Category: Native American

A 1952 Visit to an Indian Sugabush

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.

Pete Johnson tending the fire and watching the boil on his flat pan and stone arch (photo courtesy of Ted Peterson and the Lac du Flambeau Tribal Historic Preservation Office).

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.

View of the half wigwam structure for sugar making at the Johnson’s Partridge Lake Sugarbush (photo courtesy of Ted Peterson and the Lac du Flambeau Tribal Historic Preservation Office).

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.

Rose Johnson spooning warm soft maple sugaring onto metal sugar molds (photo courtesy of Ted Peterson and the Lac du Flambeau Tribal Historic Preservation Office).

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.

Matthew Thomas. “A 1952 Visit to an Indian Sugarbush.” Wisconsin Maple News. 2003, volume 19, number 3, page 23.

Sugarbush Archaeology

One interesting and important way to understand and tell the story of the history of maple sugaring is through the remains of past sugaring operations. Recording and investigating these sites and artifacts from maple sugaring’s past falls into the realm of what I like to call sugarbush archaeology.

For many folks when the idea of archaeology is brought up they immediately think of studying past human behavior before the time of written records, and that certainly covers a lot of the focus of archaeology. However, archaeology is not solely limited to the pre-writing segment of human history and also includes consideration of our material remains from more recent periods in time.

Just about everyone that has spent any time in or around a sugarbush which has been in use for a few generations or more is probably aware of the location of an old sugarhouse or boiling camp. If it is fairly recently retired or abandoned, it may be a standing ruin or relic, but if it was left many more years ago, chances are it has been reduced to a simple scatter of twisted metal, an irregular foundation or collections of stones, or a mounded patch of ground in the woods. Those remains are now artifacts and features of an archaeological site. The heritage of sugarmakers is certainly preserved in things like the photographs and collections of antiques and ephemera that line the wall of many sugar houses. But there are other artifacts, sometimes very big artifacts, of maple sugaring that we can also preserve and learn from.

While there are some written records describing early maple sugaring activities, the further one goes back in time, the fewer and fewer records there are and what is written is generally lacking in detail or description. For example, in the western Great Lakes region in earlier times when Euro-Americans were still settling the land and access to use of the woods was more open and with fewer limits, it was not uncommon to set up a sugarbush and boiling camp where ever it was deemed best. This may have been private land, it may have been unclaimed public land, it may have been tribal land or even tax forfeiture land.

Photo of nested kettles in abandoned Native American sugaring camp.

Today, archaeologists find a variety of sites in the forest that mark the past location of all sorts and scales of maple sugaring, from the simplest boiling camp that may have been a single kettle used for one season to the former location of a sugarhouse that contained multiple evaporator where thousands of gallons of syrup were made each season.

Most of the work being done that identifies maple sugaring archaeological sites happens on federal, tribal, state, and county lands where there are rules in place directing land managers to look for archaeological and historic sites like these and take those places into account when managing those lands. But maple sugaring sites are all over, and there are undoubtedly many many times more sites on private lands and in current sugarbushes that any of these public lands.

Photo of the unloading ramp and sugarhouse at the Grand Island sugarbush shortly after abandonment.

I’ve worked for many years as a field archaeologist in the woods of northern Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota and have recorded dozens and dozens of maple sugaring sites. Most of these sites were the remains of small short lived boiling camps with simple stone and earthen arches and an associated scatter of metal artifacts.  But every now and then there was an opportunity to work with a more substantial site. For example one interesting site was the remains of the Cleveland Cliffs Mining Company’s sugarbush on land now managed by the Hiawatha National Forest on Grand Island in Lake Superior off the shore of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

 

Photograph of the remains of the sugar house on Grand Island from east side of site looking west.
Map of archaeological remains of Grand Island sugaring camp.

The company operated a commercial sugaring operation for xx years before they closed shop and abandoned everything in place in 19xx. Unlike a lot of sugarhouses, when they closed they just walked away and essentially left the evaporators and equipment behind. I was able to photograph and map what was left of the decaying sugar house which was presented in a 2003 article in the Michigan Academician.

Other researchers have also looked at maple history from the lens of the archaeological record, with two notable publications being Keener, Gordon and Nye’s 2010 article on the Petticrew-Taylor Farmstead in Ohio and David Babson’s 2011 doctoral dissertation on late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century sugaring sites in Lewis County, New York.

