Today was a very special day. We had family visiting with us and they wanted to go up to Muddy Pond and visit the Mennonite community there.

We did not know ahead of time but happened upon the cooking of the Muddy Pond Sorghum. We got there about 15 minutes before the cooking started and thought the whole process was so fascinating. First there is an outside stove that burns wood and it resembles an old time locomotive engine on a train. They get the stove really fired up and the raw juice from the sorghum is piped onto these metal trays and the steam from the stove is piped under the trays in pipes which make the sorghum boiling hot as it moves along.

As you can see in this picture, the steam is rising from the boiling hot sorghum as it is beginning to ooze along the metal trays.

It is so extremely hot and the steam is intensifying!

Really nice people work there and they are so willing to share their knowledge with you.

The sorghum thickens and turns darker in color as it cooks.

At the end of the cooking cycle the hot sorghum is pumped upward through pipelines by a small electric engine and it goes to an enclosed cooling tray and then over to a tank where there is a spigot and the finished product is then put into the pre-labeled jugs and jars to sell.

I thought back to my very first visit to Muddy Pond when I was about in the 7th or 8th grade and our family made a trip to the community one afternoon because Daddy was wanting to buy some rabbits. The community was much more primitive then and had no electricity or motor vehicles.

We found the man that had the rabbits for sale and he was handing them over to my Dad and he would say, A Buck, A Doe, A Buck, A Doe.

All of the sudden the man looked down and saw my legs as I had on a pair of fish net stockings and he asked my Dad privately what the purpose of those stockings were because he knew they couldn’t be for warmth. Anyway, we had a good laugh on a way back home that day over me and my fish net stockings.

Anyway, back to my adventure of today.

The Muddy Pond Sorghum mill starts making sorghum around labor day each year and does it each Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday through the end of October. As I said before, we just lucked up today as the heavy rains this morning and the forecast of upcoming cold weather this weekend caused the mill to decide to cook the sorghum today on a Monday when they usually are not open.

I would highly recommend that you visit the Muddy Pond community and see this process for yourself. I would love to go back and take my grandchildren and let them watch the whole thing from beginning to end.

The Sorghum Mill sells their sorghum locally and also in Dollywood and Cades Cove and several other places in Tennessee.

It was so nice to enjoy a quiet day out in nature and live a slower, more peaceful time with our family with us.