Delta Sugar: Louisiana's Vanishing Plantation Landscape (review)

Delta Sugar: Louisiana's Vanishing Plantation Landscape. By John B. Rehder. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Pp. xiv+355. $49.95.

American agricultural history has it that Louisiana's sugar industry began in 1794, when Etienne de Boré successfully harvested sugar cane there which he eventually processed into 100,000 pounds of raw sugar. Lost is the story of how sugar production in Louisiana has been transformed in the last two hundred years. Delta Sugar fills this gap. John B. Rehder has written a valuable examination of the sugar industry, a layered history of the blossoming and maturation of sugar production along the Mississippi Delta in southern Louisiana.

Rehder, who began documenting Louisiana's sugar plantations in the 1960s, is passionate about the preservation of their built environment. Hence, Delta Sugar is almost as much a personal narrative as a history. Organization is partly chronological and partly topical. Tracing Louisiana sugar production from its Caribbean roots to the late twentieth century, Rehder uses statistical data to show the numbers and aggregate production of Louisiana sugar factories. In 1801, Louisiana was home to 75 sugar plantations. By 1849 that number had reached its peak of 1,536, and by 1969 the number of sugar plantations had declined to 202. Sugar mills and plantations continue to disappear. Meanwhile, production is at a historical high.

Rehder cites four innovations that contribute to and perpetuate the sugar plantation and the industry: improved cane varieties, sugar mills, and boiling apparatus, and mechanized harvesting. He also acknowledges both botanical and mechanical improvements that have shaped the sugar industry. There are excellent illustrations and photographs of the hand tools, machinery, and facilities that support sugar manufacture. Even though explanations are sometimes vague (the few paragraphs on the importance of the steel plow, for example), this book may still serve as one of the first references for scholars wishing to understand the mechanics of sugar production in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Delta Sugar's strength is its focus on the built environment. The French-influenced Creole style employed a linear arrangement of land parcels, reflective of French agriculture and the primacy of river access for transportation. The Anglo styles were typified by a block arrangement, made feasible as rail transport grew in importance. Rehder provides examples of each sort of plantation, looking at the slave quarters and the owners' and overseers' dwellings. He offers a broad view of the transformation of the Louisiana sugar industry and its use of the land. There is a superb analysis of the relationships between mansions, workers' homes, and the sugar factory. Rehder also explores the development of new facilities such as tractor barns and the simultaneous demise of mule barns.

The volume concludes with six case studies of plantations and an examination of the current state of the Louisiana sugar industry. Case studies range from Armant Plantation, where Rehder documented the demise of the mansion in 1969, to Oaklawn Plantation, where the stately home still stands. The Armant story shows one of the few weaknesses with this work: Rehder covers such a broad range of material that his narrative is occasionally vague. Another is the frequent absence of the voices of the producers, workers, and processors of sugar cane.

Rehder magnificently documents the built environment, but he omits the documentary evidence to be found in period sources. Sugar production required immense resources, and a body of prescriptive literature by and for growers began to accumulate in the mid-nineteenth century. Even when the focus is on landscape, the human face deserves a fuller treatment.

Sugar continues to play an important role in the economy of Louisiana, but it is produced on fewer farms with more hired help and more absentee ownership. Rehder details shifts in production models and the current emphasis on efficiency. The modernization of sugar factories, the push for residential and industrial development, and the mechanization of production have altered the landscape in new ways. Delta Sugar ultimately pleads...