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History of the Festival (cont'd)

At approximately 2 p.m. on the afternoon of December 11, 1932, a worker at the Macgillicuddy plant accidentally closed a steam escape valve that should have never been closed except during maintenance on the boilers. Tremendous pressure built up inside Boiler No. 2, and within seconds the powerful coal-fired boiler exploded, collapsing the scaffold above it that supported the main molasses refining tank. The tank, loosed of its moorings, tipped sideways and crashed into the east wall of the plant, shattering through the bricks and dumping its full contents--2,000,000 gallons of boiling molasses--onto Main Street.

The remnants of the Macgillicuddy plant, photographed only four days after the disaster. Smoke seen rising behind the rubble is from the coal-fired boilers of the Acme Sugar Co. plant, located on the block just behind.

Hundreds of townspeople were innocently strolling up and down the street at that moment, when suddenly T.R. Eakle, a shoe-shine boy working outside Metzger's Drugstore, cried out, "Molasses!" It was the last word he would ever utter, as the wall of boiling goo oozed over him and dragged him down, caramelizing him instantly. Pedestrians rushed to escape the sugary tsunami, darting into shop doors and even leaping headlong through display windows to get out of the molasses' path.

By the time the wave of molasses had passed, nearly three days later, 21 men and women lay dead, victims of the first--and only--large-scale molasses disaster in U.S. history.

On the 25th anniversary of the terrible tragedy, in 1957, the townspeople decided to commemorate the event by recreating it just as it had happened on that fateful day in 1932. And since that time, the people of Sucarnoochee gather every year on a crisp December morning for the "sugar race." Brave runners, many of them decendants of the original 21 victims, gather at the top of Main Street as 10,000 gallons of fast-running corn syrup is released from a large vat. With startling speed, they dash ahead of the speedy slurry, cheating death by mere seconds as the syrup drowns everything in its path.