It revolutionized the sugarcane industry. Now, the planting machine returns home to Ascension. – The Advocate

A vintage sugarcane planting machine one of 154 made by the Louisianan whose invention ended cane-planting's back-breaking hand labor has been brought back home to Ascension Parish, where it was built almost 60 years ago.

Getting the machine back to its roots has been a labor of love by the Walet farming family of Loreauville, which found the old planter on their land, hidden and overgrown by vines. The Ascension Parish Sheriff's Office, which brought the cane planter home by truck and trailer, then spent a year restoring it, and the River Road African American Museum in Donaldsonville, where it will be exhibited in the future.

And, just as important, has been the input of Leonard Julien Jr., the 80-year-old son of the inventor, who has been able to watch the machine's restoration over the last year and provide details about its design to the inmate trustees who "sandblasted it, re-blasted it and primed and painted it," said Julien.

The sugarcane planter was invented and patented by his father, Leonard Julien Sr., who farmed sugarcane in the community of Modeste near Donaldsonville and patented and built his machines, with the help of his brother, Harold, in the machine shop of a Donaldsonville mechanical engineer named John Wiggins.

"One of the machines planted more cane in a day than 12 men could," Julien said. "We used to plant it by hand. I did it."

Ascension Parish Sheriff Bobby Webre said that when he heard about the efforts to bring the old cane planter home and back in the limelight, he knew it would be a good project, providing valuable auto mechanic skills to inmate trustees.

"It was a year's project," Webre said. "It was down to the bare metal."

The planter, made in 1965, can't be operated anymore. Over time, winters froze and broke the engine block, Julien Jr. said.

But it looks to be in ship-shape now, painted its original bright red.

It was Kathe Hambrick, founder of the River Road African American Museum, who first learned of the cane planter.

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She got a call from Amaryllis Walet, whose late husband, Herman Walet, had farmed with the machine on his land near New Iberia for 35 years.

Amaryllis said her son discovered the sugarcane planter hidden in the fields, and she knew it belonged to history.

In 1999, her husband donated another of his sugarcane planters to the River Road African American Museum after he and his wife saw an exhibit about its inventor Leonard Julien Sr.

That sugarcane planter can now be seen at the West Baton Rouge Museum in Port Allen, where it was moved a few years ago to be housed in a protective tractor shed, Hambrick said.

A tractor shed will also be built at the River Road African American Museum for the newly found and restored cane planter, when it's moved to the Donaldsonville museum in the near future.

"It revolutionized the sugarcane industry," said Hambrick.

At some point, Farmer Walet of New Iberia had to replace grabber-like devices on the machine that would open and close to pull the sugarcane stalks into a chute to be dropped into the furrows of the field.

The devices were operated by a spring that stopped being manufactured at some point, so the farmer replaced them with non-moving pieces that resemble hands, called rakes, Julien Jr. said.

"I'm going to have the original pieces made and put back on the machine," Julien Jr. said,"built from my father's original pattern."

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It revolutionized the sugarcane industry. Now, the planting machine returns home to Ascension. - The Advocate