While the study of abandoned commercial sugaring sites is fascinating, a great deal of my attention has been spent working on identifying and understanding the remains of sugaring activities associated with Ojibwe and Potowatomi Native American communities from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most people who are less familiar with those Indian communities, including sugarmakers from New England, are often a surprised to learn that maple sugaring continues to be an important part of the seasonal activities of Indian people into the twentieth century. This is in part a legacy of the Indian maple production being a subsistence activity for family and community consumption and largely operating outside of the mainstream  realities the mainstream market economy. It is also a relic of a government assimilation policy that discouraged Indian people from continuing their traditional gathering activities, often forcing Indian people to quietly carry out their sugaring.

Map of remains of Native American boiling arch at McCord Indian Village in northern Wisconsin.

While working as an archaeologist for the Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe Band in northern Wisconsin we recorded dozens of abandoned sugaring camps both on and off the reservation. A great deal of this research was published in an article in 2001 in the Wisconsin Archeologist which presented an overview of the kinds of sites we were finding and the material remain left behind like metal cans, pails, birch bark containers, and metal and wood taps for sap collection as well as kettles, chains, and hooks for boiling sap.

Map of remains of storage structure and associated artifact scatter at Lac du Flambeau sugar camp LDF-081.

 

Learning as much as we could at the sites at Lac du Flambeau was a springboard to being asked to help record and interpret many more Native American sugaring sites in northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Much of that work was presented in a 2005 article in the Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology about the remains of tell-tale U-shaped boiling arches at known and suspected Native American communities.  Both of these articles were largely aimed at helping the practitioners of professional field archaeology better recognize and appreciate this often overlook and misunderstood cultural resource.

Our limited understanding of the history of Indian sugaring has been an important reasons and motivation for me to focus on recording and interpreting these sites. There are many of non-Indian archaeological remains of sugaring to investigate as well; however, the supporting documentation and historical information related to those sites is a bit more robust. Also because many of the Euro-American sugaring sites were established on lands that continue to be held in private ownership, often as sugarbushes to this day, they may be in a better position to be preserved and protected.

When talking about the early years of maple sugaring in North American, curious and knowledgeable people invariably bring up the question of who made maple sugar first, Native peoples or the Euro-Americans and Euro-Canadians that came to the new world. That’s a very interesting question and one that archaeology should be able to help answer. Wading into the origins debate, as I refer to it, is a curious topic and not unlike opening up a political can of worms.  People are very sure of what they have come to believe is the truth, regardless of what evidence they are presented. However, I will save my thoughts on that topic for the moment and dedicate another post to tackling that in the future.

What is important to consider and appreciate in looking at and managing a stand of maple trees, be it a current or past sugarbush and on private or public lands is that the the land has a story to tell. Often times this story is not recorded any where else and may no longer even remain in the minds and memories of those that worked those woods. What looks like trash or ruins does have meaning if you look at it from a certain light. Likewise the old roads, fence lines, scarred trees, and signs of different cutting histories and forest management are part of the unwritten record of sugarbush archaeology. Where we can we should take the time to consider, document, learn from and maybe even preserve what remains of the past years of sugaring.

 

REFERENCES  CITED

Babson, David W., “Sweet Spring: The Development and Meaning of Maple Syrup Production at Fort Drum, New York.” (doctoral dissertation, Syracuse University, 2011).

Keener, Craig S, Stephen C Gordon, and Kevin Nye, “Uncovering a Mid-Nineteenth Century Maple Sugar Camp and Stone Furnace at the Petticrew-Taylor Farmstead in Southwest Ohio.” Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology 35, no. 2 (2010) 133-166.

Thomas, Matthew M., “The Archaeology of Great Lakes Native American Maple Sugar Production in the Reservation Era.” The Wisconsin Archeologist 82, no. 1 (2001) 75-102.

Thomas, Matthew M. and Janet Silbernagel, “The Evolution of a Maple Sugaring Landscape on Lake Superior’s Grand Island.” The Michigan Academician 35, no. 2 (2003) 135-158.

Thomas, Matthew M., “Historic American Indian Maple Sugar and Syrup Production Boiling Arches in Michigan and Wisconsin.” Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology 30, no. 2(2005) 299-326.