In January 2020 I had the honor of being invited to the Vermont Maple Conference to make a couple of presentations on historical research I had conducted in the last few years. One presentation was a condensed version of the story of George C. Cary and the Cary Maple Sugar Company, which is the topic of my book Maple King: The Making of a Maple Syrup Empire. The second presentation was on new research I have completed for an article currently in review for publication in the journal Vermont History. This research traces the early origins and development of the use of plastic tubing for gathering maple sap in the maple syrup industry.
University of Vermont Extension Maple Specialist Mark Isselhardt arranged to have the audio from both presentations recorded in association with the presentation slides and posted these on the UVM Extension Maple Website. You can click on the following presentation titles or the title slides here to link to the full audio/slide show for each one. Enjoy!
One of my ongoing research projects, and the subject of my next book, looks at the history of Abbot Augustus Low’s Horse Shoe Forestry Company maple sugaring operation in New York’s Adirondack wilderness. Low was a very wealthy New Yorker who at the end of the nineteenth century established an extensive maple operation and associated townsite, mills, dams, and private great camp, all connected by his own personal railroad in the wilderness of the Adirondacks.
Hand painted label for Horse Shoe Forestry Company’s maple sugar featuring the Maple Valley sugar house. From the collections of the Adirondack Experience.
As a part of this research I have been conducting extensive field investigations searching for and mapping the physical remains associated with Low’s maple operations. While there is much to tell, and will be told when my book is finished, here is a small taste of what has been found and how.
Many folks with an interest in Adirondack history and maple sugaring history are familiar with an album from 1901 of hand-colored, unlabeled, photographs taken by George Baldwin titled Adirondack Sugar Bushes – Horseshoe – St. Lawrence Co., N.Y. These photographs and album were commissioned by Low and the Horse Shoe Forestry Company. There is only one known version of this album which is kept in the collections of the Adirondack Experience, a museum dedicated to Adirondack history in Blue Mountain Lake, NY. What is not as well known, is that there is another set of the same images in non-colorized form that were submitted for copyright purposes and are now held in the Library of Congress (LOC) in Washington, D.C. As a part of the copyright process, the images were published in the 1901 Copyright Office of the Library of Congress – Catalogue of Titles Entries of Books and Other Items, each with corresponding numbers and titles. What is helpful is that the set of images that are now found in the LOC, which I examined in the fall of 2018, all have their original numbers printed on them so one can see what were the actual titles assigned to these images in 1901 by A. A. Low.
Through a variety of historical and archival references and reports, we know the Horse Shoe Forestry Company built three large buildings for processing maple sap, each containing five enormous Champion Evaporators made by the G.H. Grimm Company. While these were referred to as sugar houses, they were more like maple syrup factories or plants, operating on a scale not before seen in the maple industry. All three of the large plants are featured in images in the colorized album, but I will focus on one of these plants for this particular part of the Horse Shoe story.
Black and white image of “Maple Valley” sugar house taken by George Baldwin and submitted to Library of Congress as part of Horse Shoe Forestry Company copyright registration. From collections of Library of Congress.
This particular image, LOC copyright number 1690, was titled “Maple Valley Sugar House.” For those familiar with the various images and maple sugaring buildings that once stood at Horse Shoe, that title might cause some confusion. There is another, better-known, syrup plant, also called the Maple Valley Sugar House, show in the figure below. The LOC title for the better-known sugar house is also labeled “Maple Valley Sugar House,” and has been assigned LOC number 1689. For the sake of clarity, I will call these Maple Valley 1 (image 1689) and Maple Valley 2 (image 1690).
Colorized image of Horse Shoe Forestry Company’s Maple Valley 1 sugar house (LOC copyright image 1689) taken by George Baldwin. From the Collections of the Adirondack Experience.
