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The Southern Sugar Company.
New York: Southern Sugar Co., 1927. Oblong 8vo (9” x 12”), dark brown pebbled leather, gilt title on front cover. 23 silver print photographs, 8” x 10”, mounted on linen, with typed descriptions on versos of mounts. CONDITION: Album very good, light wear to extremities, leather slightly chipped at food of spine; images very good+, strong tonality. An unrecorded promotional photo album comprising twenty-three images showing the operations and workers of the short-lived Southern Sugar Co. of Clewiston and Canal Point, Florida. The subjects represented include workers in the company cane fields (including many African American laborers); a portrait of owner and President Bror Dahlberg; fields of sugar cane near Clewiston on the bank of Lake Okeechobee; development in the Clewiston community (a hotel, housing, commercial buildings, and a school house); the company mill at Canal Point (capable of producing 400 tons of cane daily); the cane seedling field of the USDA; B. A. Bourne in a company laboratory (Bourne served as the company’s assistant pathologist and had experience in the Puerto Rican sugar industry); various strains of sugar cane being raised for seed on the company plantation near Canal Point; and the lock and spillway from Lake Okeechobee to West Palm Beach canal (described on the verso as “one of the great series of inland waterways that both irrigate and drain this company’s properties with a modern and complete system of water control”). Born in Sweden, Bror G. Dahlberg (1881–1954) was serving as President of both the Celotex Co. of Chicago and the South Coast Co. in New Orleans when he organized the Southern Sugar Co. in Florida in 1925. According to The Story of the Southern Sugar Company, a promotional pamphlet published in January of 1929, the company joined Dahlberg’s group of “closely related enterprises known as the Dahlberg Sugar Cane Industries” (p. 3). In 1927, Southern Sugar purchased a sugar mill from the struggling operations of the Pennsylvania Sugar Co., located west of Miami, Florida, and moved it to Clewiston. The decline in sugar cane production in Louisiana, caused by cane mosaic disease, affected both the South Coast Co. and the Celotex Co., which manufactured insulating boards out of spent cane plant fibers (known as bagasse) at Dahlberg’s plant in Marerro, Louisiana. Encouraged by an optimistic report published by consulting engineers Smith & Ames in 1925 as well as a USDA field study of new varieties of cane seedlings in Florida, Dahlberg hoped to develop the area around Clewiston into a major sugar producing industry by controlling water flow and draining the lands around Lake Okeechobee. John Heitmann notes that by 1926 Dahlberg’s company was in the midst of clearing nearly 35,000 acres for cultivation. Despite financial demands from hurricanes and flooding, start-up costs, soil enrichment, drainage, equipment, and labor, Dahlberg continued to expand. In 1929 he opened the Clewiston Sugar House, which was capable of processing 1500 tons of sugar cane a day and had “future expansion built into the design” (“American Food”). By 1930, however—following the stock market crash—the company was in receivership due to the decline of sugar prices, crop losses caused by flooding, and the difficulty of sourcing new capital. Businessman Charles Stewart Mott—a co-founder of General Motors—purchased the assets in 1931, renaming it the United States Sugar Co., and eventually transformed it into a profitable enterprise. No holdings recorded in OCLC, nor do Google searches locate any examples. A rich and optimistic photographic presentation of this newly-formed Florida sugar company just two years before the Great Crash of 1929. REFERENCES: Heitmann, John. “The Beginnings of Big Sugar in Florida, 1920-1945,” Florida Hist. Quarterly Vol. 77, No. 1 (1998); Southern Sugar Company. The Story of the Southern Sugar Company (New York, 1929); “American Food for American Families” at US Sugar online; “Florida Sugar Industry” at Jaime Montilla online.
Item #9028
Price: $2,250.00
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