BOILIN' THE CANE

      Friends ask, "Why don't you blog anymore?"  My best answer is, "Yeah, I used to write several every month in Miami but we're  still getting to know North Florida. It takes a while to get comfortable enough in a new place to write about it. 

    We did have a unique experience yesterday. We went to our first "Cane Boil".

Let me tell you 'bout it.

       Gainesville has a park on the outskirts of town where they re-created an 1800's farm.  Every fall they invite the public to go there for a day to see "how it was".  Volunteers, appropriately dressed, bake biscuits, feed chickens, and boil sugar cane juice. 

      As we entered we saw the harvested sugar cane  being crushed in a mill powered by young children. 

They lacked the usual mule and  child-labor laws did not exist in 1880 -so- kids pushed the big stick in a circle. As they did the cane was crushed and sweet juice rained down.

     Buckets of it were collected and poured into a hot iron cauldron. 

After heating it 12 hours  sixty gallons boiled down to six gallons of thick, sweet syrup.  You could buy a bottle for seven bucks.

    And that was just one of the  seven stations where you could visit cows, hogs. and chickens,

      

 

 

 

 

 

 

Watch a blacksmith mixing iron with fire

 

And borrow a draw knife from the tool barn

 

 

 

 

to trim an axe handle on a shaving horse.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Parents and their children

were amazed by

 

the woman carding wool,

 

the girl rolling dough for biscuits,  

 

 

 

 

 

 

the woman baking them in a wood-fired stove, and,

 

this young man trying his hand at plowing. 

 

There was folk music everywhere recalling a time

 

 

when the songs, sweaters, and biscuits you enjoyed would have been made by you and your family.  

       I asked a young lady, "What did kids do before video games?". She showed us one more way to have fun 150 years ago.

     Myra handed us bunches of feathered corn cobs called "whirly gigs".

  Francesca and I laughed ourselves silly trying to toss them into a distant basket.

  I suppose it wasn't all fun and games back then but that's the part we got to enjoy at this weekend's Cane Boil. 

We hope you can meet us there next year, when the cane is ripe, on the first Saturday after Thanksgiving.