RTCC Class Is Ready for 2009
With a Modern New Sugarhouse

A Vermont sugarhouse with solar panels? Maybe even a windmill?

It’s not quite in time for this year, but next year’s resurrected maple program at the Randolph Technical Career Center (RTCC) will be ready for sap to flow into an impressive new sugarhouse.

It’s the result of a collaboration of two RTCC programs. The building trades program, under instructor Tim Murphy, is constructing the brand new 30’x40’ structure. And Jerry Reymore’s environmental resources program will be the one to use it next spring to make maple syrup and sugar.

When the maple program is fully functioning next spring, it will ensure that a new generation of Vermonters will know all the newest science behind Vermont’s most venerable occupation—and they’ll be making money at it, too.

The new sugarhouse, substantially bigger than the one it replaced, will be able to boil sap from up to 1100 taps, Reymore told The Herald.

It will be educational as well as productive. A classroom will be built in, as well as a storefront and full kitchen to finish off the syrup and sugar, perhaps with the help of RTCC’s culinary students.

Paid for largely by a Perkins equipment grant, as well as donations from local businesses, it has been in the building stages for four months, as Murphy’s class worked most of the winter with framing, roofing, doors and windows, using Reymore’s design. Bethel Mills won the contract to supply materials with a $16,000 bid.

The front door was constructed of timbers milled by Reymore’s class from a forest on Tatro Hill.

New Technology

The old sugarhouse (in the same location behind RTCC) was built 25 years ago and "had run its course," Reymore said. The new one will include a 3’ by 10’ evaporator with steam sap-warmer, and will also employ a reverse osmosis machine and a filter press, as is common in big sugaring operations.

The arch will be fueled with oil instead of wood. Despite the high cost of oil, Reymore said, he is convinced that oil-fired evaporators will be the technology his students will find after they graduate.

Still, the program is looking to increase energy efficiency. Two restaurants have already begun collecting waste vegetable oil, which can be used along with fuel oil. Additionally, the sugarhouse has been positioned to point south, with a look toward using solar panels, and a windmill is a future possibility.

"We want the sugarhouse to be a live classroom for environmental science," Murphy said.

Reymore also hopes to improve on the 100 to 200 gallons of syrup produced in the old sugarhouse. The school will tap trees on the property of cooperating landowners, including Steve Heller, who built the foundation and whose wife works as a para-educator at RTCC.

The maple sugaring program at RTCC had been dormant for a few years but Reymore has started it up again. This year, the class tapped trees and collected sap and boiled it at the Brookfield sugarhouse of Justin Poulin.

Poulin himself was one of the most enthusiastic graduates of the RTCC sugaring program a few years ago.

Fourteen students are enrolled in Reymore’s program this year, and most of them have some previous experience with the sweet art.

One important part of the old sugarhouse has been saved. That’s the wall on which—in age-old sugaring tradition—every year’s sugaring records were written.

(Intern Leigh Riley contributed to this report.)