The Summer 2024 newsletter of the Vermont Maple Sugar Makers’ Association features an article written by me to launch a new regular feature in the newsletter called “The Maple History Corner.” I hope to contribute regular articles to the newsletter’s “Maple History Corner” and share bits and pieces of Vermont maple history.
Unlike my usual stories and historical vignettes, this particular article is more of a commentary and words of encouragement to Vermont sugarmakers to preserve and document their own personal maple histories.
You can read the article at this link or by clicking on the image to the left.
The result of an extensive and very comprehensive examination of publications in the collections of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin covering travel reports, natural history, and first hand narrative accounts in journals, diaries, and correspondence.
To the uninitiated, the collections of the library and archives of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin are an amazing and extensive treasure trove of information. I would even go so far as to call it the single greatest public library dedicated to history in the United States.
Volume I of the bibliographies contains 72 entries in chronological order spanning a period from 1634 to 1895. Volume II contains 147 entries spanning a period beginning in 1534 and ending in 1933. Each volume of the bibliographies contains an index at the end. The individual entries include a full bibliographic reference and a verbatim quote or excerpt of the notable and relevant text that addresses something related to the presence of maple trees or the use of maple products in the past. The vast majority of entries are focused on accounts of the early use of maple sap or manufacture of maple sugar and maple syrup by Native Americans, fur traders, and early settlers in Canada and New England. In addition, some entries have very brief notes or annotations to help explain some of the context or broader content of the specific publication in reference.
There is nothing especially unique about any of the entries in and of themselves since one will see most of these references repeated in other contexts and publications and one can discover these references through an exhaustive search of one’s own. However, what is handy and useful is having them published and indexed in a precise chronological form for easy use and reference.
Henry A. Schuette in 1940 when President of the American Oil Chemist’s Society.
The primary author of these bibliographies was Henry A. Schuette, a food chemist and professor of chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In addition to his laboratory work, Schuette had a special interest in the history of foods and spent a great deal of his spare time in the historical society library on the campus of the University of Wisconsin. Schuette also encouraged his students to investigate and better understand the history of food as a context for their food chemistry research.
One such doctoral chemistry student who took Professor Schuette’s encouragement to heart was Aaron J. Ihde who later went onto to himself become a notable chemist and food historian and professor at the University of Wisconsin. Ihde collaborated with Schuette on the second volume of the bibliography. The secondary author to the first volume of the bibliography was Sybil C. Schuette, who was a librarian in Wisconsin and presumably a relative of Henry A. Schuette.
For those hoping to learn more about the early accounts and descriptions of maple sugaring by our Euro-American and Native American ancestors, these bibliographies are a great introduction to the literature. And as noted above, for those already interested in the early records and accounts of the use and production of maple sugar and maple syrup, these bibliographies are a useful collection to have in one’s reference library.
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.
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.
The Library and Archives of Canada has made available an 8:14 minute color film from 1941 titled “Maple Sugar Time”.
Library and Archives of Canada maple sugaring film from 1941.
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).
In searching for detailed descriptions of maple sugaring methods and equipment from specific periods of time in our past, one of the most interesting publications comes from a piece by C.T. Alvord titled The Manufacture of Maple Sugar. Alvord’s report appeared in the first Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture for 1862 which was published in 1863 by the Government Printing Office in Washington, D.C. This was the first official agricultural related report of the newly formed United States Department of Agriculture, which was organized by law in 1862.
C.T. Alvord was Calvin Thales Alvord (1821-1894) a lawyer, progressive farmer, and sugarmaker who lived his whole life in Wilmington, Vermont. Alvord was a regular contributor to the farming and agricultural journals of his time such as the Country Gentleman, American Cultivator and Rural New Yorker, providing insights and opinions on everything from growing grass seed, to raising lambs and prized short horns, and of course maple sugaring. In fact much of what he wrote for the Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture for 1862 was previously published by him in volume 15, number 19 of the Country Gentleman in 1860 under the title “Sugar Making in the Olden Time.”
