When I was five years old, Dad and Mom decided to make maple syrup on our farm. Both had grown up in families from Maple Grove Township in Barron County, Wisconsin, where making maple syrup had been a tradition for several generations.
In 1951 Dad bought a new tractor
with big back wheels that could pull a trailer loaded with milk cans full of
sap through the rugged hills of the forty-acre cow pasture where scattered
maple trees grew. After reminiscing about syruping when they were young, they
decided that in the spring of 1952 they too would make syrup—partly to save
money and partly to relive those earlier springs when whole families worked
together in the sugarbush, and to give their 4 boys an experience they had
enjoyed long ago.
It started with Dad cutting sumac stems into three-inch pieces and poking a red-hot wire through the pithy center to make a hole. Then, with his always sharp jackknife, he whittled each piece into what he called a sap spile.
For a week the kitchen was pungent
with the smell of burned sumac pith.
He visited his brother Maurice in
February. “Can I borrow Dad’s old cast
iron kettle,’ he asked, knowng that the previous year hr had borrowed it to
scald a pig. “Sure,” said Uncle Maurice, “it is in the pig
pen, I put it in there for feeding the hogs.”
We went to the pig pen where in the corner was the huge old black kettle
settled into the churned up frozen mud filled with corn, food scraps and what
was called “pig slop.” You could see that pigs had climbed in and out and had
left it filthy.
Dad brought it home, set up three poles
as a tripod and hung a chain from the apex, the kettle about 18 inches off the
ground. Mom had thoroughly scrubbed it
out, inside and out, and it looked clean although blackened and pitted from
rust. Dad carried several milk cans of
water from the pump house and filled it half full then started a fire under it
and let the water boil for a day before dumping that and doing a second
cleaning boil. “I sure hope I got the
pig taste and smell out of it,” he commented remembering it filled with pig
slop and pig manure.
We scrounged up all of the pails we
could find, metal ones in the days before plastic, borrowed more from the
neighbors and grandpa promising them a jar of syrup if we were successful.
That year the snow was quite deep, so we
had to wait until April to get into the woods.
Dad hooked on the trailer to the tractor and we drove the ½ mile up the
road to the cow pasture. With a bit
brace Marvin and I took turns trying to drill 1 inch holes into the maple
trees, tiring very quickly and letting Dad do most of them. With a hammer, we tapped in the wooden spiles
firmly and then a nail below to hang the bucket.
It was exciting as sap started to drip
as soon as the drill was removed from the hole, at about a drip each
second. “At that rate, I will be as old
as Grandpa before it fills,” moaned Marvin who expected it to gush like the
kitchen faucet.
“A drip a minute for 8 hours will give a
couple of gallons,” replied Dad who said that his older brothers and father had
been making syrup before he was born in 1915 and he had helped them when he was
our age.
The next day Dad hooked up the trailer filled
with 10 empty milk cans, while Marvin and I hooked our sleds behind it and off
we went up the ½ mile road and into the woods to collect sap. I remember the behind-the-trailer sled ride
that was easy and fast on the road but treacherous in the woods. Marvin and I hit a hidden root and the sleds
pitched sideways, sending us rolling into the slush while the tractor hummed
along, oblivious.
It was a good day as the 50 buckets each had 2
gallons as Dad has predicted. We had the
milk strainer with a cotton pad to filter the sap as we dumped it into the
cans, filling all 10 of them.
Dad had put in a new steel post fence
south of the barn, and so had the old wood posts piled in the farm yard near
where we hung the kettle as he had planned them for cooking syrup. He asked us to gather kindling and get last
week’s newspaper to start the first fire.
“Lemmee, Lemmee,” both Marvin and I
begged. We weren’t allowed to use matches except if Mom or Dad watched us, but
had learned how to strike a match and light the kerosene lamp when the
electricity went out, had watched the big boys start the regular Friday garbage
burning at the Wolf Creek school and the school furnace, and knew that lighting
fires was not only exciting but a sign of being a big boy. We already had the
chore of adding chunks of wood to the basement furnace but weren’t allowed to
start the fire.
Marvin got to light the match after a
liberal dose of kerosene went on the paper, kindling and fence posts. It roared up quickly and after 4 hours the
kettle began to boil and then for the whole week it was kept boiling as the
day’s sap collection was added.
Dad let the fire go out on Saturday when
we boys were home from school so we could help.
There were about 10 gallons of dark syrup in the kettle that we tasted
and thought very good. Dad dipped it out
into a milk can, filtering it through the strainer with some cheesecloth and
brought the can into the house for Mom to take over.
Mom boiled the syrup in the big canner,
then canned it in quart jars after it until it “sheeted” off of a cold spoon, the
test that it was ready. Then she poured
it through a felt filter into 40 quart jars. Our neighbors each got a jar as
did our relatives. We had started with 400 gallons of sap, which
made 10 gallons of syrup, a 40-1
ratio.
Mom made pancakes for breakfast the next
day and we poured on the syrup. We had
tasted it before from some made by relatives or neighbors but never had as much
as we wanted. It was really sweet, maple
flavored and very good, we all thought, as did our neighbors, all except Dad.
“It might be just in my head, but I get
a taste of pigs with the syrup. I don’t
think I got the kettle clean enough.”
We have continued to make maple syrup since then, doing it now for my 75th
year, but never again in a kettle that came from a pigpen.
Photo about 1900 Hansons making maple syrup in
Maple Grove Township Barron WI. Dad’s
Uncles.
Russ’ book on
Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Making-Maple-Syrup-since-1650/dp/146819089X
