Guadeloupe was discovered by Christopher Columbus during his second voyage in 1493.  It is an archipelago of nine island of which six are inhabited; Basse-Terre, Grande-Terre, Marie-Galante, La Désirade and two Îles des Saintes. Though the Spaniards settled the island, they had little interest in it, so in June 1635 Charles Liénard de L’Olive and Jean Du Plessis d’Ossonville settled the island on behalf of France. The two did not get along well, so they settled a short distance apart. After Du Plessis death just a few months after arrival in December 1635, Liénart de l'Olive, now the sole leader, left the initial northern settlement where famine and disease had decimated the new settlers, for a new one in southern Basse-Terre where he built Fort Olive on the site that would become Vieux-Fort.

The British briefly occupied the island between 1759 and 1763 when it was recaptured by the French. During the Invasion of Guadeloupe in April 1794, the British captured Guadeloupe but could hold it for only until December of that year when the French regained control. Great Britain again captured Guadeloupe from France in 1810 but in 1813 Britain ceded the island to Swedish Crown Prince Charles XIV John, also known as Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte to compensate him for lost lands in France and to secure Sweden's military alliance against Napoleon. Following the defeat of Napoleon and the Second Treaty of Paris and the Congress of Vienna, Sweden ceded Guadeloupe back to France in 1815 permanently.

On January 28, 1654, the Dutch finally lost control of Recife and Dutch Brazil, leaving to the Portuguese their colony of Brazil.  The farming of sugarcane in Guadeloupe began with the arrival of Dutch Jews forced to flee Brazil after the Portuguese re-conquest. They knew how to process sugar cane and taught it to the French, who then established their own sugar plantations.  The sugar industry in Guadeloupe at the time also benefited from the influence of Jean-Baptiste Labat aka Père Labat (1663-1738), a Dominican missionary monk, botanist, explorer, ethnographer and strong leader who played a significant role in the early French colonization and influence in the Caribbean. He is known for recounting his 17th Century Antillean adventures in two books titled Nouveau Voyage aux iles de l'Amerique and Voyage du Chevalier Demarchais en Guinee, iles voisines, et a Cayenne, fait en 1725, 1726, et 1727.    Père Labat lived in Guadeloupe between 1694 and 1705 and is known for his writings about the islands, including food and cultural practices. He is also associated with the rum industry, having been recognized as an early distiller who established the first sugar refinery in Guadeloupe, thereby laying the foundation for the economic prosperity that followed.  In 1703 he organized the island’s African slaves to fight against the English Siege of Guadeloupe when he supposedly and personally fired several cannon shots.

In Marie-Galante, sugarcane was and is the most widespread crop and the major source of income and employment. It is known as the “Island of the 100 Mills” as there were once one hundred six windmills on the island, the first built in 1664. The history of Guadeloupe’s sugar industry is rich for such a small territory, and is also extensive dating back to the 18th Century. Today only two sugar factories are in operation in all of Guadeloupe, Grand-Anse in Marie-Galente and Gardel in Grande-Terre to which a page for each is dedicated. However, in addition to Gardel and Grand Anse, the following now closed four sugar factories also highlight the history of sugar production in Guadeloupe.

• Roussel-Trianon Plantation - By the early 18th Century, Guadeloupe and the other French Colonies in the Caribbean of Saint Domingue and Martinique, accounted for the majority of the France’s overseas profits.  Guadeloupe was the first of the French colonies to make the shift to a sugar monoculture.  One of the oldest surviving plantations in Gaudeloupe is the Roussel-Trianon Plantation in Marie-Galante.  From 1720s to the 1740s, its owner was Nicolas Bonhomme, a Creole native of Marie-Galante.  It was then successively bought and sold by the Fossecave and Roussel families.  As it was customary then, the Roussel-Trianon Plantation used wind power to move its mill.  The windmill at the Roussel-Trianon Plantation is one of the most impressive of its kind on the island.  The plantation prospered in and around the revolutionary period, and moved progressively from wind to steam power from 1845 onward.  In 1860, Victor Roussel, the owner of Trianon Plantation, became the first man in Guadeloupe to introduce Derosne & Cail triple-effect machinery for boiling operations.  The Roussel-Trianon Plantation is part of the Slave Route-Traces of Memory organized by the Conseil Général of Guadeloupe. Remains of the plantation are located at the site where the former Trianon sugar factory was established in 1669 with an animal-powered mill. l, built the Manor House The sugar factory was then equipped with a windmill (from the year 1800). The factory closed in 1874. The Manor House built at the end of the 18th century by its then owner Paul Botreau Rousse has been demolished but ruins of the sugar factory, the chimney and the stone masonry windmill still stand today.

