugar manufacture. Central factories on large plantations began processing cane purchased from other growers together with their own. Louisiana faced increased competition from cane sugar imported from Cuba, Hawaii, and the Philippines, and debates over tariff reductions in the 1890's led to a partisan split in the Louisiana Sugar Planters' Association. The organization went into decline and ultimately merged with the American Cane Growers' Association in 1922, creating the American Sugar Cane League.

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    Louisiana's sugar industry was ravaged and nearly wiped out by the mosaic virus in the early 1900's. Sugar production had reached an all-time high of nearly 400,000 tons in 1904, but by 1926 it had bottomed out at less than 50,000 tons. While most sugar planters were slow to react to this insidious threat to their industry, a few, most notably Southdown Plantation, recognized the urgency of the situation and began fighting back. Salvation came in the form of disease-resistant varieties of sugarcane which had been imported from Java by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Named for their point of origin, the Proefstation Oost Java (East Java Experimental Station), they were known as P.O.J. varieties. Southdown requested and received three such varieties (P.O.J. 36, 213, and 234) from the USDA in 1922 and 1923. Fears that the varieties might not be suitable for Louisiana's subtropical climate were quickly quelled as they performed exceedingly well during testing.

In 1925, Southdown made P.O.J. 234 available to sugar planters throughout the state, and for the next few years, the Louisiana Experiment Stations, the USDA, and the American Sugar Cane League worked in concert to encourage planters to adopt the new disease-resistant varieties. Although the P.O.J. varieties only dominated for a few years until the breeding program took hold, they are credited with bringing the industry back from the brink of extinction.

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    When William C. Stubbs, the original Director of the Audubon Sugar School, recommended that the School be closed in the fall of 1896, it was not without a plan. Although the School had never been a financial success and had proven a burden to his research staff, who had also served as the faculty for the School, he recognized the need for such an institution. However, he thought that the Sugar Experiment Station should focus on research, and that the teaching should be left to others. He lost little time in proposing that LSU incorporate the School's curriculum into a degree program. In a seven-page letter, he laid out a series of recommendations as to the direction he thought the program should take, including significant changes to the curriculum.

LSU President Thomas D. Boyd and the LSU Board of Supervisors agreed that the School should be brought under the auspices of LSU. It was placed in the capable hands of Dr. Charles E. Coates, who served as Director until 1937, and was reopened in the fall of 1897. With changing leadership came a corresponding shift in the curriculum. Emphasis moved from agriculture to chemical and mechanical engineering, as students followed one of two courses of study: sugar agriculture and chemistry; or sugar chemistry and engineering. The five-year program consisted of three years of classroom instruction at LSU's campus in Baton Rouge and two years of practical instruction in sugar technology at the Sugar Experiment Station in Audubon Park. Although the students' time was split between the two locations, the School's physical location remained at Audubon Park until 1925, when the entire program, along with the Sugar Experiment Station, was relocated to Baton Rouge.

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    The Louisiana Sugar Planters' Association, the American Cane Growers' Association, and the Producers' and Manufacturers' Protective Association merged in 1922 to create the American Sugar Cane League, which was organized to provide the leadership sorely needed by the industry.

LSU provided a complementary source of training for leadership. In 1925, the Sugar Experiment Station and the Audubon Sugar School and Factory were relocated to the new LSU campus in Baton Rouge. The School had made quite a name for itself, with its graduates holding top management positions worldwide. In 1938, LSU's selection as host of the sixth congress of the International Society of Sugar Cane Technologists paid homage to its status as an international force within the industry. The sixty-seven delegates from Louisiana included such notables as Charles E. Coates, E. W. Kerr, Arthur G. Keller, and William G. Taggert. LSU repeated as host when the fourteenth congress was held in New Orleans in 1971.

The School continued to churn out graduates and the Sugar Factory remained a working entity until the mid-1960's, when the program was derailed by the Cuban Revolution. As Cuban exiles, many with years of experience in the sugar industry, flooded the United States, Sugar School graduates suddenly began having difficulty finding jobs. The 1970's saw the demise of the Sugar School and the birth of the Audubon Sugar Institute in 1976. The Institute was created to serve the state sugar industry, and has been instrumental in sustaining research and promoting communication throughout the state.

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    Research has been and remains vital to the survival of the sugar industry. The Audubon Sugar Institute and the Sugar Experiment Station, which merged in 1988, have been key players along with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in sustaining the tradition of research which revived the industry when it was nearly wiped out by the mosaic virus in the 1920's.

Responding to the need for disease-resistant hybrids, the USDA established stations at Canal Point, Florida, in 1919, and Houma, Louisiana, in 1926, where researchers developed breeding and testing programs. The program at Houma received a major boost in 1949, when photoperiod control of flowering was discovered by LSU researchers Dr. St. John Poindexter Chilton and Dr. Clayton C. Mooreland. Louisiana is too far north for sugarcane to flower naturally, but with photoperiod control - which in essence fools the plants into flowering by artificially altering day length - crosses could be made in greenhouses on the LSU campus. This program remains in full swing today at the St. Gabriel Research Station, where 80,000 new varieties are grown each year in facilities that were constructed in 1982.

Research in other areas, such as Integrated Pest Management (IPM) and alternative uses of industry by-products, is also conducted at the Sugar Experiment Station and in a number of related academic departments at LSU. Research findings are communicated to practitioners via the Louisiana Cooperative Extension Service, trade publications, and field days, at which they can interact with the researchers and learn about new techniques.

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    Despite many peaks and valleys, commercial sugar production in Louisiana has grown steadily from a humble beginning of less than 5,000 tons in the late 1700's to a record high of more than 1,000,000 tons in 1994. No single factor has influenced this growth as much as technology.

