Remember when...

My father allowed a neighbor to grow sorghum cane

I am old enough to remember when my father allowed a neighbor to plant a plot of ground in sorghum cane.

The neighbor had a sorghum mill but did not have land available to plant the sorghum.

So the neighbor came to our house and proposed that he plant and grow the cane on our land. At harvest time, he would supply the mill and both our families would work together to cut and mill the cane. We would receive half of the sorghum for the effort.

When the time came to harvest, the neighbor set up the mill in the field where the cane was grown. The cane was cut by hand with a scythe. A hand-fed manual press was used that was powered by the neighbor’s mule. It squeezed the juice out of the cane as it went between two pinch rollers. A trough was set up to let the juice flow into a large metal pot. A wood fire was placed under the pot and the juice was heated and boiled until the excess fluids were removed, which left the sorghum. The sorghum then was placed in glass canning jars. My recollection was that the effort yielded far more sorghum than we needed, so the extra was sold to neighbors. My father recalled as we worked that as a younger man, he had his own mill and sold sorghum in the fall as a cash crop. The sorghum sold for $1 for a gallon can. Nearly everyone paid with a silver dollar. After he sold a lot of sorghum, all the silver dollars weighed a lot and he had to transfer the heavy dollars to his pickup truck frequently just to keep his pants up.