Lee Waters’ “hobby gone wild” of growing sugar cane and making syrup has led him to some deep history of that once major aspect of Bulloch County farm life and indirectly into the history of agricultural machinery manufacturing by iron foundries in regional cities such as Savannah and Columbus.
Waters, whose full-time work is in his family’s business in town – L.A. Waters Furniture – also shares his family’s multigenerational interest in agriculture. He previously took part in a Bulloch County Historical video about his grandfather, Si Waters, who last year turned 90, as did the company. At 28, Lee Waters is now the youngest member of the Historical Society’s board, and presented his program, “Forgotten Harvest,” for Monday’s lunchtime meeting.
“Historically in Bulloch County, every farm, they either grew cane or they made syrup, and if they didn’t make syrup, they had a neighbor who made syrup, and that was before my time and before many of us,” Waters said. “I know my grandfather talks about when he was a boy, it was everywhere.”
When he was in eighth grade, he visited the home of a friend whose family grew sugarcane, and when his mother picked him up later that day, he said it was something he wanted to do, he recalls. But when he suggested he would grow sugarcane just to grow it, his grandfather had other ideas.
“He said if we’re going to grow cane, we’re going to have syrup in a bottle and put it on a biscuit,” Waters said.
When he was in ninth grade, his grandfather dropped him off at Lannie Lee’s farm for Thanksgiving break, and the younger Waters started to learn about the process of syrup making. Renowned Bulloch County syrup maker Lannie Lee died in 2017 at age 96, but his daughter Patricia “Trish” Morton and her husband Randy Morton now continue the tradition of making Lee’s Syrup.
“They’re still good friends of mine, they still make a bunch of syrup every year, and … their farm and my farm are two of the biggest syrup operations in the state of Georgia,” Waters said.
‘Hobby gone wild’
He found a cane mill locally, then a syrup kettle from the Woodruff farm to get his start.
“It’s really just blossomed from there. I love making it every fall. I have about 15 stores that I currently sell it in, but it’s a hobby gone wild, and Anna lets me do that.’
Anna, his wife, is “a good syrup bottler,” he said. “I’m thankful for that.”
Pop’s Pure Cane Syrup is their brand. The young man pictured cooking syrup on the label is Lee Waters himself, from a watercolor of him at age 15 painted by his grandmother, Ida Waters. He now grows about six acres of cane, enough to make about 35 boilings of syrup – or more than 2,000 bottles full – and also to sell cane to other syrup makers.
His map of the historical “Sugarcane Belt” of the U.S. Southeast showed an area from eastern Texas, throughout Louisiana into southern Arkansas and across southern Mississippi and Alabama, across all of Florida and the southern two-thirds of Georgia into South Carolina. While cane grows well in the Statesboro area, it has a longer reliable growing and harvest season farther south. In his slideshow, another map by the U.S. Department of Agriculture showed scattered dots for cane syrup production in 1933, each dot representing 100,000 gallons of syrup made in an area. The dots were clustered densest across the southern-most tier of counties, with the greatest concentration near Cairo (pronounced Kay-ro) in southwestern Georgia.
“If you sit around a 60-gallon kettle that turns into six gallons of syrup in four hours, that’s a bunch of syrup that that pattern represents,” he said.
Waters talked about the different varieties of sugarcane, how there were originally “chewing” varieties, such as soft Georgia Red, and “syrup” varieties, such as P.O.J., and later also “sugar” varieties recognized by the USDA in its publications. “Ribbon cane,” a variety once renowned for syrup making, is now little grown because of its susceptibility to plant diseases, he said.
Sugarcane – although also a kind of large grass – isn’t planted from seed like corn and other grains. Instead, cuttings of stalks of the previous season’s cane crop are laid lengthwise in the furrows, buried about four inches deep, and shoots of new cane sprout in the spring from the nodes along the jointed stalks.
Usually in October, farmers strip the sugarcane of its leaves and outer layer. Waters showed photos of examples of the traditional cane stripper, a wooden handle with two short, angled parallel metal blades about a stalk’s width apart on one end. November is then the month when harvested cane is brought to the mill on the farm so that the juice can be squeezed from the stalks and boiled to make syrup.
Iron foundries
A popular, early type of machine for crushing the juice from cane was the two-roller mill, with the big iron rollers set vertically, close together. Often these were turned by an animal such as a mule walking in circles to pull the end of a wooden pole, the other end of which was attached to the mill’s vertical driveshaft. These were in use from before the Civil War into the early 1900s.
“When I look at an old cane mill, I don’t just see iron,” Waters said. “I think about the people who were there around that mill, what were their lives like, very different from now. They didn’t have as much, it was a much simpler time, but dang it if things weren’t made to last.”
Savannah and Columbus, Georgia, were each home to several iron foundries that made both cane mills and the open-topped, wide shallow kettles used to boil cane juice into syrup. Both kinds of objects, many well over 100 years old, still exist in significant numbers.
Rourke’s Iron Works, Kehoe Iron Works and Savannah Locomotive were all companies in Savannah that made cane mills and kettles. He showed a photo of a relic, Rourke two-roller mill that came from his mother’s family’s farm near Register.
Typical kettle sizes were 40, 50, 60, 80 and 100 gallons, he noted, with 60 gallons being the most common on southern Georgia farms. The three kettles he uses now were all made by Kehoe Iron Works, and his slideshow included a picture of the Kehoe foundry from the early 1900s and a recent photo of the Kehoe Ironworks buildings, now an event venue at Trustees’ Garden.
Originally, the kettles were heated with wood, often “fat lighter” pine. But today, Waters uses propane for better temperature control, he acknowledged.
3-roller mills
Around 1900, three-roller cane mills were introduced and soon preferred, he said. These have one large roller and two smaller rollers, the third roller giving the cane a second squeezing and leaving the fibers virtually “dry” he said. At least some of the three-roller mills were mounted horizontally, as shown in the ads and illustrations Waters shared. These were powered by a belt from an engine or the power takeoff of a tractor.
Foundries that “really stepped up” to make the three-roller mills included the Golden’s Foundry in Columbus, Southern Plow Company, also known as Columbus Ironworks, and Chattanooga Ironworks up in Tennessee. Earlier in its history, Columbus Ironworks had made armaments for the Confederacy during the Civil War, was burned downed by the Union Army in 1865, and rebuilt in 1866. Today, the sprawling, brick building stands as the Columbus Convention & Trade Center.
Golden’s Foundry & Machine Company still operates in Columbus, touting “140 years of Manufacturing,” and making, among other things, “syrup kettle fire pits” and Kamado grills. But the Golden’s No. 27 Power Mill that Waters uses to grind cane was a much earlier product.
By making syrup each fall, Waters likes to recapture a little of a ritual that was part of the annual cycle on family farms in the area before his time.
“It was something people looked forward to every year,” he said. “The weather was cooling down. … It was an event where family and friends and neighbors would get together and really just have a great time together … and then you hear about pulling candy, syrup candy that they would boil the syrup, keep boiling it down until it got really, really thick and start pulling it and make hard candy and pass it around to all the kids.”
He hasn’t tried the candy making aspect yet.
