St Croix River Road Ramblings

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Tuesday, January 10, 2012

History of Maple Syruping in the USA


I just ordered proof copies of a brand new book I have been working on for two years. It is called "Making Maple Syrup in the USA since 1650: A Brief History."
Having done my family history, I found my great grandpa, Charlie Hanson, who came to Wisconsin in 1871 from Skee Sweden, married a Yankee girl, Abigail Beebe. The Beebes came to America in the early 1650s to New London Ct. where the family history is that they learned to make maple sugar from the Indians and the family has been making it ever since. Lathrop Beebe came to WI in about 1863 and his daughter Abigail married the Swede in 1872, and taught him to make syrup.

The book is a mixture of very old history of sugaring taken from books and magazines from the 1700-1800s, many old recipes for using maple sugar or syrup, and my own experiences making syrup in WI. Highly illustrated. It will be on Amazon.com in about two weeks for sale for $10 in 8x10 paperback with 125 pages.

It is very easy and inexpensive to create your own book and sell it on Amazon's createspace.com I build the book in MS Word inserting the pictures and controlling the layout; convert it to a pdf and make a pdf cover too, then upload them to createpace and it becomes a print-on-demand book with no upfront cost for me. I am able to sell the book through Amazon and make a couple bucks each sale or buy 10 or 25 or 1000 and sell them myself and make almost 50% even on the $10 buck sale. This is the 6th book I have put on Amazon for printing. Some are also ebooks on Amazon and others ebooks on google books.