Freewoods Farm provides volunteers a history lesson by doing

Geneva Smalls sits surrounded by a small pile of sugarcane. She reaches in and grabs a stalk in her left hand, her right holding the knife that she expertly wields to cut the leaf stalk, leaving a 6-foot naked shoot. She talks quietly to a novice as she works, her hands flying.

“This is how we did it when I was growing up,” she recalls. “I grew up on a farm.”

Smalls is one of the volunteers at Freewoods Farm, a working farm on Freewoods Road in the Burgess Community that hearkens back to the days after slavery, when the freed slaves left the plantations with only the clothes on their backs.

Although they were promised 40 acres and a mule, few of the former slaves saw either.

At Freewoods Farm, however, it’s a different story.

There, on 40 acres, two mules work the land, six hogs grow large in their pen and chickens free roam the acreage.

It’s all in keeping with the farm’s mission, to teach what life was like for African Americans from Emancipation to about 1900.

“People learn by doing,” says O’Neal Smalls, chairman of the Freewoods Foundation who has peeled off his academic robes – he is to work the farm, stirring the sugarcane juice in his great-grandmother’s pot and transport it to the farm to make cane syrup, which is available for purchase at $6 a pint, $10 a quart. “It’s important to teach children how to work. It’s not an innate skill.”

To that end, for the next week or so, the farm volunteers and the staff will be making syrup starting at 8 a.m. Monday. People interested in helping can call the farm at 843-650- 9139 or 843-650-2064 for the schedule.

The cane, grown on the farm, is harvested, stripped and run through the juicer as one of the mules makes its way in a circle to squeeze the juice from the pulp., Then the juice is carried in buckets to the pit, where it’s boiled, skimmed and turned into syrup.

O’Neal Smalls skims the impurities from the syrup, keeps an eye on the fire in the pit below and waits for that moment that the juice thickens into syrup. It’s transferred into Mason jars for sale.

While the staff and volunteers are concentrating on syrup now, that’s by no means the only crop growing on the farm. Once the syrup making is done, peanuts still need to be picked and roasted and sweet potatoes are on the sale list.

The greens suffered from Hurricane Matthew, O’Neal Smalls said, so collards may be a bit late this season.

Because the farm is a historical entity, workers follow the same methods used by their parents and grandparents. The plowing is done by mule, picking by hand. The crops are at the mercy of the weather to grow and the volunteers to harvest.

Money earned from crop sales go right back into the farm. In addition to syrup, the farm staff and volunteers are selling sweet potatoes and some greens. As the replanted collards, mustards and greens grow, they also will be available. Call the farm to buy any of the crops or to check for availability.

One other change is in store this year. Because Emancipation Day – Jan. 1 – is a Sunday, the annual celebration at the farm will not be held this year, O’Neal Smalls said.

This story was originally published November 27, 2016 at 7:24 PM with the headline "Freewoods Farm provides volunteers a history lesson by doing."