The first year Mary Fowler and her husband, Ronnie, produced molasses, Mary made a scrapbook. She documented every step along the way.
The first year Mary Fowler and her husband, Ronnie, produced molasses, Mary made a scrapbook. She documented every step along the way, from sowing the seeds and scouring the region for a mill to purchase, to cutting and stripping the cane and canning the molasses.
“She was in it from day one,” Ronnie recalled.
As that first season drew to a close, Mary told her husband, “I hate to see it end.” And later, when she twisted the cap tight on that year's final jar, she was in tears.
“I cry because it's over,” Mary said.
It's surprising then that Mary Fowler doesn't care too much for the taste. She can tolerate it in gingerbread, cookies and muffins, she said, but she doesn't share the same affinity her husband does — he loves a big dollop on a biscuit or cornbread.
The Fowlers are in their fourth year of production, currently growing about an acre's worth of sorghum cane in Arden, not far from their home in Mills River.
The harvest season lasts about a month for the Fowlers. Having planted their seeds on May 30th of this year, Ronnie and Mary continued to work fulltime — Ronnie at Electrolux and Mary at Merry Maids — before putting their vacation time to use, taking Thursdays and Fridays off to cut and strip their cane.
“Both of us have been on jobs a long time,” Ronnie said. “Then we decided to get into this, and our summers are taken up taking care of our cane and our garden.”
“It's a lot of hard work, but I'd rather spend my vacation time doing this than doing whatever,” Mary said. “I just enjoy it.”
Their son-in-law, Brian McMahan, works alongside Mary stripping the cane that Ronnie cuts. At the end of each day, they haul the cane by pick-up truck six miles home.
The Fowlers have two mills there — one that runs off a Wisconsin gas motor and another that's wooden and mule-driven. The power mill is faster, Ronnie admitted, but Jill works just as well, he said, and harkens back to simpler, less modern time. What the motorized mill can do in two hours, Jill can do in four, according to Mary. She'll turn out about a pick-up load, but the Fowlers have to stop her every so often.
“If you went around in circles for two or three hours you might imagine what she feels like. When she gets tired, she'll stop herself. She'll stand there a few minutes, then she'll go at it again,” Mary said.
Saturdays start early for Ronnie and McMahan. By 4:30 a.m. the power mill is running, grinding cane for the day's first run of molasses. By daylight, Ronnie will have the fire going, and Jill hooked up to the wooden mill to grind the second run. The rest of the family — daughters Brandy McMahan and Jennifer Bradley, along with Bradley's husband Henry and children Hunter, 6, and Bryan Cate, 15, who goes by Boomer — are also on hand helping out. Bryan and Hunter seem to enjoy feeding the cane through the wooden mill as Jill provides the power.
“She just goes 'round and around and around and you just stick the cane in between two big rollers,” Ronnie said. “It goes in there and crushes it and the juices comes out.”
The Fowlers also have a miniature donkey, Biscuit, they'll sometimes hook up to the mill, though they can't put more than three or four stalks in at a time with her.
The juice is strained into one 25-gallon barrel at the mill before traveling through a pipe across their yard, to be strained once more and gathered in three more barrels the same size near the furnace. The juice is poured into a large wooden box set over a fire that brings the juice, in 75-gallon batches, to a boil.
During heating, impurities that look similar to algae rise up to the surface of the juice, which are skimmed off. The raw cane juice is naturally sweet, and as it boils it gets even sweeter. And of course, thicker.
For every 10 gallons of juice the Fowlers squeeze from their cane, they can expect one gallon of molasses.
Determining when the molasses has cooked long enough can be tricky. Take it off too soon, and the molasses can be too thin.
“Slow as molasses,” Mary said referencing the common saying. “It's got to be thick.”
Too late, the molasses can burn and “you might as well throw it away,” Mary said.
The Fowlers can tell by the bubbles, which start out small, about the size of a nail on a pinky finger. Then they grow larger and larger over the course of the morning before the juice hits the right thickness and sweetness.
“I had one lady one year ask how much sugar we added to it,” Mary recalled. “I said, 'We don't add anything,' and I showed her our barrels of juice that was waiting to be done for the second run. I said, 'This right here is all we put in there — no sugar, no additives, nothing. Just the pure cane juice.'”
The family sells what it makes by the quart, pint, half pint — whatever size a person wants, Mary said, though she's quick to point out what they do is by no means a business. They have customers who buy molasses each year because they really like it, but for the Fowlers it's merely a hobby, and for Mary especially, a way to pay tribute to the way things used to be done.
“You don't see this kind of stuff anymore,” Mary said. “And everything is modern, modern, modern, and I want people to know this is the way they did it in the old days. They used molasses to sweeten stuff, to make desserts with — if they were lucky enough to get the flour to make it with — that's the only way they had to survive, is to do it on their own.”
“I remember when I was growing up my dad always had a garden, always had a mule — he did like they did in the olden days. And that's what I enjoy.”
The Fowlers will continue their production through mid-October at their home at 151 Laurel Terrace Court in Mills River. They encourage people to come by and see how molasses is made.