#clewiston florida

[thegikitiki]

Owe Your Soul to the Company Store...

   Grocery Shopping, U.S. Sugar Corp., Clewiston Florida, 1940s

[michael-massa-micon]

America’s Sweetest Town - January 2021 Clewiston, Florida, calls itself “America’s Sweetest Town” because of all of the sugar cane raised and refined into sugar there. Part of the harvesting process still involves burning off the sugar cane fields. It only takes a short while to burn the leaves, debris, and various pests out of a sugar cane field so the harvest machines can start through. But during that short burn, thick, dark, sweet smoke curls up into the sky. I was on my way into Clewiston when I saw this field-burn smoke. The dark smoke curled north while the white steam from the refinery process curled south. The juxtaposition of the field smoke and the sugar mill steam was just too good an image to pass up. I pulled my car over onto the shoulder and took this image. While I was out of my car, a sugar train passed the highway (image two). US Sugar owns so many acres of ground surrounding Clewiston that there is actually a railroad line– owned by the company– which reaches out into the fields so that the harvest can be brought more efficiently to the sugar mill. There are also many, many sugar trucks on the highway bringing in the harvest from fields that the train doesn’t reach, but the slow-moving sugar trains still brings tons of cane into the mill for processing. MWM