Historic Maple Sugaring

Presented in March of 1999 on a beautiful winter day, part of the project sponsored in part by the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities. The audience included local families with young children, senior citizens, college students, young woodsmen, and Berkshire County visitors from England, Japan, and several US states.
Two local working farms, Lowland Farm of Monterey and Sunset Farm in Tyringham, loaned antique sugaring equipment for the event. A large iron cauldron was used to boil sap; wooden buckets made of pine and more modern metal buckets demonstrated part of the evolution of gathering equipment, along with a sample birch folded bucket to illustrate Native American methods.

Gulliver, steered by Tom Weldon, pulls a sap gathering tank.

Two types of 19^th century gathering tanks were on display, one looking like an enormous bucket standing about 4 1/2 ft high, the other being a more sophisticated item made like an elongated barrel, laid on its side, with two interior chambers. Both these would have been pulled on sleds by oxen or horses, from tree to tree, gathering sap to be hauled to the evaporator pans. Other items on loan included a Shaker evaporating stove form the Tyringham Shaker village, an antique shoulder yoke, and wooden sugar molds for making maple candy.

Tom Weldon, who presented the program, also made a shoulder yoke to demonstrate the earlier methods of hauling sap by human power.

The program required a lot preparation including hauling and splitting many cords of wood. A few local woodsmen and several folks from Gould Farm in Monterey aided this task.

The Bidwell House property has the remains of a sugarhouse located on the 18^th century Royal Hemlock Road. The remains consist of a chimney and parts of a stone sugar arch. This structure is proof of maple production taking place on the property. At this site, Tom set up an18^th century style sugaring camp demonstrating the period before sugarhouses, when sap was boiled over open fires in iron cauldrons and pots.

A young visitor watching the sap drip from a wooden spile into a traditional wooden bucket

Demonstrating the evolution of sugaring practices, Tom showed the Native American techniques of cutting a ‘v’ groove in a maple tree versus the white settler’s method of tapping trees with augers and wooden spiles made from sumac branches or ash saplings.

Other items on display showed a comparison of a wooden trough hollowed out by burning (a Native American method) versus one cut out with an ax and adze. These troughs were originally used by Native Americans to boil the sap using hot rocks. This method was demonstrated by Tom, who first heated about 30 small rocks in the fire then dropped them, one by one into the sap. By about the eighth rock, steam began to rise. Afte15 rocks the sap boiled, proof positive that the method worked.