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I
n South Louisiana, as elsewhere throughout the
Americas, sugar is white gold, the commodity
primarily responsible for much of the region’s early
economic, social, and cultural development. The first
century of Louisiana’s settlement and history can
be seen as a great sugar experiment, an attempt to
transform the colony into the next great sugar empire.
Louisiana’s founding fathers, the Le Moyne brothers,
Iberville and Bienville both attempted and failed in
planting cane in the area. Jesuit priests later,withminor
successes, cultivated the crop, where New Orleans’s
modern-day Central Business District now stands.
Up until the 1790s, when the planter Étienne de Boré
triumphantly produced the first batch of granulated
Louisiana sugar and thus sparking a homegrown
industry, the Le Moynes, the Jesuits, and the dozens of
other farmers who endeavored to grow healthy cane
crops all had one goal in mind: rum. The fermented
and distilled product of molasses and/or sugarcane
juice, rum, the early colonists thought, could make
them rich. It would also, at the very least, get them
quite inebriated. “The immoderate use of taffia (a
kind of rum),” the French administrator Jean Jacques
D’Abbadie wrote concerning Louisianians in 1764,
“has stupefied the whole population.”
Local Distillers Are Sweet On Sugar
by
Rien Fertel +
photos by
Matthew Noel
