Sugar Cane Mill

Sugar Cane Mill. Manufactured by Chattanooga Flow Company. , Sweet Success , Dizzy Business , To extract juice from the sugar cane plant, workers fed stalks in between the two rollers and caught the crushed cane as it came out. The cane juice flowed from the grinder into a huge barrel. They rolled the full barrel to the boiling shed and emptied it into a cast iron kettle. Then they cooked the juice down to make sugar cane syrup., It takes power to extract the sugar cane juice. A long log, hitched at one end to a draft animal and the other end to the rollers of the press, provided the power. The draft animal (a mule, donkey or horse) walked around the press turning the rollers. Not just any animal could do this. Owners trained draft animals for field work and to walk in circles for hours on end. Once trained, they could not be ridden again., Sweet and Sour History , Sugar cane arrived in the "New World" with Columbus and came to Florida with early Spanish settlers. It once sweetened the economy of the Pinellas Peninsula with cane grinders and mills dotting the landscape of farms and early settlements. About 1910, F.A. Davis began the settlement of Pinellas Farms, later to become Pinellas Park. He enticed people to buy land and grow sugar cane at a cash crop. That endured for about a decade until farmers either devoted their acreage to more profitable citrus groves or sold their property to real estate developers. The sugar cane industry moved to south Florida., Sweet Memories , Many folks who grew up on farms in the area recall the sweet taste in their mouths when, as children, they chewed on sugar cane.