Maple Valley 1 was the showcase sugar house in Low’s maple operation, and the archaeological remains of it are still fairly well preserved, if one knows where to look. Other researchers in the past, such as railroad historian Michael Kudish, have identified and published the location of Maple Valley 1. However, the true location of Maple Valley 2 has been unknown. One of the goals of my fieldwork in this Horse Shoe Forestry Company maple history project has been to identify all the locations of the buildings associated with the maple sugaring operation.
To that end, archival research in the collections at the Adirondack Experience (AE) led to the surprise discovery of another set of previously unknown images taken by photographer George Baldwin as a part of the same sugarbush series of the popular colorized album. These images, which had not been previously digitized and widely shared, brought to light a number of new and interesting details.
Black and white image showing Horse Shoe Forestry Company’s Maple Valley 2 sugar house in distance (AE image P015527) taken by George Baldwin. From the Collections of the Adirondack Experience.
In an attempt to shed light on the location of the Maple Valley 2 sugar house, the following image was especially important. In the image we see a boy tending to a sap collection pail on a hillside. But if one zooms in to what is in the background through the trees, we can clearly see the Maple Valley 2 Sugar House. Wowza! You can also see in the image the many elevated sap pipelines running through the trees downslope carrying sap from the sugarbush to the sugar house. These pipelines are very evident in the LOC image 1690. What is particularly notable in the full image of the boy on the hillside is the contour of the landscape in the immediate foreground as well as the land contours to the left of the image across the drainage and the flatter and much more open space surrounding the sugar house in the background.
Close up detail of AE image P015527 showing the Maple Valley 2 sugar house in the background through the trees. From the Collections of the Adirondack Experience.
Finding a place in the landscape that fit location was key to identifying where this image was taken and where the Maple Valley 2 sugar house once stood. In thinking this through and studying the landscape settings that had potential, an initial question was where exactly to start. Conventional wisdom has been that there were three branches to Low’s railroad each with their own names, Wake Robin Railroad, Maple Valley Railroad, and Grasse River Railroad, and we known there were three large sugar houses. Logic would have it that one branch of each railroad went to each of the large sugar houses. But was that true and what was the evidence to support or counter that notion? Well, the evidence from the LOC labels were that the three large sugar houses were named Wake Robin, Maple Valley 1, and Maple Valley 2. That would suggest that one of the large sugar houses was not associated with the Grasse River railroad branch. So, instead of looking in the vicinity of the Grasse River drainage, maybe one should start looking for a location for Maple Valley 2 in a place that was connected to the Maple Valley locale.
After studying topographic maps of the area, air photos from the 1940s to the present, and historic maps that show roads and railroad grades that connect to Maple Valley, I settled on a few possibilities and put them to the test. Could I find the spot where that photo was taken of the boy at the tree with the Maple Valley 2 plant in the background? After a bit of tromping up and down a few drainages, valleys, and hillsides, I think I found the spot!
Modern photo from May 2019 taken from same location as AE image P015527.
To the left is a modern view taken in early May 2019 that attempts to represent the same location and vantage point as Baldwin’s 1901 hillside photo (AE image P015527). As a stand-in for the boy in the original image is Adirondack trail expert and local history buff Bill Hill, who accompanied me in the field that day. If you are not familiar with Bill’s work you should check out his blog and new book Hiking the Trail to Yesterday for great information on enjoying historical places in the Adirondacks on foot or with paddle.
Side-by-side photographs comparing the 1901 image by Baldwin (AE image P015527) with recent photo taken from same location and vantage point.
And here is the original and the recent, image side-by-side in a repeat photography format. I like what I see, with the angle of the slope, the contours on the far side of the drainage, and the flat valley below, which is now much more grown up with mature spruce and maple.
If this gets us to the right location for the Maple Valley 2 sugar house, which I think it does, then we are left with the next question. What remains of the Maple Valley 2 sugar house, if any, are left on the flat ground in the valley below? And that part of the story I will leave to be told in the book.
