Sugar and The Port of Baltimore

By Mckenna Schmidl

Edited by Corey Cherenfant

Spring 2025

Cane sugar, Saccharum officinarum. By Franz Eugen Köhler.

(Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Sugar has helped shape Baltimore’s identity for more than 300 years. When established as a port by Maryland's government in 1706, Baltimore served as a port for exporting tobacco and importing other goods, specifically sugar. Legal records reflect sugar's import into Baltimore as early as 1712. In 1784, Garts and Leypold opened one of Baltimore’s first sugar refineries, part of a growing American sugar refining industry, and by the War of 1812, privateers were capturing British vessels laden with sugar bound for the city. Even then, the commodity symbolized wealth, trade, and community.

Sugarcane. (Wikimedia. Original photo by Jubair Bin Iqbal - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=123823322

Whether imported in peacetime or captured in war, in the early 19th century, the sugar arrived in hogsheads or chests having already been milled near its port of embarkation, but still in need of further refining after arriving in Baltimore. When sugar was imported to Baltimore in the 18th and 19th centuries, it had been milled. The Caribbean mills had crushed the sugar cane, extracted its juice, boiled the juice until sugar crystals were formed, and packed those crystals into hogsheads. When the chests and hogsheads of sugar arrived in Baltimore, their contents of sugar were refined to remove impurities and to create different products for consumer and later industrial use. That distinction between the receipt of milled sugar as an intermediate product and the shipment of refined sugar to distributors, retailers, and consumers is still true today.

Milled sugar crystals as they arrive at the Port of Baltimore by ship. An intermediate product, they are not yet fully refined for standardized consumer use. They still need to be refined to remove impurities and prepare them for a variety of uses and products. (Wikimedia Commons by R. Behar)

Each year, the Port of Baltimore receives shiploads of sugar and molasses that keep our refinery running nonstop. According to the ImportInfo database of imported trade items, in 2024 alone, 83 shiploads of raw cane sugar from eight different countries were delivered by 26 different ships, many making multiple deliveries to the port. The ships delivered about 554,000 tons of raw cane sugar, showing that the sweet trade is still alive in Baltimore, just as it was in the 1700s.

Sugar's global value comes from the products it enables as a result of refining, which generally encompass white, brown, and liquid sugars. Arriving from multiple ports, much of that sugar is meant for the American market, thereby keeping Baltimore tied firmly to the worldwide flow of this essential product.