Making Beautiful Sugar
"We are all as busy as bees. We have got forty seven hogsheads of beautiful sugar made and are not half done yet." -Mary C. Weeks to brother Alfred Conrad, November 29, 1820
The
Weeks family's venture into the relatively new sugar industry proved successful,
but they found that the production of sugar required hard work, skill,
and good luck. Sugarcane is a tropical plant while southern Louisiana
has a semi-tropical climate, making it more difficult to grow sugarcane
here as the length of the growing season is much shorter than the Caribbean
islands.
Louisiana planters of the nineteenth century were going against nature to raise sugarcane, and their success or failure depended greatly on the weather. Planters worried about freezes, too much rain or too little, or storms with high winds which could destroy fields, buildings, and fortunes.
Although climate might challenge the planter, southern Louisiana does have many good features for sugar production. Fertile soils made up of rich deposits from overflowing rivers and bayous, natural drainage due to the way in which the land slopes back from the waterways to the swamps, and the many waterways serving as transportation routes, together made it possible for sugar planters to be successful.
The Weeks sugar plantation at Grand Cote, situated on Vermilion Bay, provided all three attributes necessary for a successful plantation: rich soil, good drainage for the cane fields, and a dependable transportation route via the bay to the Gulf of Mexico to bring in supplies and take the sugar to market.
In the 1820s, just as David Weeks was becoming involved in sugar, new varieties of cold-resistant cane were introduced in Louisiana to accommodate the shorter growing season, and steam-powered mills replaced the older animal-driven mills, making increased production of sugar possible.
By the 1830s, sugar had become the most important cash crop in southern Louisiana, and sugar plantations included the richest and most valuable land. While there were still more non-cane farmers than sugar planters, and while these farmers owned more acreage in total than did sugar planters, their farms individually were small and the location and quality of the land made it less valuable than the more fertile property of the larger sugar plantations.
In 1834 when David Weeks died, he owned about 3,000 acres on four sites. The land plus all buildings, including sugar mills, barns, slave quarters, and The Shadows itself, were appraised at $105,194. Other property, called "movable property," was valued at almost $109,000, and included hogsheads of sugar, barrels of molasses, livestock, cane carts, farm tools, and 164 men, women and children who provided the labor for the sugar plantation.
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