The Granite State Evaporator Company was one of the only evaporator companies to come out of New Hampshire in the late 19th century. The company has its origins when Perley E. Fox purchased a tin and stove works in Marlow, NH in 1869. Fox was born in Marlow in 1833, but as a young man headed west to Illinois in 1857 where he worked as a school teacher and professor. He returned to Marlow in the early 1860s working again as a teacher and president of the Marlow Academy and as a daguerreotype artist according to the 1860 census.
Portrait of Perley E. Fox from 1890s.
He entered the tin, stove, and hardware business when he bought out the business of J.H. Fisher in Marlow.; however, it is not clear when he first began manufacturing evaporators for maple sugaring. Perley obtained a patent in 1875 (US165223) for an evaporating pan that was a series of individual pans that were linked sequentially through tubular connectors placed in an alternating formation, effectively forming a sort of baffle or zig-zag pattern of flow of sap and syrup through the pans.
Drawing of evaporating pan patent (US165223) awarded to Perley E. Fox in 1875.
Advertisements from as early as 1879 referred to Perley’s evaporator as the Granite State Evaporator. By the 1890s the illustrations for the Granite State Evaporator Company show it as large flat pan with divided compartments resting on a portable steel arch. Perley also patented his own sap spout (US283593) in 1883 that was a hookless style formed from rolled sheet metal in a tubular design.
Drawing for Perley E. Fox’s patent (US283593) from 1883 for a rolled sheet metal sap spout.
Perley reportedly retired from the hardware and tin business in 1892 to devote his time to farming, but it wasn’t the end of his evaporator company. In fact, the Granite State Evaporator Company continued to operate and manufacture evaporators well after that time. Perley was noted as an exhibitor of his evaporator at a number of fairs and agricultural expos in the region after 1892 and his name continued to be associated as the owner of the company in the next couple of decades.
Illustration of the Granite State Evaporator and portable steel arch, ca. 1898.
The company reached out beyond the range of New England maple sugar producers to the midwestern farm states to sell devices similar to small evaporators or finishing rigs that they called “feed cookers” and “water heaters”. These large deep flat pans sat on metal arches and were marketed as a universal tool for all your boiling needs on the farm, be they heating water and food to feed animals, or preserving foods or making jellies. The Granite State Evaporator Company employed a special salesman based out of New York City to help promote their feed cookers. By the late 1890s, Frank E. Morrison was listed as the company president and advertising agent and maintained a sales office in Temple Court on Beekman Street in New York City.
Advertisement from 1895 for the Granite State Evaporator Company.1897 advertisement for the Granite State Feed Cooker and Water Heater, a piece of equipment handy on the farm that was similar in design and manufacture as a maple sap evaporator.
Morrison moved on to another company by the early 1900s, but the Granite State Evaporator Company continued to manufacture evaporators and advertise to maple sugar makers in New England newspapers for a few more years. When the company stopped production is not exactly clear.
In his later years, Perley represented Marlow as a member of the New Hampshire legislature in 1903 and 1904. In August 1916, a fire in Marlow destroyed a number of buildings including the evaporator factory. Newspaper accounts of the fire described the building for the Granite State Evaporator Company as owned by Perley Fox; however, it was not clear if the company was in active production. Following the fire and the destruction of the company factory, Perley Fox was listed as a locksmith at the age of 86 in the 1920 census. He died of pneumonia in 1929 in a nursing home in Westmoreland, NH.
The lesser known Keystone Evaporator was a product of Sproul Hardware and Manufacturing Company out of Delevan, New York. James B Sproul & Sons opened a hardware store in Delevan, New York around 1902 and along with hardware goods they began manufacturing maple sugar equipment including evaporators of various sizes and syrup finishing rigs.
Portrait of James B. Sproul, founder of the Sproul Hardware and Manufacturing Company in Delevan, NY.
Prior to settling in the Delevan area, Sproul and his family tried their hand at farming for a few years in Ashtabula, Ohio and before than he was in the dry goods business in Springs, Pennsylvania. Both of J.B. Sproul’s two sons, Clyde Robert Sproul and James Fay Sproul, were a part of the hardware and manufacturing business from its very beginning and carried the manufacturing portion of the business forwards after the death of their father J. B. Sproul in 1917.
