Edward H. Cunningham's Sorghum Experiment in 1888

 

Edward H. Cunningham owned the town of Sugar Land in the late 19th century.  It wasn't much of a town because sugar refining was a very seasonal business.  Cane harvesting usually began in October and ended about 3 or 4 months later.  The rest of the year, the mill and refinery sat idle.

Cunningham was farsighted -- he knew he could make lots of money if he could extend the production cycle, ideally, year-round.

There is much more to the story, but I've been reading the 1888 Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, an industry weekly that also covered Texas.  As you can see from the top half of the front page, Cunningham was an owner of the paper.  (His name is listed among the stockholders in the left-hand column.  There are numerous articles about Sugar Land in the 1888 editions.)
  

  
This edition, published 125 years ago, contained the following article, which explained Cunningham's experimentation with sorghum as an alternative source of raw sugar.  I think its growing cycle does not coincide with sugar cane's, so it could have provided a lucrative supplemental source of raw sugar. 

You'll see refiners in Louisiana had already experimented with sorghum, but due to a controversy in reporting the results, the sugar industry was closely following Cunningham's large-scale experiment.  

The experiment did not prove successful -- I assume the engineering needed to extract sugar from sorghum was different from that needed to process sugar cane.   Essentially, a refiner would need two refineries to make it work, and that was probably economically unfeasible.  I'll continue reading to see if they report the results of Cunningham's sorghum experiment.