College of Business Scholarship

Established in 1991 by Savannah Foods and Industries Inc., this scholarship is available to full-time Parker College of Business students.The Savannah Sugar Refining Corporation was founded by Benjamin Oxnard in 1916. Oxnard came from a family of sugar refiners. With his father and three brothers, he had operated the Fulton Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn, New York, and later he and partner Richard Sprague ran a 7,500-acre plantation and refinery called Adeline in St. Mary’s Parish, Louisiana. Between about 1910 and 1915, the Louisiana operation encountered a series of setbacks. The complex was severely damaged by a fire, and then, after the factory was rebuilt and modernized, the plant’s supply of sugar cane was affected by consecutive seasons of floods, droughts, and frosts. These problems were compounded by the passage of laws allowing free entry of foreign-produced sugar into the United States. This string of developments led Oxnard to investigate moving the operation to a more profitable location. While Oxnard sought to relocate in Virginia, James Imbrie, one of the major backers of the project, made his financing conditional: he would provide the necessary funding if the company moved to Savannah, where his family had land they wanted developed industrially. This scholarship is available to incoming freshmen and is renewable for four years.

The Savannah Sugar Refining Corporation became Savannah’s first new large industry and the first in the upper harbor. Others were to follow. For many years, the importation of raw sugar into the Port of Savannah represented the largest single commodity to be imported. Import duty on this raw sugar alone exceeded the total amount spent by the Federal Government in maintaining the harbor from the Refinery to the ocean.

In 1997 Savannah Foods & Industries, Inc., was acquired by Imperial Sugar Company.