John Houstoun McIntosh Sugarhouse | |
Location | Ga. Spur 40, 6 mi. N of St. Marys, St. Marys, Georgia |
---|---|
Coordinates | 30°47′36″N81°34′44″W / 30.79333°N 81.57889°W |
Area | 1 acre (0.40 ha) |
NRHP reference No. | 92000167 [1] |
Added to NRHP | April 2, 1992 |
The McIntosh Sugarworks, near St. Marys, Georgia, was built in the late 1820s by John Houstoun McIntosh. They are a significant example of tabby concrete architecture and represent an industrial component of southeastern plantation agriculture. The Tabby Ruins, as they are also known, are at 3600 Charlie Smith Sr. Highway at Georgia Spur 40, six miles north of St. Marys. The entrance is approximately across the street from the entrance to the Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay, on Charlie Smith Highway, at 30°47′35″N81°34′38″W / 30.79310°N 81.57712°W .
The historic sugar mill site outside of St. Marys, Georgia in Camden County, Georgia was added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 2, 1992.
John Houstoun McIntosh began planting in Camden County, Georgia after the War of 1812, when he established a permanent residence at Mariana Plantation on the St. Marys River. In 1819 he purchased two smaller plantations and renamed his holdings New Canaan. Thomas Spalding recommended a sugar mill design to McIntosh in 1825, and John Hamilton Couper stated the McIntosh mill was already in production by 1829.
After McIntosh's death in 1836, New Canaan was sold to one Caroline Hallowes in 1840. The Hallowes changed the name of the plantation to Bollingbrook and lived there until after the Civil War. During the war, Colonel Hallowes planted cane and made sugar, and also used the tabby sugar works as a starch factory, producing arrowroot starch in large quantities.
For many years it was believed that the "tabby ruins" were the site of an old Spanish mission. [2] Other tabby sugarhouses in the area include that at Elizafield Plantation on St. Simons Island.
Attempts to grow sugar in North America likely began during the early 1700s. Sugar became an economically successful crop in the southern United States by the end of the eighteenth century. Sugarcane was a lucrative crop, especially for large plantations. At that time in the Georgia lowcountry large-scale planting focused on rice, and comparatively sugar required "a different growing regimen, but not a different kind of plantation." [3] For John Houstoun McIntosh, sugar added an additional cash crop to his plantations without adding much additional cost.
The processing of the sugar was another story, as the large sugarhouse attests. The construction of the sugarhouse alone required a large amount of materials and labor. Thomas Spalding estimated that one enslaved laborer could take cane from two acres in two months. The enslaved people cut the cane, stripped the leaves, and placed it on flat carts which hauled it to the mills. [4]
The standing tabby walls of the sugarhouse define a rectangular building with three rooms aligned in a row, and two porches off the central room. The McIntosh sugar mill's three rooms were each used for a separate step of the process, making sugar production there a streamlined operation. The central room had a packed earth floor, while the two end rooms had wooden floors built off the ground supported by the tabby walls. [5]
The eastern room contained the mill used to crush the cane to extract the sweet juice, according to Thomas Spalding "the first horizontal cane mill worked by cattle power." Horizontal mills were a relatively new innovation in sugar production in the 1820s, and McIntosh's was purchased from the West Point Foundry in New York. [4] The mill room is the only two-story room at the sugarhouse, with the mill being on the second story while the animals which powered it were below. [5]
In the middle room, the extracted juice was boiled and clarified into a syrup. The syrup was then allowed to crystallize into granules and the molasses was drained off. The middle room had an earthen instead of wooden floor due to the high temperatures and open flame used to boil the syrup. The boiling operation there involved multiple kettles that allowed for the different stages of condensing the juice into syrup. [6]
In the last room, the syrup was poured into containers where it was allowed to crystallize into granular sugar. The molasses was then poured out of the finished sugar. Both the sugar crystals and molasses were salable goods and the bagasse could be dried and used to fuel the boiling room or used for animal feed. [5]
Molasses is a viscous substance resulting from refining sugarcane or sugar beets into sugar. Molasses varies in the amount of sugar, method of extraction and age of the plant. Sugarcane molasses is usually used to sweeten and flavour foods. Molasses is a major constituent of fine commercial brown sugar. It is also one of the main ingredients used to distill rum.
A refinery is a production facility composed of a group of chemical engineering unit processes and unit operations refining certain materials or converting raw material into products of value.
