Sweet Season in the Lakes Region

Canterbury Shaker Village Maple sugaring building. (Courtesy Canterbury Shaker Village)

By Kathi Caldwell-Hopper

"I am now endeavoring to procure as many as I can of the Sugar maple trees, to commence plantings of these."

— Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Hugh Rose, 1792

Imagine a world without sugar as we know of it today. Then imagine a world where the only sweeteners are molasses and brown sugar. This was the norm in pre-Civil War days in America.

What a blessing maple syrup was at the time and well into the future. During World War I, syrup replaced cane sugar and that was good news for places such as the Lakes Region of New Hampshire, where sap flowed abundantly in late winter.

If a farm produced a large quantity of maple syrup, it stood to reason the farmer would want to profit. Tapping trees for sap, boiling it into syrup and bottling it were time intensive endeavors, so why not sell syrup to an eager public? This could offset the cost of production.

Among the first places to sell syrup in the area was High Maples Farm in Gilford, as told in “The Gunstock Parish – A History of Gilford, New Hampshire” by Adair D. Mulligan. The production of syrup at the farm was staggering, overseen by owner Samuel Smith. The workload was lessened with the help of Smith’s 10 children who helped with the farm’s 1,500 buckets of sap from the farm’s orchard. The yearly output saw maple syrup sold to Lakes Regioners and customers out of the area/state.

At some farms with maple syrup production, mud season sap gathering and boiling became somewhat of a celebration. By the 1930s, High Maples Farm opened its door for sugaring off parties. Local children and teens, as well as winter visitors, enjoyed the parties where they could watch sap boiling and indulge in “sugar on snow” made when hot syrup was placed on snow.

In earlier times, making maple syrup was a fascinating pastime for the wealthy in America. A quote dated 1722 from New Hampshire’s Lieutenant Governor John Wentworth, says, “I sent a small box of maple sugar to a British nobleman. I hope to make this a very useful and profitable business.”

The tiny box of maple sugar candy Wentworth sent to a British nobleman showed the Governor had the right idea. Like many others in New Hampshire, Wentworth had a sweet tooth for the delicious syrup from the maple tree and saw it as a fine gift.

New Hampshire’s maple syrup was originally produced by native people. The early European settlers in the state likely learned from natives how to collect sap and boil it to make the syrup from the sugar maple trees around them.

In the early days of the country, sugar was not easy to obtain; discovering there was a natural way to get sugar from trees must have seemed like manna from heaven to settlers. But they soon learned it was a time-consuming, difficult process to make maple sugar and syrup.

In New England, if you could make and store maple products, you had a valuable currency to trade with others. It was just about the only sweetener in the United States in the 1700s and 1800s. By the late 1880s, around 300,000 gallons was produced for sale on a yearly basis.

The early colonists endured the harsh New Hampshire winters and once they knew the process of maple sugaring, they were eager for late winter and early spring to arrive. They knew this was when they could harvest sap for sugar, and they watched the weather with anticipation. (A successful maple year depends greatly on the weather and temperatures.)

The process usually started in late February when harvesters went into the woods where they had sugar maple trees. At that time, they drilled tiny holes into the trees. The process took time, because the clear sap in liquid form dripped slowly from the taps into buckets placed on the trees.

Bringing the buckets from the woods to a camp or farm was also labor intensive. Over time, harvesters began to use oxen or horses to transport the buckets of sap to the sugarhouses.

Once at the sugarhouse, the next step in the long process began. During the time of native people, hot stones were placed into logs they had hollowed out. They filled the log containers with the sap and boiled it over the fire. The process was time consuming but the results worth the effort and long boiling time. When the boiling produced dry sugar, it was formed into a cake of sugar or “block sugar” or it was stirred to make grainy sugar. The native people also made sugar on snow by pouring sugar onto snow to create a taffy-like, delicious product. Due to the danger of maple syrup spilling when transporting it, maple sugar in blocks was much easier to carry without losing any of the precious product.

In the early days of the country, maple syrup and sugar was used to season breads and beverages. According to historical information from the UNH Cooperative Extension, maple sugar was an important part of the typical person’s diet.

Over the years, the process of maple sugaring has certainly improved. Kettles and later, evaporators were much more efficient for use in sap houses.

The Shakers, with a village community in Canterbury, New Hampshire and elsewhere in the United States, were an ingenious group. They believed that doing any project correctly was important and godly. Hands to work, hearts to God was one of their sayings and they lived the belief daily.

Maple sugaring was done by the Shakers at their villages, among them at Canterbury. The maple products were later sold around New England and tourists eagerly purchased maple candies and syrup.

According to information from Canterbury Shaker Village, the Shakers once had a “thriving maple sugar camp. Throughout the 19th- and 20th-centuries, Shakers spent early spring days gathering sap and their nights boiling maple syrup and making candy. At the conclusion of the maple season, the Shakers would emerge from the camp and return to Shaker Village with their sweet harvest in hand.

“Records indicate that in 1864, at the height of the American Civil War, the Shaker Village Church Family set out almost 1,200 wooden buckets for the gathering of sap and produced almost 700 barrels of maple syrup. The syrup was not only an important sweetener for the many mouths they fed daily, but an important cash crop for sale to the outside world.”

It was said the Shakers at Canterbury once had a maple tree orchard with over 1,000 trees about a mile or two northeast of their village. From there, they tapped the trees and eventually produced candy, sugar cakes, syrup and other products which were sold to the public.

When a Shaker elder once visited Canterbury in the mid 1800s, he was shown the sugar camp and was impressed that they made around 2,000 pounds of sugar the year before. This was a very large amount of maple sugar and shows how important the sales of the product were to the Shaker economy.

Much as the Native Americans and early colonists had discovered, it was hard work hauling the sap to their homes once it was collected from sugar trees. Thus, they found a more efficient and less physically taxing way to harvest the sap and boil it down to make the syrup. The Shakers made an exodus from their living quarters in the main village and set up a temporary residence at a sugar camp a few miles away.

Located on Shaker property, the sugar camp was a great place to make maple products. The Shakers stayed at the camp for a month or more and had living quarters, a sugarhouse where they boiled the sap and other buildings.

The Shaker men took turns staying up at night to boil the sap, feed the fire and watch over the sap house. It was hard work, but much easier than hauling the gathered sap to the main village to be boiled down.

Shaker Sisters kept the buildings clean and made meals for the group.

A Canterbury Shaker, Nicholas Briggs, recalled maple sugaring as a boy, “The maple sugar season began soon after school closed, and it was an interesting time for the boys. They always were in requisition to assist in distributing the buckets to the trees and driving the spiles in the holes bored by the brethren.”

While the popularity of maple syrup never really caught on in England, Governor Wentworth’s plan to harvest and sell maple products was a good one. Americans used a lot of maple syrup. To this day, they still do so.

When the sap begins to run in the late winter, we eagerly anticipate, as did people many years ago, the sweet taste of maple syrup to come.