This machine belongs to and has been returned to the Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Museum in Skagway Alaska, and to this day there aren’t many good roads into it… Imagine how hard it would have been to get this device up there to be used for candy, and how much money there must have been in the 1890s to warrant someone bringing it up so that miners could have a little bit of happiness in their pocket… some nice candies to eat, I guess, when they mine. It was a good bit of luxury that they could take with them, that they didn’t have to worry about spoiling… because they lived a really rough life as they mined up there.
And while it probably was worth bringing to Skagway for business reasons, it probably wasn’t worth bringing it back, so it got stashed in a barn and it’s been sitting there for the last hundred and something years, slowly rusting away forgotten.
And now I’ve been given an opportunity to give it a little bit of new life making candy again.
Artisanal candymaker Greg Cohen, owner of Tallahassee, Florida’s Lofty Pursuits, shares how he restored and made strawberry candies with a Victorian hard candy-making machine and brass drop rollers found in Alaska from the Klondike Gold Rush era, circa 1890.
Watch more Victorian Nectar Drop candies being made at Lofty Pursuits. Plus: How A L Simpkins sweets are made in the UK, incredible Amezaiku candy animal sculptures from Japan, and how are candy canes made by hand and by machine?
via The Awesomer.