• Beauport Sugar Factory - In 1864, industrialist Jean François Cail and Creole factory worker Ernest Souques (1831-1908) joined forces to create the Société de la Sucrerie Beauport of which Souques was manager.  The Beauport Plantation and sugar factory was established in 1788 by Ernest Souques' father, Doctor Armand Souques in Port-Louis.  Upon his death, it became the property of his eight children.  On December 30, 1864 the Souques heirs deeded a majority interest in the factory and the land to the Société J-F Cail & Co., probably in payment for debt related sugar factory machinery acquired from Cail.  Its name changed to Société Sucrière de Port-Louis in 1875 while managed by Société Souques-Cail & Co.  In 1901 it was acquired by Fernand Clerc of Martinique from Crédit Foncier who had foreclosed on it.  On August 4, 1908, the factory and the properties were sold by Clerc to the Société Anonyme des Usines de Beauport (SAUB) headquartered in Bordeaux.  In 1970 (SAUB) filed for judicial administration and in 1981 then part of the Grands Moulins de Paris, announced the cessation of its operations in Guadeloupe and filed for bankruptcy and a court-appointed administrator was assigned. Public authorities then asked Huygues-Despointes, a private group with local capital to manage the finances for one year and Beauport S.A. was organized to replace SAUB and entrusted with the assets of SAUB's business through a lease-management agreement for a period of twenty-one months and the understanding that Beauport S.A. would subsequently be transformed into a semi-public company. But after losses of FF2 million in 1982 Beauport S.A. withdrew and ceased its activities. Then in 1982 the General Council of Guadeloupe decided to replace Beauport S.A. with SOSUMAG in the management of the sugar refinery which was old and in very poor condition. Thus SOSUMAG became responsible for managing two sugar mills: one owned outright (Grand'Anse) and the other leased (Beauport). In 1989 the Beauport Sugar Factory suffered devastating damage caused by the path of Hurricane Hugo. Unable to financially recover or rebuild from the hurricane's destruction, the factory officially capitulated and permanently shut down in July 1990. The local government purchased the abandoned site in 1991 and transformed it into the cultural heritage museum, Beauport-Pays de la Canne, which opened to the public in 2004.

• Usine Darboussier - On October 16, 1771 a gentleman named Dulubre sold land to Jean Darboussier ( -1803), a French merchant and smuggler who came from an old family from Montbazin, France and settled in Guadeloupe during the 18th century and made a fortune in trade.  By 1772 Darboussier had established there a “vinegary”, or an alcohol distillery and in 1781 acquired additional adjoining lands. On February 18, 1805 Darboussier's son and only heir, after an agreement with his step-mother, sold the distillery to Frenchman Silvestre Lombard (1748-1808).   On August 27, 1807 Lombard acquired from Léonard Tabanon property previously also owned by Darboussier which he called Bellevue, comprised of approximately seven hectares and several houses and buildings by the sea in Pointe-à-Pitre. Silvestre Lombard (1748-1808) was born in Séméac, France to a wealthy family, he arrived in Pointe-à-Pitre sometime between 1767 and 1776 and soon became a very successful merchant.  In 1784 at the age of thirty six, he married sixteen year old Magdalaine Cleaveau (1769-1834) who also belonged to a wealthy family from Berry, France.  Upon Silvestre’s death, Magdalaine and two daughters, Marie Anne Adélaide Lombard (1784-1824) and Louise Adélaide Lombard (1789-1871) inherited the properties in Pointe-à-Pitre which were kept in the family until 1867. Having been in the sugar business together and wanting to expand, on September 17, 1867 Jean François Cail (1804-1871) and Ernest Souques acquired the Darboussier family property for 200,000 FF and that same year established the Société Agricole et Industrielle de la Pointe-à-Pitre. Between 1867 and 1869 they built the sugar factory and a goods warehouse on the docks.  When Cail died in 1871, Souques who had already been the manager since its creation, found himself alone in charge of the factory.  Darboussier was the biggest sugar factory in the West Indies and with a thousand workers was the largest employer in Guadeloupe, in the 1880s it became one of the first central sugar mills in the West Indies. For more than one hundred years, from 1870 to 1980, it was the economic heart of Guadeloupe and Marie-Galante. Ca. 1880 the sugar factory’s director's residence later known as Villa Souques-Pagès pictured below, was built at 9 Rue Nozières in Pointe-à-Pitre. It has housed the Saint-John-Perse Museum since its inauguration in 1987.  The property where the Darboussier sugar factory operated was for several years abandoned and partially destroyed.  Today, a cultural center on the memory of slavery, the Memorial ACTe is built on the site.

• Usine Sucrière Grosse-Montagne - In 1918, in the verdant countryside of Lamentin, Edouard Reimonenq established a sugar mill where, from 1925 to 1927, five thousand tons of sugarcane were crushed annually. On January 28, 1928, the Martinican entrepreneur Charles Simonnet purchased the property but in September of that same year the estate was destroyed by the Okeechobee Hurricane which caused widespread damage to the island. Simonnet rebuilt his estate and in 1934 built a distillery to produce both rhum agricole from sugarcane juice and industrial rum from molasses. In 1937, Grosse-Montagne produced 823,163 kilos of sugar and 1,779.86 hectoliters of rum. By 1939 the area under cultivation had increased to almost thirteen hundred acres from around three hundred acres in 1928. In 1952, Grosse-Montagne absorbed the Jaula factory and its plantation, which became the home of the Simonnet family. It then acquired the Sainte-Rose County Estate in 1973 and the Blanchet sugar factory in 1979. In 1983 Grosse Montagne was experiencing serious financial difficulties and submitted its case to the Interministerial Committee for Industrial Restructuring (CIRI) which concluded that with insufficient sugarcane production and despite the government's efforts, it was necessary to consolidate the industrial facilities. The factory closed in 1994.

Today there are ten rum distilleries in the Guadeloupe Islands and centuries-old traditions in distillation are still used to produce multi-awarded labels.  The two sugar factories in operation today, Grand Anse in Marie-Galante and the Gardel Sugar Factory in Grande-Terre, supply the sugarcane juice and molasses needed in the production of rum by these distilleries.

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[1] Rhum Vieux Agricole is aged an aged agricultural rum aged in oak barrels for several years giving it an amber color and a rich, complex flavor. Major brands are Montebello, Damoiseau, Bologne, Bielle and Père Labat.