The process of converting field cane into refined sugar has many phases: planting, cultivation, harvesting, loading, transporting, unloading, extraction, clarification, separation, and refining. Each of these phases has seen an evolution from manual to animal power and finally to full mechanization. This move towards mechanization has freed the industry from the limitations imposed by the availability of a labor force and allowed a steady increase in the acreage devoted to sugarcane. A major breakthrough occurred following World War II when the mechanical harvester was introduced commercially. Proclaimed to do the work of 200 workers, it gained rapid acceptance and changed the face of the industry.

Similar economies of scale led first to a shift in the 1800's from plantation sugar houses to large centralized sugar factories and refineries, and then to a steady decline in their numbers throughout this century. This trend continues today, as can be attested to by the recent closing of the Supreme Sugar Refinery, leaving just two commercial refineries in Louisiana.

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    Overcoming adversity has been a way of life for the Louisiana sugar industry. Of all threats, one of the most vexing has been federal legislation. The federal government has been a fickle suitor to the industry, establishing and eliminating support with annoying regularity. The American Sugar Cane League has made it its mission to play watchdog and coordinate efforts to lobby for support in Washington.

    Sugarcane, or Saccharum, grows naturally in tropical areas. Believed to be native to New Guinea, sugarcane can now be found in parts of Asia, Africa, Europe, and Central, South, and North America. Generally, at least three annual crops can be harvested from a single planting, the original plant cane crop plus two or three additional cuttings, called "ratoon" crops. Sugarcane can grow to tremendous heights. Experimental varieties have exceeded 20 feet, but for commercial varieties grown in Louisiana, heights of between six and nine feet are the norm.

Because Louisiana is far north for sugarcane, growers are faced with a shortened growing season (approximately nine months) and potential weather hazards. Thus, certain traits are required for commercial varieties to be successful, such as early maturation, frost-resistance, and heartiness. High sugar yield is particularly important because sugarcane is immature when harvested in Louisiana.

For over 100 years (from 1825 to 1926), the Louisiana Purple and Louisiana Striped varieties dominated the industry. When those varieties fell prey to disease, the breeding program was intensified and a procession of thousands of hybrid varieties began which continues today. So many are developed each year that naming them all is impossible, and a new system for identifying the varieties had to be developed. Today, a combination of letters and numbers indicates the place and year of origin for each.

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Artifacts on loan from the LSU Rural Life Museum:

• Cane knives, early 20th century, used in harvesting sugarcane
• Skimmer, circa 1840, for removing impurities during open-kettle boiling of cane juice
• Sugar barrel stencil, circa 1858, used to mark shipments of raw sugar from St. James Parish plantation "Bonne Esperance"
• Sugar cone mold and snips, 19th century, used for serving sugar at table
• Windrow hook and stalk shaver, late 19th century, agricultural tools used in sugarcane cultivation

Other items:

• Becnel, Thomas. Labor, Church, and the Sugar Establishment: Louisiana, 1887-1976. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980
• Billeaud, Ramon. "The Industry That Would Not Die: A Look at the 200 Year Old Louisiana Sugar Industry, Its History, Technology, Politics." Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Sugar Cane Technologists-Louisiana Division, February 2, 1995. Thibodaux: American Sugar Cane League, 1995
• Breaux, R. D., and J.J. Matherne, R.W. Millhollon, and R.D. Jackson. Culture of Sugarcane for Sugar Production in the Mississippi Delta (Agriculture Handbook No. 417). Washington: Agricultural Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1972
• Coates, Charles E. "An Experiment in the Education of Chemical Engineers: The Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Audubon Sugar School." Reprinted from the Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, vol. 9, no. 4 (April, 1917)
• Conrad, Glenn R., and Ray F. Lucas. White Gold: A Brief History of the Louisiana Sugar Industry, 1795-1995. Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1995
• Deer, Noel. Cane Sugar: A Text-Book on the Agriculture of the Sugar Cane, the Manufacture of Cane Sugar, and the Analysis of Sugar House Products. Altrincham (Manchester): Norman Rodger, 1911
• Deer, Noel. The History of Sugar. London: Chapman and Hall, 1949-50
• Feiger, E.A. "The Audubon Sugar School." In the Land of Sugar Cane, 1946: Review and Pictorial of the Fifth Annual Louisiana Sugar Cane Festival and Fair. New Iberia: Louisiana Sugar Cane Festival and Fair Association, 1947
• Galloway, J.H. The Sugar Cane Industry: a Historical Geography from its Origins to 1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989
• Green Fields: Two Hundred Years of Louisiana Sugar. Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1980
• Heitmann, John Alfred. The Modernization of the Louisiana Sugar Industry, 1830-1910. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987
• Hugill, J. A. C., ed. Sugar. London: Cosmos Publications, 1949
• The Louisiana Sugar Industry. Thibodaux: American Sugar Cane League, 1995
• Maier, Emile A. A Story of Sugar Cane Machinery. New Orleans: Sugar Journal, 1952
• Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: the Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking, 1985
• "Over a Half Century of Sugar at LSU." LSU Alumni News, v. 22, no. 10 (November, 1946)
• Richard, Charley. "200 Years of Progress in the Louisiana Sugar Industry: A Brief History." Reprinted from Sugar Journal, February, 1995
• Simon, E.C. A Brief Discussion of the History of Sugar Cane: Its Culture, Breeding, Harvesting, Manufacturing and Products. Baton Rouge: Louisiana Sugar Experiment Station, 1969
• Sitterson, J. Carlyle. Sugar Country: the Cane Sugar Industry in the South, 1753-1950. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1953
• The Year Book of the Louisiana Sugar Cane Industry, 1939. New Orleans: Sugar Journal, 1940