Tapping Into History: Maple Sugaring in the Colonial Period
There is made from it a beverage very pleasing to drink, of
the colour of Spanish wine but not so good.
It has a sweetness which renders it of very good taste; it does not
inconvenience the stomach…This is the drink of the Indians, and even of the
French, who are fond of it.” Nicolas Denys, 1672.1
“I
was regaled here with the juice of the maple; this is the season of its
flowing. It is extremely delicious, has
a most pleasing coolness, and is exceedingly wholesome; the manner of its
extracting is very simple.” Charlevoix 1721.2
When the last gasp of winter are in the air and the days sun
begins to melt the snow from the landscape, nature wakes itself from slumber
and sends life giving food back through trees and plants. For the maple tree, this food that runs
through the tree is sweet, and when the water is evaporated, becomes a
wonderful syrup or sugar. No one knows
when the Native Americans of the Northeast discovered this sweet sap. Europe has maple trees but not the climate or
conditions necessary to produce this same sweet sap. The Iroquois legend says:
“The Creator had at first made life too easy for his people by filling the
maple trees with a thick syrup that flowed year-round. One day, Glooskap, a
mischievous young man, found a village of his people strangely silent – the
cooking fires were dead, weeds had overtaken the gardens. Glooskap discovered
the villagers laying in the woods, eyes closed, letting the syrup from the
maple trees drip into their mouths. Glooskap brought fresh water from the lake
and using his special power filled the trees with water until the syrup ran
from them thin and fast. He then ordered his people up, telling them that the
trees were no longer filled with the maple syrup, but only a watery sap. He
told them they would have to hunt and fish and tend their gardens for
sustenance. He promised that the sap would run again, but only during the
winter when game is scarce, the lake is frozen, and crops do not grow.”3
The French were some of the first Europeans to witness the process of tapping the trees. Collecting the sap and producing syrup
fascinated the immigrants coming to the Northeast. The earliest accounts come from the 1550s
describe the technique, a couple of slashes with a tomahawk cuts the bark in a
V. A piece of wood was inserted in the V
so the sap would drip into a birch bark basket.
The sap would be collected in a hollowed out log where hot rocks would
be used to evaporate some of the water.
The result was far from the maple syrup we know today but it was sweet
and considered good for colds, aches and an energy drink. Sometimes they would boil meat in the sap,
pour it over snow or mix it with corn meal, chestnuts and berries to make a
dish called sappaen. For a month or more
in late winter it became their principal food.
“Quitserza, or the nourishing food which is used by
the savages and even the French on their long journeys through the wilderness
when they cannot carry much food, is made of maize flour and this sugar
prepared and mixed by special process…A small sack of this food, which can be
carried under a man’s arm, can serve as his food for one or two months.” Kalm,
1751.4
In 1755, a young colonist was captured and
"adopted" by a small group of natives in the region that is now
Ohio. His description of maple syrup
production offers another option.
“Shortly after we came to this place the squaws began
to make sugar. We had no large kettles with us this year, and they made the
frost, in some measure, supply the place of fire, in making sugar. Their large
bark vessels, for holding the stock-water, they made broad and shallow; and as
the weather is very cold here, it frequently freezes at night in sugar time;
and the ice they break and cast out of the vessels. I asked them if they were
not throwing away the sugar they said no; it was water they were casting away,
sugar did not freeze, and there was scarcely any in that ice. They said I might
try the experiment, and boil some of it, and see what I would get. I never did
try it; but I observed that after several times freezing, the water that
remained in the vessel, changed its colour and became brown and very sweet.”5
Europeans put more of an emphasis on making maple
sugar. In the early spring when the sap
was running enough maple sugar could be made to last the year. The practice of
tapping the tree evolved so less damage was done to the tree and the
same tree could be tapped for many years.
A hole was drilled with a metal auger and a sumac spile (a hollow stick)
was used to drip the sap into wooden buckets or hollowed out troughs at the
base of the tree.
Fires were made out in the
sugar bush (a grove of maple sugar trees) with large metal kettles suspended
over the fire. The sap would be boiled
over the fire until almost all the liquid was gone then poured into molds to
make the maple sugar cakes. Maple sugar
cakes could be easily stored and used instead of expensive Caribbean cane sugar. In the late 18th century Dr.
Benjamin Rush became a champion of producing and using maple sugar for health
reasons, “the plague has never been known in any country where sugar composes a
material part of the diet of the inhabitants” and also as an abolitionist
cause. If cane sugar was not needed then
the institution of slavery in the Caribbean would not be needed. This idea would be picked up again before the
Civil War. Maple sugar became even more
popular after the British government passed the Sugar Act of 1764 which imposed
high duties on imported sugar. Using
maple syrup and sugar became an expression of protest against the British
Parliament taxing the American colonies.
