Historic Louisiana

plantations the work was contracted out to
gangs of Irish laborers. English journalist
William Howard Russell observed that “the
labor of ditching, trenching, cleaning the
waste lands, and hewing down the forests, is
generally done by Irish laborers, who travel
about the country under contractors.” On
Houmas the ditches ran back to the rear levee
that cost $100,000 to build. A great drainage
machine pumped 175,000 gallons of
rainwater a minute over the levee. The
drainage machine was a cast-iron thirty-foot
wheel that lifted water over the rear levees. A
$30,000 steam engine of 140 horsepower
operated the wheel and also drove a sawmill.
The second job on the sugar plantation was
chopping wood to feed the steam engines at
next season’s grinding. Workers chopped
wood more or less continuously from January
to August, accumulating about three
thousand cords of wood. But the slave
workers also had to cut shingles and make
barrel staves. In February on Houmas five
men worked to cut shingles, and another five
brought out six thousand staves for barrels. A
highly respected slave named Peter Nott
supervised a gang that made thirty thousand
staves and a new cistern for the quarters.
The preparation of the fields for a new cane
crop also continued after the end of January.
The preceding fall workers had plowed two
hundred and twenty acres of cane land, and
actually planted one hundred acres. In
January, while some men were ditching and
others were cutting wood, most were
planting. Planting meant that the cane
seedlings were laid across the furrow, four
inches apart, alternating and overlapping
eight inches on each side of the furrow. The
heads all faced the same direction. The canes
were then covered with soil. The slaves
planted fourteen acres on January 3, another
twelve on January 4. Three ox carts hauled
the cane seedlings. Six three-horse plows
prepared another hundred acres and then
turned to plowing for the corn crop, the
essential food source for the plantation.
Once the planting was done at Houmas,
sixty men began scraping cane, all the while
continuing to plant additional acreage in
corn. Scraping was the process of reducing
the amount of soil covering the plant cane to
no more than two inches, so that the heat of
the sun would induce sprouting. Yet another
March activity was the planting of twelve
acres of pumpkins, considered an experiment.
In May the workers were running thirty plows
in the cane to control weeds.
The slaves were simultaneously hauling
sugar and molasses from the sugar house to
ships tied up in the river. The process of
shipping sugar directly from the plantation to
refineries in the east that Hampton had
inaugurated continued up to the Civil War. On
January 27, 1853, the bark Parson Warren
loaded sixty-five hogsheads of sugar from the
Conway sugarhouse. The next day they hauled
127 hogsheads out of the Clark sugarhouse.
On the twenty-ninth the gang turned to
filling barrels with molasses and completed
two hundred and ten barrels by 3 p.m.
✧
Left: Young sugarcane with the sugar mill in
the background.
COURTESY OF THE LOUISIANA STATE MUSEUM.
Right: A pair of oxen pulling a cart to town.
These animals were the principal power
source until the introduction of mules in the
nineteenth century.
COURTESY OF THE LOUISIANA STATE MUSEUM.
CHAPTER IV
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