Tafia is a drink similar to rum made from sugarcane juice. It is typically unaged whereas rum is typically aged in wooden barrels to reduce the level of fusel. Most of the fusel is absorbed in the first two years. Premium rums are aged for a longer period, incidentally increasing the evaporation of ethanol.
Sweet sorghum is any of the many varieties of the sorghum grass whose stalks have a high sugar content. Sweet sorghum thrives better under drier and warmer conditions than many other crops and is grown primarily for forage, silage, and syrup production.
A sugar refinery is a refinery which processes raw sugar from cane or sugar extracted from beets into white refined sugar.
Golden syrup or light treacle is a thick, amber-coloured form of inverted sugar syrup made by the process of refining sugar cane or sugar beet juice into sugar. It is used in a variety of baking recipes and desserts. It has an appearance and consistency similar to honey, and is often used as a substitute where honey is unavailable.
Thomas Spalding was a United States representative from Georgia. He was born in Frederica, Georgia, St. Simons Island, Glynn County, Georgia. He studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1795, but did not practice. He engaged extensively in agricultural pursuits.
The Dunlawton Plantation and Sugar Mill, a 19th-century cane sugar plantation in north-central Florida, was destroyed by the Seminoles at the beginning of the Second Seminole War. The ruins are located at 950 Old Sugar Mill Road, Port Orange, Florida. On August 28, 1973, the site was added to the United States National Register of Historic Places under the title of Dunlawton Plantation-Sugar Mill Ruins.
The Jarrell Plantation State Historic Site is a former cotton plantation and state historic site in Juliette, Georgia, United States. Founded as a forced-labor farm worked by John Jarrell and the African American people he enslaved, the site stands today as one of the best-preserved examples of a "middle class" Southern plantation. The Jarrell Plantation's buildings and artifacts all came from the Jarrell family, who farmed the land for over 140 years. Located in the red clay hills of the Georgia piedmont, It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. It is a Georgia state park in Jones County.
Sugarcane or sugar cane is a species of tall, perennial grass that is used for sugar production. The plants are 2–6 m (6–20 ft) tall with stout, jointed, fibrous stalks that are rich in sucrose, which accumulates in the stalk internodes. Sugarcanes belong to the grass family, Poaceae, an economically important flowering plant family that includes maize, wheat, rice, and sorghum, and many forage crops. It is native to the warm temperate and tropical regions of India, Southeast Asia, and New Guinea. Grown in tropical and subtropical regions, sugarcane is the world's largest crop by production quantity, totaling 1.9 billion tonnes in 2020, with Brazil accounting for 40% of the world total. Sugarcane accounts for 79% of sugar produced globally. About 70% of the sugar produced comes from Saccharum officinarum and its hybrids. All sugarcane species can interbreed, and the major commercial cultivars are complex hybrids.
The history of sugar has five main phases:
Tabby is a type of concrete made by burning oyster shells to create lime, then mixing it with water, sand, ash and broken oyster shells. Tabby was used by early Spanish settlers in present-day Florida, then by British colonists primarily in coastal South Carolina and Georgia. It is a man-made analogue of coquina, a naturally-occurring sedimentary rock derived from shells and also used for building.
A sugar cane mill is a factory that processes sugar cane to produce raw sugar or plantation white sugar. Some sugar mills are situated next to a back-end refinery, that turns raw sugar into (refined) white sugar.
Plantation complexes were common on agricultural plantations in the Southern United States from the 17th into the 20th century. The complex included everything from the main residence down to the pens for livestock. Until the abolition of slavery, such plantations were generally self-sufficient settlements that relied on the forced labor of enslaved people.
The Callawassie Sugar Works is a historically significant industrial site at 29 Sugar Mill Drive in Okatie, South Carolina, on Callawassie Island in Beaufort County. The site contains the tabby ruins of two structures and archeological evidence of a third structure. The sugar works, constructed circa 1815–1818, was a complex for processing sugar cane into sugar.
Mosquito Bay plantation was owned by Johan Lorentz Carstens, who was also the owner of the plantations Perlen on Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands and a smaller plantation on St. Jan.
Cider syrup is also known as apple molasses. It is a fruit syrup concentrated from apple cider, first made in colonial America. It is a thick, dark brown, opaque syrup with concentrated apple flavor. The color is darker than honey and its flavor more tart than maple syrup. A syrup-like product has a much longer shelf-life than the fresh fruit, thereby extending the apple harvest's contribution to diets throughout the year.
John Houston McIntosh, also sometimes spelled John Houstoun McIntosh, (1773-1836) was a wealthy planter in Georgia who helped lead a rebel group during the Patriot War in Florida.