One of the most interesting ways to study the history of maple sugaring is to watch it in action in vintage films. There are a number of films available to watch online and others available in libraries and archives in the maple sugaring region.
Although the black and white films depicting sugaring activities, both in the sugarbush and in the sugarhouse were generally staged or “directed,” taking away a certain degree of spontaneity and authenticity, they still provide a useful glimpse of the methods, technology, and landscapes in use at the time. Most of these films include scenes of men and boys gathering sap from pails on trees, boiling in kettles in the open air and in evaporators in sugarhouses, as well as finishing and bottling. Many films also illustrate sugar on snow parties and enjoying maple syrup on pancakes.
What follows is a listing and links to a handful of early 20th century maple sugaring films, mostly from the 1920s and the silent film era.
Huntley Archives
The Huntley Film Archives includes a 9:37 minute black and white silent film titled Film 371 dating to 1920.
Prelinger Archives
The metadata from the Youtube post claims that this 14 minute silent film from around 1925 titled “Maple Sugar” was from the Library of Congress’ Prelinger Archives; however, I have not been able to find this film in the Prelinger’s online listings, so I cannot confirm that is the source. It appears from this same youtube info that this film was produced by the Mogull Brothers.
British Pathé Archive
British Pathé, an online newsreel archive includes a short 2:29 minute clip depicting scenes from sugarbush titled Maple Syrup Harvest (ca 1920-1929).
Library and Archives of Canada
The Library and Archives of Canada has made available an 8:14 minute color film from 1941 titled “Maple Sugar Time”.
Northeast Historic Film
Another film I am especially familiar with is a black and white silent film shot on silver nitrate stock in the sugarbush, sugarhouse, and factory of George Cary in 1927. The film is archived at Northeast Historic Film in Bucksport, Maine and was donated for stabilization and preservation as part of the Philippe Beaudry Collection. The film is extremely deteriorated in some sections but overall is clear enough with windows of very clean images, to see what was being documented and displayed. This film is not available online in its entirety and there are severe restrictions on its use, but there is a 4:45 minute sample clip of the film on the Northeast Historic Film website and many still photos taken the same day as filming have been published over the years. Copies of the film for public viewing have been donated to the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum, the archives at the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium in St. Johnsbury, the Vermont Historical Society archives, and the Special Collections at the Bailey Howe Library at the University of Vermont.
Through my ongoing research on George Cary and the Cary Maple Sugar Company, I have found this film and its history especially interesting. As a result I have dug a little deeper into the story of how and where this film was made.
Here are a number of stills from the Cary film followed by an excerpt about the film from my recently completed book on George Cary titled, Maple King: The Rise and Fall of a Maple Syrup Empire, which will be available for purchase in spring 2018.
Excerpt from Chapter Four of Maple King: The Rise and Fall of a Maple Syrup Empire –
Movie Making
Wishing to display both the evolution of sap gathering and maple sugar making as well as the modern process employed by the Cary Maple Sugar Company, George Cary arranged for a silent moving picture to be made in 1927. The film included outdoor scenes from the sugarbush and sugarhouses at Cary’s Highland Farm, along with action shots of processing and packing syrup and sugar in the Cary Company plant in St. Johnsbury. Today, a copy of the film, which was originally shot on 35 mm nitrate stock, has been archived in the Philippe Beaudry Collection at Northeast Historic Film, a repository in Bucksport, Maine.[i]
The silent moving picture, along with an extensive collection of still photographs of the same sugarbush and sugarhouse scenes as featured in the film, were shot over several days by well-known photographers Harry and Alice Richardson of Newport, Vermont. The Richardson’s were widely regarded for their many outdoor and studio photographs of the Northeast Kingdom in Vermont, including a number of colorful novelty postcards. It was announced as early as 1926 that the Richardson’s would be making a moving picture for the Cary Maple Sugar Company.[ii]
Scenes in the sugarbush focused on three romanticized periods in the history of maple sugaring; Native American sugaring, nineteenth century Euro-American/Euro-Canadian sugaring, and early twentieth century Euro-American/Euro-Canadian sugaring. For the telling of the Native American story, Cary hired a full-blooded Penobscot Indian named John Lewey from Old Town, Maine. Mr. Lewey was accompanied by his son Roy Lewey. Posing in the snow in a full-feathered Plains Indian-style headdress, buckskins, and polished leather dress shoes, Lewey is shown tapping a few maple trees, gathering sap with wood pails from wood troughs, and boiling sap in a large iron kettle suspended from a tripod in front of a newly constructed log cabin. Sap was gathered from about one hundred split log wood troughs fed by hand carved flat wood taps.[iii]
The nineteenth century methods of sugaring featured a Yankee farmer played by Albert Leland, himself a sugarmaker from Barton, Vermont. Leland was dressed for the part, complete with wide brimmed straw hat, a thick full-length beard, and high boots. Equipped with a shoulder yoke and two wooden gathering pails, Leland was shown hustling from tree to tree collecting sap from wood collecting pails set on the ground and transporting it to a gathering tank pulled by oxen through the snow.[iv] A young Richard Franklin, son of Earl Franklin, a Cary employee, was shown leading a pair of steers with a goad stick, while in another scene, Mr. Cary himself appears driving a different pair of oxen along a road in the sugarbush.
