Sweet Cane: The Architecture of the Sugar Works of East Florida by Lucy B. Wayne (review)

In Sweet Cane, Lucy B. Wayne undertakes what she describes as “above all an architectural history. It is not a regional history or a socioeconomic history, nor is it an attempt to look at the New World sugar industry as a whole” (5). The architecture in question is the remains of the sugar works for eight eighteenth-and nineteenth-century plantations clustered together along the East Florida coastline in present-day Flagler and Volusia Counties. In the process, Wayne also opens the door to myriad areas of broad historical inquiry.

In order to provide the necessary grounding for the detailed analyses of these remains, Wayne dedicates the first section of the book to an examination of how sugar plantations functioned and how they can be classified as industrial complexes. This section also provides a brief historical overview of the history of the sugar industry in East Florida, dividing this history into distinct periods based on the world power that dominated the region at the time. The eight sugar works under consideration were in operation mostly during the Second Spanish Period (1783–1819) and the Territorial Period (1819–35), although a few produced sugar both before and after these terminuses. Contending with marginal land, stiff competition, ongoing war, a volatile market, and regional technological backwardness, the sugar works of East Florida never succeeded in garnering the profits that their owners envisioned. After the Second Seminole War (1835–42) laid waste to much of the region and caused the ruin and abandonment of many of the sugar works, few planters would ever resume sugar production in this area.

The second part of the book, “Architecture of East Florida Sugar Plantations,” examines the ways in which the architecture of the various sugar works reflected changing technologies. Wayne argues that, over time, the architecture of the sugar works of East Florida evolved to accommodate new technological advances in the sugar production process. Here the author provides for each of the eight sugar works a general overview, history, architectural analysis, and brief summary. This section is further subdivided into subsections—“Spanish Trains,” “Adaptive Sugar Works,” and “Fully Evolved Sugar Works”—that group the sites according to their level of technological evolution, which, unsurprisingly, also puts them in rough chronological order. We learn of such advances as the introduction of the steam engine to power the cane-crushing mills and the use of new configurations of vats and furnaces in the process of distilling the cane juice.

Wayne’s decision to focus so tightly on these buildings is of course perfectly reasonable given the enormous breadth of such related topics as the New World sugar industry. Furthermore, as Sweet Cane implies, the plantations under examination formed such a miniscule component both of the larger Caribbean/southeastern continental sugar industry, as well as in the development of the territory of Florida, that they would surely be lost in a much broader study. Such historiographical marginalization would indeed seem an injustice when viewed in the context of the substantiality of the ruined sugar works that Wayne studies: these buildings exist, many of them are accessible to the public, and so should receive their own history—one that helps people “better understand what they see and what the structures represent” (5).

At the same time, other editorial decisions—e.g., to focus only on these eight plantations and not others in Florida or even in East Florida—suggest that this study was compiled from a preexisting body of data that was itself fairly circumscribed to begin with. Wayne, a professional archaeologist who has worked on structural evaluations and stabilization plans for several of the sites, essentially confirms this in the acknowledgments section, when she writes that Sweet Cane is primarily based on the many unpublished archaeological and architectural studies of the sites that had been completed...