At the turn of the 1800s, the highest concentration of millionaires in America could be found in one winding corridor only about 120 miles long as the crow flies – a strip in southern Louisiana along the Mississippi River between New Orleans and the region around Louisiana’s capitol, Baton Rouge.
The region’s wealth came from massive sugar cane plantations. While the rest of the American South cultivated cotton, Louisiana grew sugar and utilized the Mississippi River as a frontier freeway to get the crop to New Orleans and markets abroad. The planters generated personal fortunes as they grew the “white gold.” Prior to the American Civil War, Louisiana was producing as much as half of all the sugar consumed in America – in the 1850s alone, Louisiana sugar plantations are said to have produced an estimated 450 million pounds of sugar worth over $20 million annually.