Twentieth century sugaring was depicted both with the collection of sap in covered galvanized metal pails hung from the trees along with the cutting-edge Brower Sap Piping System. In one scene a man is shown installing the Gooseneck section of the Brower pipeline in a taphole in the tree. Later he is shown connecting sections of the pipeline along their wire supports, while in another he is walking along and checking the metal pipeline for leaks.
There are also numerous scenes of Cary’s Highland Farm sugarhouses in action with steam billowing from the cupola, men feeding the boiling arches and drawing off syrup. Other men are seen moving barrels of syrup, along with gathering and unloading tanks of fresh sap pulled on sleds by teams of Cary’s prized oxen.
Besides the footage of the sap gathering and syrup making process in the sugarbush and sugarhouses, the filmmakers also shot footage inside Cary’s St. Johnsbury plant. Such shots included a worker filling wooden boxes lined with waxed paper on a conveyor line with thick hot maple sugar from an overhead vat as well as a room full of hundreds of such boxes of sugar in a warehouse cooling. In contrast to the dirt and soot of the scenes from the sugarbush and sugarhouses, the shots from the plant interior feature employees clad in all white smocks and hats working with processing and automated packing equipment in a sterile-like white painted and polished interior. Shipping boxes labelled “Highland Pure Maple” are shown being nailed together and one scene a worker displays a can of “Highland Pure Maple Syrup”.
One-part marketing tool and one part educational materials, the film was likely shown in theaters as a short before feature films began. A few years after the shooting of the film, a reporter from the Caledonian Record who had been on hand to document the movie making told of his delight at seeing the film while in a movie house in Seattle, Washington. The reporter was even more shocked to see a few seconds of himself on the film where they had captured close-up images of him drinking fresh sap from a metal collection pail behind a large tree.
Notes
[i] The Cary silent film was donated as 2,600 feet on four reels to Northeast Historic Film in 1997 by Philippe Beaudry of Longueuil, Quebec for safe and secure archiving. The reels included footage of the Vermont flood of 1927 and is archived under the title “Cary Maple Sugar Company –outtakes” in the Philippe Beaudry Collection at Northeast Historic Film. The film has been converted to VHS and DVD masters for safe handling and reproduction. Unfortunately, restrictions on reproducing still images from the film coupled with the often poor quality of the images on the deteriorating film prevent the display many of the various scenes from the film, in particular scenes from the interior of the Cary plant and activity at the Stanton (now Jones) and Waterman (now Newell) sugarhouses (see Chapter Five). However, many of the still photographs made by the Richardson’s at the time of filming the moving picture display the same scenes in better quality. Copies of the film in DVD format are maintained at the Vermont Historical Society, UVM Bailey Howe Library, the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium Archives and the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum for educational purposes.
[ii] Florence A. Kendall, “Moving Pictures of Maple Sugar Making,” The Vermonter, Vol. 31, No. 9 (1926).
[iii] Lois Goodwin Greer, “America’s Maple Sugar King: George C. Cary,” The Vermonter Vol. 34, No. 1: 3-8 (1929); “Real Romance in VT. Maple Sugar Making : Three Epochs in Its Development Shown in Cary Camps” Unknown Newspaper, April 7, 1927. News clipping found in photocopy version of Cary Family Album in the George C. Cary Papers, Fairbanks Museum Archives (St. Johnsbury, VT).
[iv] “Real Romance in VT. Maple Sugar Making: Three Epochs in Its Development Shown in Cary Camps” Unknown Newspaper, April 7, 1927. News clipping found in photocopy version of Cary Family Album in the George C. Cary Papers, Fairbanks Museum Archives (St. Johnsbury, VT).