The Farmington-Hawaii Connection Harvesting sugar cane

by Brian Swartz

Their woodstoves well stoked and aglow, Franklin County farmers sat at their kitchen tables in the snowy cold of early February 1901 and opened the latest edition of the fourpage Franklin Chronicle.

Right there on page 1, under the headline Among Sugar Cane, the farmers read an incredible tale of sugar-cane farming in the Hawaiian Islands. Comparing sugar-cane farming with growing corn in Maine, “former Farmington boy” Benjamin H. Norton detailed how farmers in a world dominated by warm breezes and swaying palms grew their cash crop.

Circa 1880, Norton had moved to Honolulu in the Sandwich Islands (as

Hawaii was then known) to work on a sugar plantation and then as an engineer “on the steamers plying between Honolulu and the other islands of the group.” The steamers served the sugar-cane plantations that dominated the local economy.

“These islands are all of volcanic formation, mountainous in the interior,” Norton told his Franklin Chronicle readers. Dependent on sufficient rainfall, many sugar-cane plantations stretched “from the sea back to the hills,” from which “flumes and ditches” steered runoff “for several miles” to the cane fields.

Irrigation was vital to growing sugar cane. Owners of one Maui plantation had spent $750,000 to construct an irrigation system extending “into the mountains over thirty miles” and incorporating “heavy iron pipes” to span “deep gulches,” Norton observed. Where the natural runoff proved inadequate, plantation owners sank artesian wells “four to eight hundred feet in depth” and “eight to twelve inches in diameter.” Interconnected wells fed “immense pumps,” some able to handle 12 million gallons a day, according to Norton.

While smaller plantations relied on horse-drawn plows to till the fields for planting, the larger plantations used steam-powered equipment. “Two large engines, something like a locomotive, (cont. on page 30)

(cont. from page 29) are placed one on each side of the field about five hundred yards apart,” Norton wrote.

Then eight plows, each “about sixteen or eighteen inches [wide] on a heavy triangular frame,” were connected to the engines “by a wire cable.” Set four across on the cable, four plows faced one side of the field and the other four plows the other side.

On signal, the No. 1 engine driver “winds up the cable.” The four plows facing the No. 2 engine rose from the ground, and No. 1 engine pulled the four plows facing it “across the field, plowing a strip the width of the four plows,” Norton wrote.

No. 2 engine repeated the process in its direction, and both engines moved forward until they had plowed the field. “In the corners and narrow strips [horse] teams are used,” Norton informed Franklin County farmers.

Irrigation required fields to then be crisscrossed by mule teams dragging “a double plow” that created “a lot of crooked ditches,” Norton wrote. “The land is now ready for planting.”

Franklin Chronicle readers could not imagine a place like Hawaii, where planting extended from May to October or perhaps November, the time when all crops but the root vegetables would have been harvested in Maine. As planting got underway in the Pacific isles, “pieces of cane” (with each sporting a bud) were “planted in the bottom of the furrow as left by the double plow,” then covered by about 3 inches of topsoil, Norton wrote.

Afterwards the furrows were wa- tered “two or three times per week or as often as necessary,” he noted. Resembling “young corn,” cane sprouts soon popped through the soil, and farm workers weeded the sugar cane like Maine farmers weeded a cornfield.

Sugar cane “grows until a year from the following November when it tassels,” Norton continued comparing the Hawaiian crop to corn. The cane ripened until being harvested and shipped to sugar mills for grinding. Farmington-area farmers cut their silage corn at ground level — and so did Hawaiian sugar-cane workers, who then loaded cut cane “on wagons or cars and hauled it to the mill,” Norton wrote. A few plantations had sufficient water to sluice harvested cane to the nearest mill, “but on most of the plantations it is hauled to the mill with a locomotive.”

Sugar cane could grow “sometimes as thick as a man’s arm” and measure 18-20 feet in length, “but the most common size is about one and a half inches thick and eight or ten feet long,” Norton noted.

Grinding cane for approximately six months, a mill needed “from seven or eight tons of cane to make one ton of sugar,” he observed. A plantation with average soil produced “six to eight tons of sugar per acre,” a plantation with exceptional soil more than 13 tons per acre.

Although sugar cane resembled silage corn in growth and harvest, the former grew a second crop without being replanted. Once the cane stalks were harvested, farm workers burned off the leaves, cleaned out the ditches, and diverted water into them again.

Then “a volunteer (or ratoon) crop springs up from the roots” to tassel “the next November” before harvest, Norton explained. Thus, a plantation owner harvested a single planting twice, and “in some places they take off several ratoon crops,” he pointed out.

“A good ratoon crop yields about two-thirds as much as plant cane,” Norton commented.

Besides silage corn, Farmington-area farmers also raised cob corn that local mills ground into flour. The small mills along Franklin County streams were no match for Hawaiian sugar-cane mills, each “a mass of machinery both massive and expensive,” Norton wrote.

Harvested cane went through a crusher, then “immense rollers weighing from nine to fourteen tons each, a second “set of rollers,” and finally “the third and last set of rollers,” he observed. The rollers squeezed the “juice” from the cane pulp, then the juice boiled in “clarifiers” and “containers” before ultimately reaching “the centrifugal” that produced “No. 1 sugar.”

Norton believed his story “may interest the many readers of the Chronicle.” He was correct.

“IF