My contribution to the December 2025 edition of the Maple Syrup Digest is a review of Maple Syrup: A Short History of Canada’s Sweetest Obsession, the new book by Toronto based journalist, Peter Kuitenbrouwer. The Maple Syrup Digest is the official quarterly publication of the North American Maple Syrup Council.
Kuitenbrouwer’s book takes a look at a various aspects of the place of maple syrup in the history and culture of Canada. With chapters covering such topics as the importance of maple to First Nations peoples, the rise and control of Québec’s maple syrup federation, and of course the ever popular Great Canadian Syrup Heist, the book covers a lot of ground, most notably the events and changes to the industry over the last 30 years.
The book is targeted to a general audience and is decidely not written from the perspective of the academic historian or researcher, although it is sure to interest all types of readers wtih an interest in maple history. In that regard, the narrative is often presented from a kind of first person perspective, recounting the research journey and travels of the author in preparation for writing this book and as part of his past journalistic investigations.
The book was published in October 2025 by Doubleday Canada, an imprint of the publisher Penguin Randomhouse. Copies of the book can by purchased in paper or electronic formats at the Penguin Randomhouse website and at various online outlets like Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
You can read a PDF copy of my review at this link or by clicking on the accomapnying image of the first page of the book review.
You can read my latest maple history contribution in the September 2025 edition of the Maple Syrup Digest newsletter at this link or by clicking on the image of the article. The Maple Syrup Digest, it is the official quarterly publication of the North American Maple Syrup Council.
This article traces the history of the introduction and use of block sugar in the maple syrup industry. Block sugar was made by super heating maple syrup into a thickened consistency and then pouring it into large, hard 60 to 70 pound blocks of pure maple sugar. Large blocks like this made it easier to store and ship maple sugar for use in flavoring various products like tobacco and blended table syrups. The article explains more about block sugar’s origins, the key players in its production and sale, and how widespread the use once was.
You can read the article at this link or by clinking on the accompanying image.
Fans of maple history are often intrigued by the question of the origin of maple sugar. Related to that there seems to be a particular fascination with various Native American legends and folk tales that have been used to explain how Native North American people learned to make maple sugar. As a historian whose work is based on careful documentation, getting to the gist of folklore and legends that come from an oral story telling tradition can be a challenge. On top of this is the problem of sorting out what Native American stories are “true,” “old,” or “authentic,” versus those that are the creation of more recent authors and story tellers.
Late 19th century photograph of Rowland E. Robinson.
One notable example of such a questionable legend is the often-repeated Native American maple sugar origin story of Woksis and Moqua. However, contrary to the belief that the Woksis and Moqua story is an ancient legend of the Algonquian peoples that has been passed down orally over the generations before finally being committed to print, the Woksis and Moqua story is the 19th century work of the imagination of a European-American story teller from Vermont by the name of Rowland E. Robinson.
Robinson’s 1896 article in The Atlantic magazine.
The first time the Woksis and Moqua story appeared in print was the April 1896 edition of the magazine The Atlantic, appearing in a six-page article written by Robinson, titled “Old-Time Sugar-Making.” In introducing this origin story, Robinson initially makes note that Native people may have learned to tap the maple tree for its sap by watching the spring time actions of the red squirrel nibbling on the smooth bark of young branches of the maple tree, before moving on to the legend of an Algonquian man Woksis and his wife Moqua, and declaring “the true story of the discovery of maple-sugar making is in the legend of Woksis, the mighty hunter.”
Picking up in the middle of Robinson’s text, he first notes that Moqua was aware that the maple tree, when wounded, would produce a sweet water. Robinson then goes on,
Happily, she bethought her of the great maple behind the wigwam, tapped merely for the provision of a pleasant drink, but the sweet water might serve a better purpose now. So she filled the kokh (container) with sap, and hung it over the mended fire. In spite of impatient watching it presently began to boil, whereupon she popped the ample ration of moose meat into it, and set a cake of pounded corn to bake on a tilted slab before the fire. Then she resumed her embroidery, in which the sharp point of each thread supplied its own needle.