Portion of a Sproul Manufacturing Company sales brochure featuring the Keystone Evaporator, circa 1910-1915.
In 1909 Sproul & Sons expanded their production operations, constructing a new building in Delevan specifically dedicated to manufacturing maple sugaring evaporators. At that time, they also posted advertisements in the Buffalo, NY area looking for experienced “tinners”.
The primary product of their maple sugaring manufacturing efforts was called the Keystone Evaporator, which was a flat-bottomed set up with multiple pans on an iron arch. A particularly unique feature of the Keystone Evaporators was a series of horizontal tubes built into the back pan to serve as a kind of sap pre-heater. The smaller model called the Keystone Junior featured vertical tubes in the rear pan that were referred to as a cupped heater.
Image of the horizontal tubes in the deeper sap heater pan at the rear of the Keystone Evaporator cropped from Sproul Manufacturing Company sales brochure.
In the 1930s, the Sproul Manufacturing Company added another evaporator to their line up which they called the Cyclone Evaporator that featured a back pan with deep flues, a middle pan with shallower flues, and a flat-bottomed front or syrup pan.
1934 advertisement for Sproul Hardware and Manufacturing Company’s Cyclone Evaporator.
Sproul Manufacturing offered a full-complement of maple sugaring supplies and equipment including the Vermont sap spout made by the Vermont Evaporator Company and patented by Willis. They produced their own sap gathering and storage tanks and their special Keystone sap pail. The sap pail cover they offered was made in the design patented by Augustus H. Todd of Griffin’s Corners, New York.
Patent drawing for A.H. Todd’s 1884 design for a sap bucket cover (US302604) sold by Sproul Manufacturing Company.
By 1915, J.B. Sproul appears to have retired from the business and left it in the hands of his sons. In 1916, they sold the brick and mortar hardware store and the two sons instead focused their attention on manufacturing sugaring equipment. This continued through the 1920s, 1930s, and into the 1940s.
It is not clear when exactly the Sproul Manufacturing Company stopped manufacturing and selling evaporators, but it was probably sometime in the mid-1940s. The older of the two sons, Clyde R. Sproul, passed away in 1946 and it appears that the company was transferred to bank ownership in 1950. The younger son Fay Sproul himself passed away in 1957.
Image of reverse side of Sproul Manufacturing Company sale brochure featuring sugar making supplies.
A somewhat unique partnership between two giants in the maple industry occurred at the turn of the last century when the G.H. Grimm Company produced a specially designed sap pail cover for the Horse Shoe Forestry Company. The Horse Shoe Forestry Company was a new endeavour of Brooklyn millionaire Abbot Augustus Low. Low had purchases tens of thousands of acres of forest around Horse Shoe Lake in the Adirondacks with the intent of developing a large-scale modern and efficient maple syrup operation. Low also happened to be an experienced inventor with dozens of patents to his name, who, when faced with a problem or an opportunity, tried to make an improvement or come up with an entirely new design. In the case of maple sugaring, the lowly sap pail cover did not escape Low’s attention.
Baldwin image of sap pails with both red and yellow covers in use. Photo courtesy of the Adirondack Experience.
As one of the leading equipment manufacturers of the time, G. H. Grimm was the company chosen by A.A. Low and the Horse Shoe Forestry Company for purchase of many new evaporators, sap pails, spouts, and sap storage tanks. Numerous newspaper accounts from the late 1890s and early 1900s describe with awe the sheer size of the equipment orders placed with G.H. Grimm by the Horse Shoe Forestry Company. By the height of their operations, the Horse Shoe Company had built three large sugarhouses, factories really, to enclose as many as 15 of the very largest evaporators the Grimm Company made at the time.
Excerpt from an undated G.H. Grimm & Co. pamphlet promoting the “Horseshoe Cover” alongside the Grimm Spout No. 1. Collections of author.