What is especially interesting about Alvord’s 1863 report is that he starts off with a description of what a typical sugaring operation was like about 25 years earlier, circa 1835, before bringing the reader up to date on what was the state of the art around 1860. Alvord’s description of sugaring in the early 1800s emphasized the use of multiple iron kettles for long nights of boiling, V-cuts and U-shaped wooden slat taps transitioning to tubular wooden spiles in drilled holes, and rough split log collection troughs transitioning to wooden pails on the ground or hung on spikes. The sugaring camp featured crude shacks in the woods for storage and shelter for the people when boiling but not for actually protecting the kettles or sap. Of course the product of those times was exclusively maple sugar.
Related to that, Alvord’s report is useful in showing how much maple syrup, or maple molasses as they sometimes called it, was being made by the early 1860s. It shows that the shift away from sugar production was well underway prior to the Civil War. In fact Alvord notes “…many farmers are now making ‘maple sirup’ to sell, instead of maple sugar. At present prices it is thought to be more profitable to make sirup than sugar.” It is interesting that he put the words “maple sirup” in quotation marks, when using that word choice instead of molasses as if it was a new word for the sugarmaker’s vocabulary. Alvord goes on to say that in recent years the maple sugarmakers in his area of Vermont have “to some extent” been making maple syrup instead of maple sugar and putting it up in wooden kegs and metal cans holding from one to four gallons.
Alvord’s 1860s description is important in that it shows how early much of the technology of the late 19th century was in use. With the exception of the flat pans on brick arches being replaced by evaporators with baffles and drop or raised flues as well as the shift to cast iron spiles and sheet metal collection pails, very little improvement was seen in the technology for the next 40 or so years. Even the sugarhouse described by Alvord was little changed in layout and form by the turn of the century.
Alvord even describes a kind of pipeline of grooved wooden slats laid end to end to direct sap from a gathering point higher in the sugarbush down to the sugarhouse. Recognizing the drawbacks of the open wooden pipeline for debris and snow and rain to affect the sap, Alvord notes that there were even examples of tubular tin “leading spouts” as he called them which was a “great improvement on the wooden spout. It can be used as well in stormy as in pleasant weather. It is made in the form of a tube or a pipe, in lengths of eight feet. The size of the tube generally made is one-half inch, and costs thirty-seven cents per rod; one end of these spouts is made a little larger than the other, so that the ends will fit tight in putting them up.” This description of a metal pipeline notably predates the invention and use of the better known Brower Gooseneck metal pipeline by a good 50 years.
A PDF of the entire report can be viewed and downloaded from the link above with the Alvord chapter found on pages 394 to 405.
As the longest standing publication for the maple industry, this archive of past issues is a treasure trove of information on what was happening and important to the maple industry in the second half of the twentieth century.
Beginning with Volume 1, Number 1 published in January 1962, one can review industry and production reports, examine advertisements, and read commentaries that trace the trends and issues of previous years. One can also follow through time new directions in research, changes in technology and equipment, and the ups and downs of marketing and policy.
For many a review of past issues of the digest may seem like a fairly recent walk down memory lane since many current maple producers were active during much of the era covered by these earlier issues. For others, these are a tightly dated, rich and detailed source of information on the maple industry’s more recent past.
Preserving and telling the maple history story as complete and accurately as possible relies on a wide range of sources of information, artifacts, and contributors. Sugarmakers have always had a strong affinity for collecting and preserving the material objects and antiques that help tell the history of maple syrup and sugar. There are a number of great museums specifically dedicated to housing and presenting myriad tools, devices, and equipment, as well as honoring those that have made significant contributions to the industry. What we have seen less of is the sharing and organized preservation of the documentary history; the photos, written and paper records, and past publications. I would argue there is a growing need for greater consideration and attention to creating, maintaining, and contributing to an archive or archives focused on the maple syrup industry.