The work grew more and more interesting. The central figure, her husband’s totem of the bear, was becoming so lifelike that it could easily be distinguished from the wolves, eagles, and turtles of the other tribal clans. In imagination she already beheld the moccasins on the feet of her noble Woksis; now stealing in awful silence along the war-path; now on the neck of the fallen foe; now returning jubilant with triumph, or fleeing homeward from defeat, to ease the shame of failure by kicking her, in which cases he felt herself bearing, as ever, her useful part. So she dreamed and worked stitch by stitch, while the hours passed un-heeded, the shadow crept past the mark, the kokh boiled low, and the cake gave forth a smell of burning. Becoming aware of this obvious odor, she sprang to the fire. Alas, the cake was a blackened crisp, and lo, the once juicy piece of meat was a shriveled morsel in the midst of a gummy dark brown substance!
She snatched kokh and cake from the fire, and then, hearing her husband coming, she ran and hid herself in the nearest thicket of evergreens ; for she knew that when he found not wherewith to appease the rage of hunger he would be seized with a more terrible one against her. Listening awhile with a quaking heart, and catching no alarming sound, but aware instead of an unaccountable silence, she ventured forth and peeped into the wigwam. Woksis sat by the fire eating with his fingers from the kokh, while his face shone with an expression of supreme content and enjoyment. With wonder she watched him devour the last morsel, but her wonder was greater when she saw him deliberately break the earthen pot and lick the last vestige of spoiled cookery from the shards. She could not restrain a surprised cry, and discovering her he addressed her : —
“O woman of women! didst thou conceive this marvel of cookery, or has Klose-kur-Beh been thy instructor?”
Being a woman, she had the wit to withhold the exact truth, but permitted him to believe whatever he would.
“Let me embrace thee!” he cried, and upon his lips she tasted the first maple sugar.
1920 painting by artist Clark Fay titled “Legend of Woksis”
The discovery was made public, and kokhs of sap were presently boiling in every wigwam. All were so anxious to get every atom of the precious sweet that they broke the kokhs and scraped the pieces, just as Woksis, the first sugareater, had done. And that is why there are so many fragments of broken pottery, and so few whole vessels to be found.
A complete copy of the story in The Atlantic can be viewed at this link.
Following Robinson’s publication in The Atlantic, the Woksis and Moqua story was widely circulated and republished in New England newspapers like The Rutland Daily Herald and The Greenfield Recorder, and the Brattleboro Reformer, as well as a variety of national newspapers and magazines in both the United States and Canada.
Who was Rowland Robinson and how did he come to write this story? Rowland E. Robinson (1833-1900) was a well-known and once popular nineteenth century farmer-writer and illustrator from Ferrisburgh, Vermont. Robinson wrote both fiction and non-fiction, specializing in novels and short stories that featured characters and folklore from life in Vermont. He also frequently made drawings to accompany and illustrate his stories.
As a farmer and rural resident of 19th century Vermont, Robinson was well-aware of the details and legends of maple sugaring and wrote about it often in his works on Vermont life. In his 1895 story “A New England Woodpile,” he wrote, “here is a sugar-maple, three feet through at the butt, with the scars of many tappings showing on its rough bark. The oldest of them may have been made by the Indians. Who knows what was their method of tapping? Here is the mark of the gouge with which early settlers drew the blood of the tree; a fashion learned, likely enough, from the aboriginal sugar-makers, whose narrowest stone gouges were as passable tools for this purpose as any they had for another.”
