Outline

Documenting Louisiana Sugar has a long history as a research project. As a graduate student at LSU in the late 1990s, Follett began working with the Champomier crop statements and saw the potential for digitizing the sugar records. A meeting with Dr. Rick Halpern, then of University College London, at LSU's Hill Memorial Library in the spring of 1997 began a decade long research partnership and one committed to bringing the sugar statements to public access. As stated elsewhere on this website, the annual sugar records are unique in detail and as a time series on agricultural production. Nothing quite so detailed as the Champomier and Bouchereau reports exist for any other crop in southern plantation agriculture or in most areas of U.S. nineteenth-century farming. Scholars had long known about and used the Champomier and Bouchereau reports for their published scholarship, but until the advent of modern computing, collating and editing the sugar reports was simply impracticable. With support of a small grant from the National University of Ireland, Galway where Follett worked, the Royal Irish Academy, and University College London, Follett and Halpern initiated a pilot project in the summer of 1999 to explore the possibility of creating a searchable database that drew upon the Champomier reports. In 2003, Follett and Halpern (now at the Universities of Sussex and Toronto respectively) received major research grants (valued at $220,000) from the UK and Canadian governments (via the AHRC in Britain and the SSHRC in Canada) to assemble a publicly available and searchable database of the annual sugar statements, 1845-1917 plus related census materials. We were also tasked with publishing a series of articles related to the DLS project and delivering conference papers. The final outputs of the project include two databases with track, query, and search functions; one co-authored and four single-authored articles by Follett; eleven conference papers drawing upon DLS materials delivered by Follett, two more scheduled for 08-09 (6 in the USA, 4 in the UK, 1 in Germany, 1 in India, 1 in China).

Data Entry

Following receipt of AHRC/SSHRC grants, we employed data technicians (Alison Bambridge plus several students at Sussex; a team of students at Toronto) to enter the crop records and to transcribe the manuscript census returns (microfilm) into standardized templates on MS Excel spreadsheets. Appropriate crop data was assigned to the separate data entry teams though Sussex undertook to lead on the census materials. Despite acquiring a digital microfilm scanner (Canon MF300), the task of entering the U.S. census materials proved to be extremely problematic and extraordinarily time-consuming for the project team. In the first instance, we began census entry work on five key parishes, entering the data into standardized Excel spreadsheets. After a year of laborious work on the census materials, we ultimately decided to focus our attention solely on these five parishes (Iberville, St. James, Rapides, Terrebonne, St. Mary). Despite the enormity of the data (over 100,000 separate lines of data in the sugar reports alone), we successfully met all project milestones for 2004 and 2005. By spring 2006, all data entry had been completed.

Database Design

In March 2006, Alison Bambridge began that task of assembling a database on MS Access (initially for the five 'key' parishes) with most of the query and search functions we sought for the crop and census materials. The technical problems confronted were substantial; first, matching the crop data to the corresponding census entry proved problematic. After painstaking work, however, Bambridge included query functions that enabled users to examine both "matched" record sets. Second, having created the census/crop database (five parishes) we decided that it would be easier to develop a second stand-alone database for all crop data (all parishes 1844-1917), rather than merge the two databases. The two databases were largely completed in design stage by December 2006. During 2007, the project team at Sussex checked all the original data sheets for accuracy, against the primary reports, and prepared the completed and cleaned Excel spreadsheets for upload. This was completed in January 2008. Since that date, we have been engaged in final data upload, drill-down testing, and improving the search and query functionality of the databases. To ensure public availability, we assembled this project website where users can download the database files (in read-only format, thus protecting the veracity of the original data). The scale and duration of this research project has been lengthy and extensive, but DLS project ultimately permits users to rifle through the hundred thousand data entries that Champomier and Bouchereau filed a century ago and examine the social and economic history of the American South's most industrialized and capital intensive plantation regime.