To use the sugar loaves, which were rock hard, required wield ing implements including steel nippers and hammers to break the sugar into smaller chunks. Consumers also could buy s ingle- and double-refined “ loaf ” sugar, formed in earthenware cones at sugar refineries by successive rounds of boiling and evaporation. The coarsest and least expensive was raw brown muscavado, a product left over after draining off molasses during the first stage of refining.

Philadelphia consumers had access to a wide range of sugar products. Philadelphia’s status as a center of transatlantic commerce and the availability of laborers-including European immigrants, free Blacks, and enslaved people-made it a desirable location for sugar refining. This raw sugar was next packed into wooden casks and transported to cities such as Philadelphia, where it was refined-a labor-intensive process of cooling and heating the sugar repeatedly to remove impurities and produce a finer, whiter sugar. The liquid was then heated to evaporate liquid and concentrate the sucrose. Extracting the sugary juice of the cane before it spoiled required the cane to be immediately crushed or run through a roller mill. At the time, most sugar plantations were located in the Caribbean, where enslaved Africans worked under brutal conditions to harvest tough sugar cane stalks with sharp blades.

The type of sugar consumed and refined in early Philadelphia was extracted from s ugar cane, a plant that grows only in tropical and subtropical zones. Philadelphia’s early dominance as a principal seaport gave the city ready access to sugar. Philadelphians who purchased single- and double-refined sugar loaves used sugar nippers, like those pictured here, to cut small pieces of sugar from the loaf. It s legacy briefly revived in 2010 with the naming of the SugarHouse Casino, but only until rebranding changed the name to Rivers Casino Philadelphia in 2019. After acquisition by the National Sugar Refining Company in 1947, the Penn Sugar refinery closed in 1984. The rise of national sugar conglomerates and increasing production of sugar extracted from sugar beets proved to be insurmountable challenges, however. Although the city lost its dominance of the industry to New York by the end of the eighteenth century, local s ugar refining continued to expand, particularly under the Pennsylvania Sugar Refining Company (“Penn Sugar”). Philadelphia, the Place that Loves You Backį ueled by extensive trade with sugar islands in the Caribbean, Philadelphia became a leading center of sugar refining in colonial America.

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