Herrington Mills has annual open house

Published 5:00 am Sunday, December 7, 2014

    In 1989, Robert Herrington decided it was time.

    The Herrington Mill had been silent since the 1960s. The mill, in one way or another, had operated for more than 70 years before it closed.

    “I had always wanted to try to get it going again,” Herrington said. “I thought ‘I better do this while I have someone around who knows how to get it going.’

    “I had a great-uncle, Buddy, who was my cook for a while and Aunt Mamie (who had fired the furnace in the ’40s) was still living. I cook a lot and I’ve always made jelly and done those things, but it’s on a whole lot bigger scale. But there’s no way to know unless you really just do it.”

    The original mill was located on the property of Emma and Lewis Burnett.

    “My understanding is that their son, Victor, was the cook at that time,” Herrington said. “I don’t know how long it was idle between those times, but sometime in the ’30s, another son, Lavell ‘Doc’ and his wife, Mrs. Mamie Burnett, and my grandparents, Wesley and Janie Herrington, were good friends.”

     In the ’40s, the Burnetts moved to Jackson to work at the state hospital.

    “They moved the mill up to our house and my grandmother’s brother, Ervin Edwards, was the cook and my papaw fired,” Herrington said.

    Syrup is made by grinding the juice from cane and heating it in a pan that is 9 1/2 feet long, 38 inches wide and has 8-inch channels for the juice to flow through.

    “The fire is so hot, it starts as juice on one end and ends up as syrup on the other,” Herrington said.

    Since 1990, he has opened the mill to visitors for one day each year and served breakfast: biscuits, bacon and sausage.

    This year, the mill was open on Nov. 29. Herrington began the day grinding cane at 7:30 a.m. and began cooking at 9.

    “I take a big pan of biscuits and sausage to eat and to give out, and it’s just a time to visit, to buy syrup and eat and hang out,” he said. “We try to do it once a year and get the word out.”

    By the time the cooking was done at 2:30 p.m., 75 people had been at the mill, which had produced 60 jars of syrup in addition to 60 jars made earlier in the week.

    Since re-opening the mill 25 years ago, Herrington has worked with his aunt and uncle, both parents and step-father. His father, Willis Herrington, moved back to Meridian from Houston, Texas, in 2009, and keeps up the one-fourth-acre plot the cane is grown on.  

    “It’s really been a family thing,” Herrington said. “(Daddy) moved back here because his health wasn’t all that good and his wife died. I guess we kind of needed each other. He and some neighbors and cousins pretty much do that plowing, cutting and cultivating of the cane the last few years.”