Low and the Horse Shoe Company were such good customers for G.H. Grimm, the Grimm Company used their name as a selling point in their advertising. Noting in a 1907 ad to sell their sap spouts, that the Horse Shoe Company, touted as the world’s largest sugar maker, had purchased 50,000 of the Grimm spouts. No other sugarbush was even close to that large in scale and that number of spout begs the question were there also that many Horse Shoe-Grimm sap pail covers in use at Horse Shoe as well?
Although produced primarily for the the Horse Shoe Company, the Horse Shoe-Grimm sap pail cover was not for the Horse Shoe Company’s exclusive use. Grimm made the cover available for anyone to purchase and use. An undated G.H. Grimm promotional pamphlet informs readers that for twenty-five cents they will send you a a sample of a hookless No. 1 Grimm sap spout and Horse Shoe sap pail cover.
Baldwin image highlighting red sap pail cover. Photo courtesy of the Adirondack Experience.
A series of photographs taken by George A. Baldwin for the Horse Shoe Forestry Company in 1900 or 1901 includes examples of Low’s Horse Shoe – Grimm sap pail cover in action. One particular set of these images was hand colorized by Baldwin and depicts both the red and yellow sap pail covers in use in the Horse Shoe sugarbush.
Image of A.A. Low’s 1901 patent design for the Horse Shoe Forestry Company – G.H. Grimm sap pail cover.
A.A. Low applied for a patent on his sap cover invention on June 6, 1900, before being awarded patent number 668,313 on February 19, 1901. The cover itself was made
from two sheets of metal molded such that they formed a raised shape surrounded by a flat rim. The core in the center of the two raised sides was supposed to serve as an insulating air-pocket to help keep sap in the pail cool. The raised center also served to position the cover in the pail with the wide rim extending over the sides of the pail to keep debris and moisture from entering. It was necessary to use a hookless spout like the Grimm Spout No. 1 that would fit into the hole on the collection pail.
Detail of the logo embossed into the metal of the cover with the upturned horseshoe for the Horse Shoe Forestry Company along with the name G.H. Grimm & Co., Rutland, VT.
As a strong self-promoter and regular use of advertising and trademarks, the Horse Shoe – Grimm cover did not escape the hand of A.A. Low. Every Horse Shoe cover was embossed on both sides with the Horse Shoe Forestry Company name and logo as well as the G.H. Grimm and Co. name and location of Rutland, VT. Interestingly, the embossing also notes patent applied for, suggesting that the Grimm Company began producing the covers sometime in the second half of the year 1900.
Side view of the two colors and profile shape of the Horse Shoe -Grimm sap pail cover. This particular example is in the collections of the Adirondack Experience.
Ever thinking of improving efficiency in his sugarbush, Low had his sap pail covers painted red on one side and yellow on the other. The idea was that on each sap gathering run, the covers would be turned over after the pail was emptied. The two colors allowed the men gathering sap to see from a distance which pails had been collected and which had not. The G.H. Grimm promotional pamphlet noted that each cover is painted on both sides to prevent rusting, although it does not note the two color scheme.
The photos on the left from the collections of the Adirondack Experience are examples of the bright red and yellow colors used on each side of the Horse Shoe – Grimm sap pail covers. Note the hanging hole near the rim. This was not originally part of the A.A. Low design and was likely added at a later date by another maple syrup maker.
For those interested in the history of A.A. Low’s Horse Shoe Forestry Company maple syrup operation, check back in for additional posts on other aspects of the story including new, never before seen site maps and photos from the field. Eventually this research will be compiled and shared in the publication of my second book. For the time being, I am deep in the throes of field and archival research documenting and detailing the exact locations of Low’s maple syrup operations at Horse Shoe and recounting the broader history of use and development of Low’s estate.
And should anyone know the whereabouts of one of these Grimm-Horse Shoe Forestry Company sap pail covers that might be for sale, I would very much like to hear from you!