It is easy to say or think that one’s old records or files or photos or even objects are not really important or of no interest to anyone in the near or distant future. But you’d be surprised what folks miss after its gone. Such items, be they from a small mulitple-generation maple producer or a large corporate packer or equipment manufacturer, become the bedrock of the industry’s history. While it may seem like people understand and know their history and someone will always remember the past, memories fade and change, and people come and go, figuratively and literally. You can’t and don’t necessarily want to preserve everything, the challenge of course is knowing and deciding what is valuable and might be worth preserving.
Archival materials related to maple history most certainly do exist and can be found in varying amounts in the archives of most state historical society libraries in the maple producing regions. Although I am less familiar with the archives in adjacent Canadian provinces, having never heard of an archive dedicated to the maple industry, I assume that the situation is somewhat similar to in the U.S. In some cases local county or community historical societies have provided space and resources for the storage and access to maple related archives and select collections. As an example, the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium and later the St. Johnsbury History and Heritage Center have provided preservation services and access to the George C. Cary Papers in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, keeping this important collection in the same town where George C. Cary’s maple sugaring empire flourished.
In the mid 1980s, the Vermont Maple Industry Council worked with a collection of people mostly affiliated with maple research at the University of Vermont (UVM) to form a Maple History Committee and tasked them with compiling “historical information on the folklore, production methods, and economics of the Vermont maple industry and make it available . . . for use in teaching children and others”. A great deal of material was collected and put on file in the Special Collections and Archives at the UVM Bailey/Howe library with a particular focus on the research contributions of individuals associated with the University of Vermont. This committee was a great idea and a great start but it was too short lived. Unfortunately, the individuals that formed the backbone of the committee at UVM moved on to retirement and in many cases passed away and in time the committee was no longer active.
More recently, the University of Vermont libraries Center for Digital Initiatives in conjunction with the UVM Proctor Maple Research Center has taken a more modern approach to preserving a part of their history and some of the materials of the Maple History Committee by scanning and putting online a Maple Research Collections. This includes digital copies of the many articles, reports, and photographs that stemmed from the years of research at the Proctor field station as well as digital copies of maple related reports that appeared in early editions of the University of Vermont Agricultural Extension Bulletins. This is a great example of using digital means to preserve and share a portion of the archives from UVM’s important maple research legacy.
I recently had the pleasure of meeting with folks at the Leader Evaporator Company in Swanton to discuss maple history and learned of their own long term project to review their many historic business records, catalogs and reports and document their corporate history. It was fantastic to see that they were tackling such an important project since the Leader Company’s history is in many ways an overview of the history of maple equipment manufacturing and dealers in the United States. In discussing their work, I asked what they thought they might do with all the historic, largely paper material they had assembled about the company, to which they said, “that’s a good question and we haven’t really thought about that yet”. This really hit home that not only is there a need to provide resources and space for the safe and organized preservation and study of the documentary record of the maple industry, there is also a need to recognize its equal value and importance alongside the preservation of the maple industry’s historic places, artifacts and objects, and stories.
Museums dedicated to maple history do a relatively good job preserving, displaying, and interpreting the material remains and objects of sugaring. For the most part their focus has not been in the area of preserving the paper, photos, and other ephemera found in most archives. Preserving such materials takes the right kind of space, as well as financial resources and human resources, not to mention a way of making these materials available to researchers and interested people. After all, that is the point, preserve these materials so we can study and know and tell the maple history story. However, maintaining an archives may not fit within the means or the varied missions of these museums.
Is this a call for a dedicated maple history archives? Not necessarily, although the idea has merit. Perhaps there is simply a need to improve the understanding and integration and access to what already exists in established archives and to push for more concerted effort to curate, preserve, and share those records that remain and continue to be discovered out there amongts the maple syrup community. This is the history and legacy of individuals, families, companies, institutions, and an entire industry. As with a lot of things, one has to ask oneself what is it worth to preserve the history of an industry and who should be the ones doing it?
Unlike my usual stories and historical vignettes, this particular article is more of a commentary and words of encouragement to Vermont sugarmakers to preserve and document their own personal maple histories.
