The Erath Sugar Company

A mill is only half of the sugar economy. The Erath mill bought cane from local farmers and was the leading buyer from 1943 until it closed in the 1970s. Growers such as the Domingues family, who began farming at Erath in 1918, worked land they partly owned and partly sharecropped. Reista Domingues used mules for field work, and the family loaded cane by hand until a truck-powered winch and derrick took over the lifting. At harvest, neighbors shared machinery.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 8.1 mi
  A 170-acre garden and wildfowl refuge on a Gulf Coast salt dome, founded by Edward Avery McIlhenny, on an island that was a Marsh sugar plantation worked by enslaved people before Tabasco and the 1862 salt works.
• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 14 mi
  A National Trust site in New Iberia built 1831 to 1834 for sugar planters David and Mary Weeks, now interpreted around the 1,112 people the Weeks family enslaved, among them Charity Polk, Amos, Patty, Isaac and Louisa.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 17 mi
  The Mother Church of the Acadians, founded in 1765 on St. Martin Square in St. Martinville, with a late 1870s Lourdes grotto and, a block away, the Evangeline Oak on Bayou Teche.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 17 mi
  A museum in the St. Martinville Cultural Heritage Center on the arrival of Africans in Southwest Louisiana, slavery, the free people of color and Reconstruction, with the fourteen-panel exhibit The Shackles of Memory.

More markers nearby

• Private Farrell J. Vice — steps away
• First Lt. Brandon R. Dronet — steps away
• The 1964 Fall of the Erath Water Tower — steps away
• Acadian Prairie Settlement — 1.0 mi