In his short story, “In the Spring Woods,” Robinson shared his observations of squirrels intentionally wounding and sucking the sweet sap of the maple tree in the spring. Robinson wrote, “if you wade into the woods — and it is easier wading without a gun than with it — about the time the sugar-makers are beginning their work, you may see that someone has been before them, tapping nearer the sky than their augers bore, and where the sap has a finer and more ethereal flavor. You can see little trickles of it darkening some of the smaller smooth branches, and if your eyes are sharp enough, the incisions it flows from. These are the chisel marks of the red squirrel, the only real sap-sucker I know of, excepting the boy. Make yourself comfortable on some patch of ground that the spring ebb of the snow has left bare and keep still long enough, and you may see him stretch himself along a branch and slowly suck or lap the sap as it oozes from the wound. Evidently he enjoys it greatly, and it must be grateful to his palate, for all winter, save in a thaw or two, he has had nothing to quench his thirst but snow, and eating one’s drink is a hard and poor way of taking it. Was he the first to discover the sweetness of the maple, and did the Indians take the hint of sugar-making from him? If so we are under obligations to him…”
Interestingly, these words relate to an earlier maple origin story published in 1882 by Robinson that uses the same narrative and storyline as the later Woksis and Moqua legend. In March 1882, Robinson published The Story of Maple Sugar in Wide Awake magazine. Wide Awake was a monthly American children’s magazine that published between 1875 to 1893 before it merged with another magazine called St. Nicholas Magazine. A complete copy of the story in Wide Awake magazine can be viewed at this link.
Robinson 1882 article in Wide-Awake magazine.
In his 1882 story, Robinson told the tale of how Native Americans came to learn about the sweet sap of the maple tree and went on to make the accidental discovery that maple sap could be made into maple sugar by boiling. In this telling of the story, the characters are an Indian man named Awahsoose, the bear, and his wife, Wonakake, the otter, and a young son called Wungbasahs, the woodpecker.
The story begins when the son is out hunting and encounters Mekwaseese, a little red squirrel. When the squirrel was cornered by Wungbasahs with his bow and arrow, the squirrel offered to tell the boy a secret in exchange for his freedom. Robinson wrote,
“Let me hear your great secret, and then I will see.”
“Well,” sighed Mekwaseese, “I suppose I must tell, whether you kill me or not. When you first saw me here I was sucking sweet water from this branch!”
“Sucking sweet water from this branch? You lie, Mekwaseese! There is no sweet water in trees.”
“Yes,” said Mekwaseese, “sweeter than the juice of the sata (blueberry), and ever and ever so much of it. Put your lips here where I have bitten through the bark, and taste for yourself. If I have lied I hope to be shot.”
So Wungbasahs lay down upon the limb, and putting his mouth to the wound, got a few drops of a very sweet and pleasant liquid. The squirrel, having no great faith in Indians, big or little, took advantage of his enemy’s position, and jumping upon his head, scampered along his back, and gaining the trunk of the tree, got behind it in almost no time at all. The boy was angry enough at being played such a trick, and made all sorts of murderous threats against him; but the squirrel asked, peeping from behind the trunk,” Did you not find it as I told you?”
Wunghasahs admitted that it was sweet, but so little of it that he could never get enough to satisfy him.
“But if you will promise never to shoot me, I will tell you how and where you can get a bucketful in half a day.”
Yes, Wungbasahs would promise, if what was told him proved true.
So Mekwaseese told him to take a gouge and cut through the bark of the trunk near the ground, and stick a spout of senhalon wood just below for the sap to run through into a pkenmojo. a birch-bark pail, which should be set at the end of it.
Then Wungbasahs got down from the tree and went home to devise means to carry out the squirrel’s instructions.
He could make a pkenmojo and spout easily enough, but he must borrow the gouge. He knew where his father kept his stone gouges and knives and axe, in a pesnoda, or deer-skin tool-bag, hung in the back side of the wigwam; and he knew as well that he could not get the precious tool for the asking; so he took it-the very best and sharpest one of the lot; for I am sorry to say Wungbasahs was not quite so good as the best boys nowadays. Then he cut a slender stick of senhalon wood, ‘which we call sumac, where it grew on a barren place by the lake shore and where he had often gathered its leaves for his father’s smoking, and whittled out a spout; then peeled a sheet of bark from the mask-wamozi, the white birch, and made a pail; and with these he set forth to the tree where he had found the squirrel, for that, he thought, must be better than any other.
With a good deal more labor than he liked, he cut a furrow through the bark and into the wood, and below it made a slanting cut with the gouge and stuck in the spout. It was a soft, half-sunny day, following a frosty night, and the sap came dropping out of the spout into the bark pail at such a lively rate that there was soon a good draught of it, which Wungbasahs swallowed with great relish.