Thomas Jefferson took the cause a patriotic step further. On his return from France he joined Dr.
Rush’s Society for Promoting Manufacture
of Sugar from the Sugar Maple Tree and proposed a plan to have yeomen
farmers of America produce enough maple sugar to supply the country’s needs and
also export to put the British sugar producers out of business. The maple sugar scheme combined his love of
botany, antislavery sentiments, his desire for his country to achieve economic
independence, his dislike of the British and his vision of the yeomen farmer as
the backbone of the American republic.
In May of 1791 Jefferson and James Madison made a trip to Vermont (the
country’s newest state) plus upstate New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut and
Long Island to encourage farmers to plant orchards of maple trees to help
America gain economic independence from its largest import – cane sugar.6
Into the 19th century the process of collecting
and boiling maple sap did not change much.
Camp was set up in the sugar bush during the maple sugaring time and the
fire was constant. Nearly all the maple
producers were dairy farmers who would work together as a community before
planting season began. What was being
produced was still mainly maple sugar to supply the families with sugar for the
year and an extra income selling sugar cakes.
At first the sugar molds were simple.
Later they became decorative, made out of wood and metal.
After the Civil War technology started to change how maple
sap was collected and processed. Tin
buckets were used to catch the sap and sugar shacks were built for large scale
production. Tin cans allowed syrup to be
sealed, stored and shipped all over America. In approximately
1864, a Canadian borrowed some design ideas from sorghum (molasses) evaporators
and put a series of baffles in flat tin pans to channel the boiling sap. In 1872 a Vermonter developed an evaporator
with two pans and a metal arch or firebox which greatly decreased boiling time.
Seventeen years later, in 1889, another Canadian bent the tin that formed the
bottom of a pan into a series of flues which increased the heated surface area
of the pan and again decreased boiling time. The boiling time was always the longest part
of the process. It takes 40 gallons of
sap to make 1 gallon of syrup and takes even longer to boil down to sugar.7 This has always been a very labor intensive
endeavor but with great rewards. In the
1800s the U.S. production of syrup was 4 times what it is today. With the clearing of forests for agriculture,
cheaper cane and beet sugar coming from the south, syrup became a delicacy and
more favored than maple sugar. Nearly
all maple sap is made into syrup today, although maple sugar can still be found
in the form of maple candy.
Today the process of maple sap collection is evolving
again. Maple producers are now using vacuum
pumps and plastic tubing to tap the trees so the sap runs directly to the sugar
shack where large evaporators use electricity to control the temperature and process
large quantities of maple syrup with less labor. Scientific processes are being used like
maximizing the sap season by knowing the best temperatures for tapping, pre-heaters to "recycle" heat lost in
the steam, and reverse
osmosis, a process of purification using a semipermeable membrane to remove larger
particles from the sap before it is boiled.
Maple sugar is now being looked at again as a more natural alternative
to processed sugar. Maple sugar and
syrup retain their natural nutrients and are a rich source of both manganese
and zinc. Vermont is the leading
producer of maple syrup, followed by New York in the United States. The world’s largest supplier of syrup is the
province of Quebec in Canada.
1 Denys, Nicolas. 1672. “Histoire naturelle des peoples,
des animaux, des arbres & plantes de l’Amerique septentrionale & de ses
divers climats: avec une description exacte de la peche des molues, tant sur le
Grand-Banc qu’a la coste, et de tout ce qui s’y pratique de plus particulier,
&c.” Paris: Chez Claude Barbin.
2 Charlevoix, P.F.X. 1744. Journal d’un Voyage dans
l’Amerique Septentionnale. Paris: Giffart. Quoted in H.A. Schuette and Sybil C.
Schuette, “Maple sugar: a bibliography of early records.” Transactions of the
Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, volume XXIX (1935).
4 Kalm, Peter. 1751. Beskrifning hum socker gores uti
Novia America. Stockholm: Kungliga Svenska Veteskaps Academiens Handlingar.
“Peter Kalm’s description of how sugar is made from various types of trees in
North America. 1939.” Trans. By Esther Louise Larsen. Agricultural history: Volume 13, Number 3. Fargo, N.D.: Agricultural
History Society.
5 Smith, James. 1799. “An Account of the
Remarkable Occurrences in the Life and Travels of Col. James Smith.” London.
6 Theobold, Mary Miley. “Thomas Jefferson and the
Maple Sugar Scheme.” CW Journal: Autumn 2012.
7 http://wildblueberries.net/maplehistory
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