This article originally appeared in a 2003 edition of the Wisconsin Maple News.
In the late summer of 1951 while working as a forester for the Northern Highland State Forest in Vilas County, a young Ted Peterson discovered a maple sugaring camp in an old growth forest of sugar maple and yellow birch on what he thought was state forest land. Noting a large flat pan resting on a sturdy stone and earth arch and a very old upside-down copper kettle sitting inside half of a birch bark covered wigwam, Peterson made a note to himself to come back the following spring to find out just whose sugarbush this was.
Returning the following April with his camera in hand, Peterson came upon a nicely cleared path through the snow leading to the evaporator and wigwam he witnessed the summer before. Only this time the sugar camp was in full operation with steam rising from the flat pan, metal pails hanging from every maple, and a middle aged Potawatomi Indian couple tending the fire and gathering the sap. Realizing he was an uninvited guest, Ted Peterson quickly introduced himself to the proprietors, Rose and Pete Johnson.
Fascinated by what he saw in front of him, Peterson wanted to know more and began to ask one question after another to the Indian man tending the fire under the flat pan. But Pete Johnson was very short with his answers, aw he was not sure who this man really was and why he was there. Johnson also knew that there was a longstanding disagreement between the Escanabas, his wife’s family and landowners, and the state of Wisconsin over the ownership of the woods they were tapping and land on which they lived. Not daunted by the Mr. Johnson’s cool reception, Peterson pressed on, taking pictures and asking questions about the boiling process, tapping the trees, and the layout of their sugarbush. Not seeing any thermometers or hydrometers, Peterson asked Pete Johnson how he knew when the syrup was done, to which Johnson replied that it was finished when it tastes right and when it feels right.
A short distance away from the stone arch and flat pan was the half wigwam where Peterson found Rose Johnson tending a small fire under the old copper kettle. The Johnsons often set as many as 500 taps each spring, and Peterson soon realized that in addition to making syrup, the Johnson’s were making sugar. If fact, the majority of the sap they gathered ultimately went into making maple sugar. It was at the hands and direction of Mrs. Johnson that as much as 160 pounds of sugar was made every spring in the large copper trade kettle, handed down from earlier generations. In observing Mrs. Johnson boil the syrup for sugar, Peterson noted that she would rub the inner rim of the kettle with deer tallow, and each time the bubbling mass of thick syrup foamed up it would touch the grease near the rim and settle back down. Traditional defoamer! When the syrup has thickened to the right consistency and bubbles, the kettle was taken off the fire and the maple molasses was spooned into metal sugar molds to cool into sugar cakes. Not having electricity or an icebox in their cabin, the Johnsons kept most of the more easily stored sugar for home consumption. Much of the 150 gallons of syrup that they made each spring was sold in stores in Eagle River, Star Lake, Rhinelander, and Lac du Flambeau, providing much needed cash to an otherwise subsistence lifestyle.
Rose Johnson’s parents, John and Mary Escanaba, settled on the north shore of Partridge Lake in 1904, after a smallpox epidemic broke up their Potawatomi village at nearby Indian Lake. At that time, John Escanaba made a deal with a man from the sawmill in Star Lake to obtain title this 40 acres parcel from the Goodyear logging company in exchange for nine ponies. Unfortunately, John Escanaba passed away the following year and the piece of paper they received in exchange was not actually the deed, being a worthless piece of paper. In spite of that, the Escanabas never left, resisting efforts to move them to the Potawatomi Reservation instead choosing to maintain a traditional lifestyle in which they fed and clothed themselves from the land and their labors. Pete Johnson came to the Partridge Lake settlement in 1914 when he married Rose Escanaba, where along with Rose’s mother Mary, they raised their family. Although they maintained their traditional religious beliefs and a traditional gathering, farming, and hunting lifestyle, the Escanabas and Johnsons did not necessarily shun technological improvements. Sometime before the 1920s, they stopped boiling sap in kettles and began to boil sap in a large iron flat pan. They also abandoned the use of wood taps and birch bark containers, shifting to metal taps and sap cans. Every few years they would move their camp to another location in these woods to allow some of the trees in their sugarbush a rest and they only removed the non-maples and the sick and damaged for firewood.
Pete Johnson died in the 1960s and Rose in the 1970s, but not before the family obtained title to their home and traditional sugarbush. The family continues to own and occupy the homestead and sugarbush and has made syrup in the woods as recently as the early 1990s.
Ted Peterson later went on to become an extension forester with the late Fred Trenk at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he spent many years as a conduit for new information and technology on syrup making to Wisconsin maple producers. Before his retirement in 1990, Peterson provided important operational support to the Wisconsin Maple Syrup Producers Association working hard with producers, striving to improve production and quality. But it was his 1952 encounter with a Potawatomi family in the woods of Vilas County where he received his one of his first lessons on maple syrup production.