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The Mesmerizing
If you live in Vermont, you probably know someone who sugars, which makes sense considering the Green Mountain State is the largest producer of pure maple syrup in the United States. But maple syrup was actually first discovered by Native Americans hundreds of years before Europeans settled in North America. A popular Native American legend says a chief threw his tomahawk at a maple tree in anger after a long day of hunting and sap dripped from the cut into a hollowed-out log that happened to be beneath the tree. Later the chief's wife used the maple "water" to boil venison from the hunt. After much boiling, the meat absorbed most of the delicious maple flavor and the leftover "water" became thicker and sweeter; the chief and his wife were pleasantly surprised. Native Americans continued to collect the sap from the v-shaped gashes and maple sugaring was created, although maple sugar, not maple syrup, was the primary maple product produced in North America until the 1920s. Ever since the process has continued to develop; cast iron kettles introduced by the colonists were replaced by flat evaporator pans in the 1850s and pipe lines have now replaced both the metal buckets and the original hollowed-out logs. Today larger sugarhouses use reverse osmosis machines to remove some of the water from the sap before boiling, saving these sugarmakers a great deal of time. Many Vermont sugarmakers, though, have modest systems, like Richard Slocum of Randolph Center. Over the past seven years Slocum has tapped about 500 trees and produced 45 to 100 gallons of maple syrup with a simple setup. "Our setup is strictly a wood fire and an arch, everything is pretty basic," he said. "I don't use any buckets, mine is strictly on a pipeline."
This season most syrup Slocum produced was fancy, the lightest of the four grades of Vermont maple syrup. In January Slocum won Best of Show at the Vermont Farm show in Barre for the fancy he made last season. This year Slocum made 111 gallons of maple syrup. A Family Business Slocum thinks of his sugarhouse as a fun winter hobby but for Charlie Brown of South Strafford sugaring is a family business. Brown's father sugared before him and now his son Frank is a partner of the business; Browns other two sons, Punka and Tony, have been known to help in the sugarhouse as well. The Browns use some buckets, but mostly pipeline, to transport sap from the 2250 trees they tap each spring. Horses and a draw sleigh with a dumping station were used to collect the buckets of sap until 1982. Once the sap has been collected it is boiled down using evaporator pans in the Brown’s 77-year-old sugarhouse. Then the syrup is carried in 15-30 gallon drums to Brown's old milk house which serves as a canning room. On average they produce 400 gallons of maple syrup, but Brown recalls making 800 gallons one year; this year the family has made about 200 gallons so far and plans to continue boiling into late April. They retail 250 gallons of maple syrup each year and the rest they sell wholesale. Brown also makes maple cream by hand with a wooden spoon. Brown has even mailed his maple products to England, Japan, and all over the U.S.A. Whether the sugarhouse is a business as it is for the Brown family or a pastime-as it is for Richard Slocum, the appeal is the same. Who wouldn't want to spend the last few weeks of winter turning sticky sap into "liquid gold?" (Morgan Brown is a senior at Randolph Union High School. This article is one of several written by Morgan for The Herald as part of her senior project.) |
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