Bessemer deacon, family continue long heritage of syrup making

It’s annual syrup-making day at David Holland’s family land in Bibb County Oct. 21, and he’s in his usual place at the center of the long copper pan. With a dipper, he skims impurities off the top of the sorghum juice as it bubbles, cooks and becomes syrup — the same way it has for decades.

“Dad used to sit over there,” he said, gesturing to a bench on the other side of the steaming pan. Even after his father, Huron, couldn’t cook the syrup himself anymore, the syrup patriarch never stopped giving his son instructions from where he sat and watched until he died in 1997, said Holland, a member and deacon of Loveless Park Baptist Church, Bessemer. “When he died, people asked, ‘Will your syrup still taste like your dad’s?’ I said, ‘Since I’ve been making his for the last 10 or 12 years, it probably will taste nearly the same.’”

Things have changed a little since his grandfather started making syrup decades ago — for example, the mule that once powered a manual cane mill has been replaced with a motorized machine and pumps have been added to move the juice.

But it’s still a family affair — on syrup day, his son Todd and brother Dalton feed cane into the mill for hours while David Holland mans the cooking surface in the shed just down the hill. His brother Dover tends the fire in the furnace beneath the pan, and his wife, Sharon, and son, Will Nahrgang, bottle the finished product and label jars.

And everyone takes a turn at trying to talk the rookies, mainly the children, into tasting the raw juice, a thick, green substance that looks nothing like the syrup it’s going to become — and tastes nothing like it either. The reaction when the bitter liquid meets a gullible person never seems to get old — it’s always good for a laugh.

Eventually the Holland sisters, hymnals in hand, will circle around the men, singing in harmony. The men join in but David Holland never takes his eyes off the bubbling juice. With the dipper, he moves it down the pan and back up again until his eye tells him it’s perfect.

“It’s definitely a science,” Nahrgang said.

And it’s a well-preserved art that folks from the community and even from miles away come each year to watch — and sample on a biscuit.