A Plat of the ETCGPA Syrup Mill
The above diagram is not drawn to scale, and may not be 100% technically correct, but is designed to give you an idea of how the East Texas Cane Grower's and Producer's Syrup Mill was laid out and how it probably functioned. As shown by the photos, the mill is now in bad condition. Some piping and parts are missing, so we are not exactly sure where everything fit, but the diagram should be fairly close.
1 - Trucks were weighed on a scale upon arriving at the mill. Only the concrete pit that once contained the scales remains, and its wooden deck is completely gone.
2-A/2-B - After the trucks were weighed, they pulled up a hill on either side of the pit. There their cane was unloaded and put on a conveyor that lowered it into the pit. There were two sets of conveyors in the pit. One fed each mill roller.
3-A/3-B - Hard to see in this photo due to deterioration and undergrowth, the cane fell off of the end of conveyors 2-A and 2-B onto conveyors 3-A and 3-B, where it was raised into the building containing the syrup mill's big rollers.
At the top of conveyors 3-A and 3-B, the cane slid down a steep chute into the mill rollers, where the raw juice was squeezed out. The angle of the slope and the weight of the cane sliding down it should have made the rollers self-feeding without the need for a person to push the stalks through.
5 - The flattened stalks exited the front of both mill rollers onto conveyor 5, where it was sent to the cutter/blower to be made into silage.
4-A/4-B - The syrup mill's big twin 36" rollers squeezed the raw juice from the cane. The rollers were powered by large electric motors connected by belts to flywheels..
6 - The flatten stalks were run through a cutter/blower, which ground them into silage and blew them onto an overhead rack. The pipes from the blower to the rack have fallen but are still present.
7 - After grinding, the silage was blown into this overhead rack. We feel sure the rack was lined with wood and/or tarpaulens to hold the silage, which has since disappeared. Two large metal trap doors opened to drop the silage into waiting trucks to be returned to the farm where it was used as livestock feed.
Raw cane juice ran out of the rollers through this trough and into some kind of container. The container is long gone, but the juice was pumped from the rollers to overhead holding tanks.
7-A/7-B - There is one of these overhead holding tanks for each cooking vat (a total of 3). Raw cane juice was piped from the rolling mill into these tanks to await cooking.
8-A/8-B/8-C - The raw cane juice was cooked in 3 massive vats, each measuring almost 30' long x 4' wide x 16" deep. The juice entered the vat's north end, circled to the south end where it passed over the burners, and exited the other side of the north end as finished syrup.
This metal gate separated the juice that was still cooking from the finished syrup. As the juice cooked into syrup, the gate was raised and the fresh syrup was moved into the smaller holding tank, where it was drained through the pipe and valve on the right.
Fire from these large natural gas burners once heated the cooking vats used to boil sorghum juice into syrup. They are each 4" in diameter and are fed from a massive supply line. Flames shot straight from these burners under the massive cooking vats inside a brick enclosure.
Heat exited the brick enclosure that supported the cooking vats through brick and sheet metal chimneys on the opposite end from the burners. The sheet metal chimneys have fallen over through the years.