In an hour or so he had got his fill of drink, and began to wish for something to eat. A bright thought struck him. Only two days before, his father had come back from a hunt, hauling home on his dobogan half the carcass of a moose. Would not a chunk of moose-meat, seethed in a kettle of this sweet water, be better than cooked in any other way? So home he went, and added to his sins by purloining a bit of meat half as big as his foot, and one of his mother’s kokws, or earthen kettles, with a handful of live coals in it, and made off with his booty to his one-tree sap-works.
Here he started a fire with the coals, and, by a cord of bark about its rim, slung the kettle over it filled with sap and the piece of meat.
They say that a watched pot never boils, and this one did not till the watcher had fallen asleep with his back to a tree and his feet to the fire. When he awoke the sun was down and the snow was blue with twilight shadows. His first thought was for his cookery. There was nothing left of the fire but ashes and embers; but the kokw had boiled almost dry, only in the bottom was a gummy mass, out of which rose, like the barren rock, wojahose, the shrunken remains of the moose-meat. Wungbasahs was hungry as a wolf, and, tearing it out, set his teeth into it without waiting for it to get cooler. His delight and astonishment raced with each other over the most luscious morsel he had ever tasted. Sweeter than the minute drops in the bags of the columbine, and a whole mouthful of it, to say nothing of what was left in the kokw!
Drawing by Rowland E. Robinson of the maple sugar origins story to accompany his 1882 article in Wide-Awake magazine.
He was so delighted with his discovery that he ran home with what was left of its results as fast as he could, and told the whole story from beginning to end. When Awahsoose and Wonakake had tasted, and then licked and scraped the kokw cleaner than it had ever been before since it was first made, Wungbasahs was forgiven his theft and unauthorized borrowings, and named, with solemn rites, “The-one-whom-the-squirrel-told-how-to-get-the-sweet-water-and-who-himself-found-out-how- to-make-it-better,” which in Indian is so very long a name that I have not paper enough left to write it on.
And so began the making of maple sugar. This story was not told me by the Indians, but by the Blue Jay; and so I cannot vouch for it, since it is said that, blue as he is, the jay is not true blue.
But I do know that to this day, the red squirrels spared by Wungbasahs suck the sap of the maples.
A complete copy of the story in Wide-Awake magazine can be viewed at this link.
In saying that “the story was not told to me by the Indians but by the Blue-jay” and that the words of the Blue-jay are less than reliable, Robinson freely admits that his story is a tale that sprang from his imagination and not a part of the oral traditions of Native peoples that were passed down through the ages or to Rowland Robinson.
In truth, 14 years before Robinson’s imagination brought the world the Woksis and Moqua story, he published essentially the same story. For his 1896 version of the story, Robinson changed the names and roles of the characters but stuck with the narrative of the squirrel sharing the knowledge of sweet sap and the accidental discovery of boiling sap down to make sugar by neglecting a pot of meat cooking in maple sap.
There are those who will claim with great certainty that the Woksis and Moqua story has deep roots in the oral history and traditions of Native Peoples of New England. I will admit that there is always a possibility that I have made a mistake and my research in incomplete or has led me astray. I would love for another researcher to produce a well dated earlier example of a close version of this story gathered from the oral traditions of the indigenous peoples of North America. As a historian of the maple industry, it is important to try to be objective and dispassionate and take an empirical approach when looking at the past. I have learned to question our assumptions about long-held beliefs and to look a little deeper to see if there is in fact a story behind the story, like with the Woksis and Moqua story.
Is it plausible that there is some truth in this legend as far as the way humans learned to make maple sugar? Yes, it is a plausible tale, but at this point we just do not know how or who first made maple sugar. Was an “authentic” Native American legend passed on to Rowland Robinson for him to put to paper and share with readers of late 19th century magazines? Almost certainly not.
Maple historian Matthew Thomas speaking about history of the Vermont Maple Creemee.
I am happy to share a link to a great new video on the cultural and historical importance of the Vermont Maple Creemee. Boston-based videographer, Danny Mortimer, who makes videos about regional food history and people, has put together a fun and informative video explaining what a creemee is and why it is so loved in Vermont. The video even includes a few clips of me talking about creemee history. Click on the image above or this link to watch the video and also check out this link for more great Boston area food history videos by Danny Mortimer.
