From the Boardwalk

Dunlawton's sugar factory included an engine room with two steam boilers, one now gone, a horizontal steam engine, and a cane crusher with engine-powered rollers and a pan for catching juice, while a coquina chimney created draft for the boiler fires. Across a passageway, the boiling room processed cane juice with a chimney drawing fire under two lines of kettles, where workers removed impurities, moved the thickening liquid from kettle to kettle, and then poured it into wooden cooling troughs. The crystallized sugar was packed in barrels and drained in the purgery, or drying room. The operation was smoke-filled, busy, and loud, with smashed dried cane stalks fueling the fires, enslaved people feeding new stalks into the crusher while risking their hands, and the giant machinery shaking the ground for hundreds of yards, prompting the plantation's owners to live near the Halifax River away from the works.

Port Orange, Florida · United States