Appalachian History

Kentucky and Tennessee are today the leading sorghum syrup-producing states, and neither are shy about the fact. Gray, TN hosted the Appalachian Sorghum Festival last weekend, and over in Morgan County, KY the locals of that district celebrated their own Sorghum Festival simultaneously. And North Georgia’s Sorghum Festival, in Blairsville, GA comes up Oct 11-12.

A poor-soil brother of the corn family, sorghum grows all over the United States and as far north as Canada. To mountain folk, in the days when they knew sugar only in liquid form, there just wasn’t any other sweetening like it. Sorghum meant a rich dark-brown molasses, just right for corn bread and unbeatable for hot-cakes. It is still used for seasoning beans and for making cookies. A sorghum “run-off” was the most enjoyable event of the old-time farm year. Sorghum—the ‘sugar plant’---was mostly a small farm product, but during the Civil War years about sixty million gallons of it were manufactured. Today sorghum has been bred into a dry soil plant for livestock feeding.

The beers mentioned in early American writings were in no way similar to beer as we know it---and such was southern molasses beer, made from sorghum. A first distillation of fermented sorghum juice, molasses beer was found on the tables of most mountain farms, often as a substitute for milk, and was taken by small children at every meal.

The typical Kentucky family had two acres planted in sorghum. Most of it was for syrup, part went for cattle fodder, and the seeds fed the chickens. The sheet metal pan for cooking the syrup was similar to New England’s maple sugar pan, but the horse drawn sugar mill originated in the South. Northerners usually preferred to do their “farm squeezing” with wooden screw type presses.

Sorghum Festival 2008 at Ketner's Mill TN.

Squeezed sorghum juice exuded from the mill through a burlap strainer and into a barrel. It was then transferred to the cooking pan. As the juice began to boil, it was paddled and cleared of impurities, turning from green to muddy and finally to clear brown. Four gallons of juice produced about one gallon of syrup; as a substitute for store bought sugar, sorghum was an easily grown crop with very little waste.

Unlike today’s sugar with its nutrients refined away, primitive sorghum syrup was not as good to look at, but it at least contained food value. Sorghum joined corn as one of the staffs of early farm life; it even found its way into paints and dyes.


source: Once Upon a Time: The Way America Was, by Eric Sloane, Dover Publications, 2005



sorghum+molasses sorghum+festivals Blairsville+GA Morgan+County+KY Gray+TN appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

“[My grandparents] had a molasses mill; they made molasses. I used to help make them, too. [They made molasses to sell.] And they made for people. They'd make molasses for six weeks or longer at a time, every day except Sunday. Sometimes they didn't make them on Saturday. It was usually five days a week.

“They'd start grinding the cane in the mornings about four o'clock, and it'd usually be ten or eleven before they'd get the last ones cooked and off of the pan, before they quit. [My grandmother] was in charge of the cooking of the molasses, and she was really good at it. She stayed right there from the time they got juice on that pan and started cooking till it was all off at night. She didn't even go to the house to eat her meals. They'd bring her meals to her.

Photo caption reads: Boiling juice of sugarcane into sorghum molasses. Racine, West Virginia. Sept 1938.

“They cooked them with wood. It was a big long pan, and you let the juice come on first, and you'd keep the fire going. It had to be a certain kind of wood, oak wood. And you'd keep the fire going under that pan to get the juice started, and you'd have to skim the skimmings off because it would be real green and foamy skimming. And you had what looked like a wire pan, and you'd take that and go down in under them skimmings and dip them off, and you had cans and buckets that you'd put those skimmings in. They weren't any good; they'd just throw them away.

“And as the molasses would cook, they'd have divisions in that pan, and over here would be when the juice would start coming in. And then after they started thickening a little bit, it had a place that would close up, and they'd open that up and let that juice, as it started to thicken, come over in the next section. And it would cook so long in that section. And then at the last they would let them go over in the third section to finish cooking. And you had to stay with them all the time and keep stirring them to keep them from sticking, after they started thickening.

“You really had to work to keep them molasses. And they tried to keep that temperature about the same temperature all the time, to make good… They would make them for people and take so many gallons for making them. That was the pay they got out of it. They'd get twenty-five cents a gallon for them when sold them, and now they're twelve dollars a gallon.”

Eunice Austin
b. 1915, Catawba County, NC

Interview H-107
Southern Oral History Program Collection

source: http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/austin/menu.html

related posts: "Maple syrup time"


Eunice Austin
Catawba County NC
sorghum molasses
appalachian culture
appalachia history
history of appalachia