To Start a Fire

We are in the early stages of my 75^th year of making maple syrup on the Hanson Farm, here in NW Wisconsin.  We still do it the old fashioned way, a flat pan over a wood fire with sap directly from buckets hung from spiles on 100 + year old sugar maples.

When the sap runs, we often boil day and night, adding sap and finishing batches in about 5-10 gallons each.  Our trees test about 2. 5% sugar meaning that we need 35 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup, requiring a great deal of boiling.  We start the fire when we have at least 150 gallons and then keep it going, stopping when we have a lull in the sap run.

During the 6-week season, sap runs maybe a gallon per tap or less most of the days, some days 2 gallons, with each tree giving different amounts based on location – northern hillsides running later in the season then southern exposed trees. 

Most seasons we have at least one what we call a sap run.  That can mean in 24 hours we get 5 gallons of sap per tap – on at least some of the trees.  Most years we have one or two of those, some years none, just a consistent gallon or two per day. 

This spring we tapped 2 weeks ahead of our normal mid-March time.  We had days in the 50s early, and so worried it might be like 2024 when February was the sap season and last year when it began with the start of March.

However, in the first two weeks we got very little sap, and so have been adding what we get to the 50 gallon sap cooking pan, and boiling it occasionally to make sure it doesn’t spoil as we add more sap.

That means many times we have started the fire from cold ashes.  Each time I do that it is a reminder of my own life starting wood fires, from childhood until now my 79^th year where I have already started 6 so far, including the first one in our sugarbush cabin in many years.

My first experience with fires comes from visiting Grandpa and Grandma who lived on the River Road south of Wolf Creek.  They had a wood stove for heating, a wood stove for cooking and kerosene lamps and lanterns, not having electricity.  They moved in 1951 to a new home where they still had a wood heat and cooking, but electric lights

In our own home, electricity came in March of 1948, while Mom was away having my younger brother Everett.  I don’t really remember the wood stove in the kitchen that was replaced with an electric range that same month the electricity came. 

I do remember our basement wood furnace that both heated the house in the winter and heated the water, the furnace having a water jacket connected to a water tank to keep it hot.  When summer came, each time Mom wanted to have a lot of hot water, for example washing clothes, a special wood water heater hooked to the same tank was used.  Early in the morning, Dad started the fire in the small unit and in a few hours the water was hot.  We used that until I was in 8^th grade, 1959. 

The basement wood furnace was replaced with a more modern wood furnace, but until the 1990s, the main source of winter heat was with wood.  Each fall, the basement would be filled with split dry firewood and every few hours more wood went into the furnace.

By the time I was 6 years old, Mom would ask me or my older brother, Marvin, to “throw a few chunks of wood in the furnace.”  That meant opening the stove damper with the knob in the kitchen connected to the furnace in the basement so air would draw through the stove rather than smoke come out when we opened the furnace door. 

We might bring 4 or 5 big split chunks of oak from the ranks behind the furnace and put each in the firebox, ranking them inside and then close the door. If the furnace  was down to coals, we put in smaller split kindling to get it started before adding the large chunks. 

In the worst case, if it was mild weather during the day, the furnace would be allowed to go out, and restarted in the evening.  We weren’t allowed to start the furnace until we were older, maybe about 8 years old. 

It was relatively easy as we put in some of the kindling, and a few smaller chunks, then drenched it all in kerosene and lit it and it roared to life. My experiences while at home, including starting the fires for the maple syrup boiler back in the 1950s and on were the same – kerosene soaked woods.

In 1972, I married Margo.  Margo’s father was big into charcoal grilling and had a unit at both their home near West Bend, WI and at their lake cottage near Weyerhauser, WI (up north).  Merlin not only was big into grilling but pooh poohed the idea of buying special charcoal starting fluid.  I was shocked the first time I watched him light the grill.   He dumped about two cups of gasoline on the coals, sprinkling it liberally and then told me to stand back.  From about 5 feet away, he light a wooden match, got it going well, then tossed it into the grill.  “Whoomph” and a huge flash of flames shot up from the grill before it calmed down and started burning the rest of the gas.  It was dangerous and a real spectacle, but I suppose WWII veterans had seen worse.  I think Margo and I got a charcoal grill too, but used the charcoal lighter fluid that is not at all explosive.

