Stripping sorghum cane leaves and making sorghum

One job we worked at when we were children was on my daddy's farm. We grew sorghum cane, the juice was used to make sorghum syrup. Sorghum cane looks a lot like cornstalks. Not quite as large around as cornstalks are but they have the overall general appearance of cornstalks. After the sorghum cane has reached its maturity stage, my dad would take a sharp knife and cut the heads off. The head grew on the top of the stalk and was covered with hundreds of seeds. The seeds could be used as chicken feed or two plant next year's crop of sorghum cane. It was the stalks that we wanted to use for making sorghum syrup. The sorghum cane stalks were filled with a juice which was used in making sorghum syrup.

From a small plank my dad would make what looked like a hand sword made out of wood with one side sharp and the handle on the other end. With this wood sword we children would attack the stalks in the field and cut the leaves from the stalk. These lease we would bundle up for feed, to feed the cows. This left the stock standing bear in the field. With a team of horses pulling a wagon we would go through the fields cutting the stalks off at the ground and loading them onto the wagon. When the wagon was full of sorghum stalks we would haul the stalks over to a mill that my mother's uncle had.

I called it a mill but it was more like a press. There were three large rollers standing vertically on the end attached to the top was a long pole. This press was attached to large timbers and the press itself weighed probably close to 500 pounds. This long pole was about 20 feet long and was attached to the mill with about 5 feet sticking out on one end and 15 feet on the other end. To the 15 foot into the pole we hooked a single tree pulled by a mule or a horse. The animal would walk in a circle pulling the pole thus turning the rollers of the mill. A man would set next to the press feeding the stalks into the press thus abstracting the juice from the stalks. This juice ran out into a number two wash tub. This juice would be carried to the cooking vat. 

The cooking vat was about 3 feet wide and 10 feet long. It was placed upon a brick fireplace. A wood fire was built under the cooking vat. The vat itself was about 8 inches deep and divided by many metal walls with doors that could be closed or open. Starting on one end of the vat these metal doors alternated sides going to the end of vat. You would start cooking the sorghum juice pouring in on one side of the vat and as it cooked you would move it through the doors to the other end of the vat. You put the raw juice on one end and took the sorghum syrup out the other end. As the sorghum cooked a foam would be on top of the juice. This was a sticky foam and us kids would take a sorghum stick and collect the foam and eat it. We would collect the sticky foam on a stick much like the man at the county fair does when he collects cotton candy on a stick. We were walking in high cotton when we ate this stuff.

The following paragraph I took from Google where someone explains the process I was talking about above.

The evaporator was partitioned at regular intervals throughout its length with gates or openings on every partition, alternated to control the flow of juice as it meandered through the channels to the finishing compartment, where it was completed and drawn off into containers ready for

market or home consumption.  The cooking vats were placed over a furnace and

fired by wood.