Maple history fans will be interested in a new book titled Maple Syrup History: Fun Facts – Production Evolution – Spouts by Maxime Caouette. The book is an English translation of Maxime’s French language book Histoire Acéricole: Anecdotes – Procédés techniques – Chalumeaux, originally published in Québec in 2023.
I previously wrote a post about the original release of the French version of the book, which one can read at this link. Finding the French version of the book to be a valuable contribution to maple history from a Québecois perspective, I contacted Maxime Caouette and we quickly became friends and maple history colleagues. That connection led me to urge Maxime to consider translating his book into English, which he has thankfully done here. This book is an important addition to the library of any readers interested in maple history.
To place an order for the English version of the book in the United States, contact Dominion & Grimm USA in St. Albans, Vermont by telephone: 802 524-9625 or by email: dgusa@dominiongrimm.ca
I am pleased to share a video recording of a presentation I made on April 23, 2025 about the history of the G.H. Grimm Company. The talk was presented at the Nella Grimm Fox Room of the Rutland Free Library in Rutland, Vermont. You can watch the 53 minute presentation by clicking THIS LINK or by clicking on the image below.
Many thanks to the Rutland Free Library and the Rutland Historical Society for hosting this event and making it possible. And a very special thanks to Rutland’s PEGTV for recording, editing and posting the video on their Youtube channel.
I am please to share an article recently written and published by Laurie Jordan of Essex Junction, Vermont on the history of the Vermont Maple Syrup Company building. Laurie Jordan, along with her husband Joe Jordan is a syrup maker, collector of maple industry antiques, and an avocational historian.
The syrup company building was constructed in 1916 in Essex Junction, Vermont by F.N. Johnson for his Vermont Maple Syrup Company. Between 1916 and 1991, this building was been home to a number of important maple syrup packers and bottling companies, inlcuding Vermont Maid syrup, Vermont Maple Orchards, and United Maple Products of Vermont. Although it has been put to uses other than maple syrup processing in the last 30 years, it is still standing in its original location.
You can read a PDF of the article at this link or by clicking on the image of the article. The article first appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of The Echo, the Newsletter of the Essex Community Historical Society and is reproduced here with their permission and the permission of the author, Laurie Jordan.
You can read my latest maple history contribution to the March 2025 edition of the Maple Syrup Digest newsletter at this link or by clicking on the image of the article. The Maple Syrup Digest, it is the official quarterly publication of the North American Maple Syrup Council.
This article takes a detailed look at the people and events that came together in the 1960s and 1970s to apply the new technology of reverse osmosis to the processing and concentration of maple sap. Today, reverse osmosis technology is a standard tool in all sizes of maple operations, yet the story of its origins and introduction is less well understood. This article covers the first two decades of the evolution of reverse osmosis for maple syrup, from an experimental concept to functional designs, commercial production, and industry adoption.
You can read the article at this link or by clinking on the accompanying image.
I am happy to share a recently published article I researched and wrote which takes a deeper look into the origins of the maple creemee, the maple flavored soft-serve ice cream or ice milk treat that is popular in Vermont.
I am happy to share a recent article I wrote on the origins and unique history of the use of a round metal can for packing maple syrup in the province of Québec. Unlike the United States and most other Canadian provinces, where syrup was packed in rectangular shaped metal cans for many years, in Québec the use of a round can was introduced in the 1950s and has continued to be used ever since, eventually becoming an iconic cultural symbol identifed with Québec.
The article was published by Fédération Histoire Québec in Volume 30, Number 1 of their imagazine Historie Québec. As an article focused on a decidely Québecois topic, this article is written in French. You can download a PDF copy of the article at this link or by clicking on the image or the article above. Or you can view each of the three individual pages of the article below.
My contribution to the December 2025 edition of the Maple Syrup Digest is a review of Maple Syrup: A Short History of Canada’s Sweetest Obsession, the new book by Toronto based journalist, Peter Kuitenbrouwer. The Maple Syrup Digest is the official quarterly publication of the North American Maple Syrup Council.
