The Sorghum Experience:

As a kid growing up in the hills of backwoods Arkansas,with the nearest neighbor almost a mile away, there wasn’t much for us kids to do in the quiet of summertime on a 360 acre farm. We kept busy working in the oversized garden raising our own food that was home canned and put away for the winter month’s meals. We also took care of farm animals that furnished us with meat, eggs and milk. We smoked bacon and hams and bartered with the neighbors, exchanging one thing for another.

The annual Sorghum Party brought in neighbors from miles around, participating in the cooking of Sugar Cane juices to make the best Sorghum Molasses you’ve ever tasted. Those who helped with the processing were the ones who went home with several gallons of the stuff. I remember helping carry the cans to the filling table where the rich amber liquid syrup was poured into the brand new shiny one gallon cans. During the harvesting of the Sugar Cane, our horses were hitched to the wagon and we helped Dad and Grandpa load the bundles of cane into the wagon for transport to the cooking site. It was fun to sit on top of the cane pile for the quarter mile ride to the old Liken’s place where the squeezing, the cooking process took place.

The squeezing machine was fun to watch. It was a device that had a long pole that stuck out several feet from the center and attached to the Mule. As the Mule walked around in a circle, the gears would turn and the operator would feed small bundles of Sorghum Cane into the rollers, pulled through by the action of the device. The juice would be squeezed out of the cane stalks where it ran down a chute and into a bucket. As the bucket got full, a worker would exchange it with an empty bucket, take the full one and dump it into one end of the large cooking vat. The vat was about 5 feet wide by 15 feet long and had some kind of division inside it to accommodate various stages of the cooking process.

The juice entered the vat on one end and the finished product was pulled off at the other. People along both sides had long poles with boards nailed to the end, used as stirring paddles to keep the Sorghum from sticking and burning. The fire was built beneath the raised vat and was fed by the fire tender to try to maintain a certain height of flame and heat, so as not to get too low, or too high, for the entire length of the vat.

It was a skill to make good Sorghum. Our community was noted to make the “best in the country”. I don’t know how the trade was handed down from other generations, but I do know the art of Sorghum making ended with my Grandfather when we moved from Arkansas to Kansas and my Dad began working as a welder. We still miss those days of fresh Sorghum Molasses with homemade butter and hot biscuits. The sights, the sounds and the smells can never be captured on film. Only in our minds do the memories of those events still come alive in a never ending mode of instant replay at our beckoning.