In 1986, Scott joined Boy Scouts.  The scout organization required parent participation and so I volunteered to go along camping.  My camping experiences were few, but included some tenting and Coleman fuel stoves.  We bought a small charcoal grill and the lighter fluid and sometimes used that, and occasionally started a campfire, liberally using the lighter fluid.

To become a full fledged Scout, one of the steps along the way is to start a camp fire using no more than 2 matches that will burn unattended for 5 minutes.  The experienced adult leaders showed the steps from gathering tinder, kindling and fuel (each being a little larger than the preceding).  The boys often had never struck a match, so even that required practice along with the stern warning you don’t play with matches at  home. 

That is where I learned to build a fire without the liquid fuels.  And so when I built the fires the past couple of weeks, I re-practiced the 2 match no artificial ingredient fires.  There are many down old birch trees where the wood has rotted leaving the bark curls that make excellent tinder.  Each wind brings down dead twigs that come next and often large branches that can be easily broken in to short pieces.  We were taught to prop the branch against something to raise one end from the ground and then stomp it to break rather than across one’s leg or knee where we were told we might break  the bone.

We learned to use a hatchet by propping up the stick of wood to be split, then resting the hatched on top of the chunk, then pounding it through with another piece of wood, far more likely to split it than whaling away with the likely hood of losing some toes.

As I relive my past lighting fires, I find that most times I can do a one match fire that would meet Boy Scout tests.  However, this morning, my fingers freezing, the twigs frozen into the ground, using cardboard and newspaper my fire still went out.  I opened up the cabin, found the charcoal lighter and soaked down the wood and lit it.  It roared to life wonderfully.   I wonder if I poured in a few cups of gasoline if I might raise the pan right off of the firebox?

Never Make Maple Syrup in a Pig Kettle

 

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 75^th 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

 

75th Year of Making Maple Syrup

 We tapped the maples last week, a little earlier than the normal mid-March time.  We have owned the woods on the east side of Orr Lake since 1963 when Dad and Mom bought it as a second farm.  The woods were cow pasture with huge old maples and mostly open under them with large areas of open pastureland. 

The woods were about 55 acres of 100 acres of the farm.  We had been tapping maples at what we called the North 60, a half mile from the home farm on Evergreen Avenue.  The 50 acres of woods there were also cow pasture with a scattering of large maples, on very rolling hilly lands bordering the east side of Wolf Creek.  

With the new farm, with many large maples, easier to tap and collect sap, we made the switch and eventually even built a sap cooking shed there rather than haul it the 3 miles to the home farm.  

In 1975, Margo and I built a lake cottage - we call The Cabin - on the hillside overlooking Orr Lake.  We used it for our summer home when I was then a teacher, and a weekend escape in later years and as a second home from 2005 on after we retired, ending our stay there in 2013 when we bought the home farm after Mom died. 

I claim to have started to help make maple syrup when I was 4 years old, 75 years ago, although I may have been 5 or 6 - it was in the early 1950s when Dad got the urge to try it like he and his brothers had done growing up.  

This year, so far, we have 80 taps out, probably headed to 100, down from many years when we tapped twice that or more. Our goal is 25 gallons of maple syrup this year, what we can sell, give as gifts and use.  

Dad got Parkinson's disease in this early 70s, gave up his cows and gradually most of his farming, putting his fields into CRP.  By the time he was 85, his balance made it so he mostly watched us make syrup, participating by watching the cooker and enjoying it from in our newly made sap cooking shed.  He died at age 89.  That year he was only able to be at the sap cooker a few times, being unable to walk on uneven ground even with a walker. 

I am 79, and other than a rackety heart, am physically sound and able to still carry pails and walk through the woods OK, although slower than I used to and a little more careful on the slippery hillsides.