While many attractions closed due to COVID-19, this museum is luring people - with syrup?
As sugar water spilled out of the sugar cane grinder, Brenda Nobles gazed over Conway’s Living History Farm, remembering what it was like when her own family ground sugar cane to make syrup decades earlier.
“I’ve lived all my life here in Horry County,” she said. “I can remember all this, my grandparents did all this.”
Gesturing to one of the farmhouses on the property, Nobles added, “I lived in a house like that when I was a little girl.”
With a knowing smile, Nobles wouldn’t say if she missed those days, decades ago, but said, “it would be neat if everybody had to live like that. Everybody was close, but they wouldn’t have a TV to sit in front of. Kids with electronics.”
Nobles and her 6-year-old granddaughter, Rynleigh, happened to be visiting the LW. Paul Living History Farm, a branch of the Horry County Museum, Tuesday afternoon when the staff was getting ready for their annual syrup-making event that coming weekend.
“(Rynleigh) likes it out here, she said she could live like this,’” Nobles said with a laugh.
The farm was the perfect afternoon getaway for the pair. Stuck at home with remote learning, Rynleigh wanted to get out and see the Living History Farm, which she’d been to before. The almost entirely outdoor environment — barren of any other visitors that day — made it as safe as one might a museum can be during the COVID-19 pandemic.
As the Nobles looked on, museum director Walter Hill and staff members Marian Calder and Hillary Winburn shoved mounds of sugar cane into a grinder, pulling out the sugar water inside that would later be boiled down into syrup.
Eventually, after hours of grinding, they would have 60 gallons of sugar water, which would over six hours the next day boil down into six gallons of syrup. It’s not enough for mass consumption, but South Carolina never grew sugar cane for mass consumption really, Hill said.
The climate is good for a short sugar cane growing season, good enough for families to make syrup to last them several months, but not enough to sell large quantities.
“For sugar cane to truly grow for its 15 month growing season, you had to have an environment where you don’t have a freeze, a killing frost like we had last night,” Hill said, referencing the cold front that hit Myrtle Beach this week. “So, it wasn’t economically feasible to try to grow it as a cash crop ... But because we do get good summer growth here and we can get some use, it made sense for farmers around here (to grow sugar cane) for home consumption and just for domestic use.”
Well-suited for a pandemic
Small batches, and small events, is what the L.W. Living History Farm has become good at during the coronavirus pandemic.
“We started to experiment with a little bit shorter, smaller events to see if the public felt comfortable coming out and visiting with us,” Hill said. “And they did.”
With free admission, the farm wasn’t worried about getting visitors to come by so they can keep running. They were set. The biggest issue is getting enough volunteers to help manage their events.
“I don’t want to sit here and paint a picture through rose-colored glass, say, oh, ‘nothing is nothing.’ If we had to be selling tickets, there’s a period down where we would have been hurting like everybody else, probably worse than most other people,” Hill said. “But fortunately for us, we’ve been able to get back into a position that the public is comfortable with.”
But the pandemic, keeping people indoors, helped with that as well. While they might not always be able to get as many volunteers as they used to, Hill said, they also don’t have as big of groups.
In the past, many of the farm’s visitors came in the form of school groups. Kids would crowd onto buses and teachers would corral them into the gates, not unlike trying to herd the chickens that also lived on the farm.
Schools don’t visit anymore. The children still come, however, having convinced their parents to take them to the farm where they’d gone on field trips in the past.
“With our events shorter and our exterior location here we’re seeing a lot more people come to the site, the use site as an outside safe place to be,” Hill said. “So, in other words, for 10 years it was unheard of to think of somebody going to McDonald’s and coming out here to the farm and sitting on a picnic table. That happens now. Real people come here, drive out here, because it’s just plain picnic area out in the open.”
Visitors, often in the form of families these days, get to meet and learn about chickens, a Daisy the cow, a few pigs and a mule named Minnie. The farm does blacksmithing demonstrations, and in the coming weeks has a small Christmas event planned and more to come next year.
The sugar the farm’s staff made that day will become the samples attendees can try to the farm’s annual Syrup Day this Saturday.
Sugar cane isn’t just made by people, though. Minnie also helps by pulling a harness tied to a log that turns the sugar cane grinder.
“What I what I love is that with these smaller things and us being active and doing stuff, we’re seeing people who never came before and, you know, whether they didn’t know existed or what we were doing was off the radar or they had so many other options,” Hill said.
Syrup Day runs from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 21, at the L.W. Living History Farm on 2279 Harris Short Cut Road, Conway, S.C.
This story was originally published November 19, 2020 at 12:13 PM.
