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Show Sugar Industry in South Was Born in Old Kettle BATON ROUGE, LA. An old iron kettle, blackened by the many fires over which it has hung in the past 200 years, rests on the campus of Louisiana State university as a memorial to the man who made Louisiana's sugar industry possible. Indigo was the money crop when the French planter aristocracy owned plantations that stretched for miles along the bayous and lakes of southern Louisiana at the end of the Eighteenth century. Jean Etienne de Bore was no exception. De Bore was born in 'the Illinois section of the Louisiana Purchase territory. At the age of four he was taken to France by his parents where he received his education and later married into large colonial holdings. He returned to New Orleans with his wife about the time of the French revolution and established his plantation on what now is a part of Audubon park near the city limits. There he engaged in the planting of indigo. When a blight, however, wiped out the indigo crops, De Bore and the other planters were faced with bankruptcy. Many planters already had tried to granulate sugar from cane juice, but their experiments failed time after time. De Bore, overriding the protests of his wife, decided to have a fling at the sugar business. |