This article originally appeared in a 2004 edition of the Wisconsin Maple News.
Plastic tubing and vacuum pumping continue to grow in popularity in Wisconsin sugarbushes with a few more miles added every year. But long before the invention of plastic tubing in the late 1950s, early twentieth century Yankee farmers wanting to reduce the labor of gathering sap invented a metal gravity-fed pipeline system that carried sap directly from the tree to the sugarhouse. This metal pipeline system consisted of three sizes of tubing, each constructed from long narrow sheets of English tin folded and crimped at the top and slightly tapered at the end to be inserted tightly into another piece of tubing. The system also included spiles made from conical sheets of tin with a metal tube soldered to the bottom like a drop line. The spile was either inserted directly into openings on the top of pipeline or into connecting pieces that fit into the pipeline. This connection from the spile to the tubing was made by a shorter, tapered piece of tubing with a curve at the narrow end, similar in appearance to the neck of a goose. In fact, it was this piece that gave this system its common name of “gooseneck system”. The weight of the rigid metal pipeline was supported by heavy gauge wire strung through the woods, with a hook at one end of each piece of tubing to hang the tubing on the support wires.
The gooseneck system in use in a Vermont sugarbush circa 1930. Source: Vermont Maple Sugar and Syrup, Bulletin 38.
The gooseneck system was patented in 1916 near the village of Mayfield, New York along the southern margins of Adirondack State Park by William H. Brower, Jr. Brower, who was described by his grandson as a mechanic and tinkerer, developed the system with his neighbor and syrup maker, Edward L. Lent. Today, the workshop where it was invented still stands on land owned by the Lent family and is noted by a roadside historic marker. According to Lent family history, Brower and Lent later sold the patent to one of the larger Vermont maple syrup equipment makers. Amazingly, through four generations of syrup making, the Lent family has never stopped using the gooseneck system. At one time, the Lent family’s mountainside sugarbush was using as many as 2500 taps on the system and boiling on a 3 foot by 16 foot wood fired evaporator. In recent year the family has reduced their tapping to around 300 to 400 taps and downsized to a 2 foot by 10 foot evaporator. According to the Lent family, the metal pipeline will occasionally freeze during cold spells, but thaws out quickly on south and east facing hillside of the their sugarbush. At the end of the season, the network of support wire is left strung through the sugarbush but the tubing is taken down. The pipeline sections are washed and boiled in the evaporator in the last sap of the year then set upright to dry, coating them with a thin layer of sugary sap that prevents rust from developing in the off season.
The late Edward Lent, grandson of Edward L. Lent, tapping trees for gooseneck system in Lent family sugarbush in March 2002.
The gooseneck system was sporadically used during the 1920s and 1930s in the more hilly and mountainous sugarbushes of northeastern United States. Until recently, this technology was not known to have made it as far west as Wisconsin. However, in 2003, cultural resource management staff of the USDA Forest Service in Wisconsin discovered the long abandoned remains of a maple sugaring operation in the hills of southwestern Ashland County. The remains of this former sugarhouse and storage building included over one thousand, four-foot long sections of the tubing system, as well as the gooseneck connecting pieces, coils of suspension wire and other debris. Today the site appears as a series of building foundations in an overgrown clearing at the base of a maple covered ridge, a perfect location of the gravity fed pipeline system.
A fallen over stack of thousands of sections of metal pipeline at the remains of an abandoned sugarbush on the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, southern Ashland County, Wisconsin.
Based on the age of the other artifacts at the site, including three sizes of metal syrup tins, the use of this sugarbush roughly dates to between 1915 and 1930. The U.S. Forest Service acquired the land in 1934, shortly after it had been logged and most of the large mature maple trees removed. As the only known example of the use of the gooseneck system in Wisconsin, the Forest Service has recognized its historical importance and is protecting the site as part of planned forest management activities. In addition, research into the history of the site and use of the pipeline continues.
