Compensation’s sugar pioneer
An old legend tells the story of how sugarcane farming all started.
Photo South African Sugar Association
Did you know that South Africa’s very first lumps of sugar were produced in the Ballito area?
In 1848 an Englishman named Edmund Morewood planted the first sugarcane crop on the farm Compensation and crushed the country’s first sugar in 1851, using rollers made from yellowwood trees.
The mill was pushed by hand by two men turning a piece of wood stuck through an opening through the top of the rudimentary “mill”.
The juice squeezed from the cane was captured in a trough and boiled off in iron pots to create sugar crystals.
Legend has it that the rollers used to crush the cane originally came from the masts of a shipwreck. The legend was later disputed.
Morewood made a calculated guess that sugarcane would grow well in this region, a guess that ignited what became a thriving South African sugarcane industry.
Sadly he gained nothing from this pioneering experiment because he was unable to raise enough money to continue farming and emigrated to Brazil in 1853.
Today Morewood’s yellowwood mill is kept at the South African Sugar Association in Mount Edgecombe.
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