Making Maple Syrup

As we were growing up on the farm and February was coming to a close our minds went to an exciting time of the year.  The trees were changing the color from the stark black to a more gray color and there were subtle signs of spring approaching.  Daddy and Grandpa Gerow knew it was time to grab the bit and brace, the spiels, hooks and sap buckets and go the sugar bush.  It was time to tap the trees!  Daddy usually used the horses for this project as there would still be snow on the ground.  Grandpa had a nice little sugar bush (a group of sugar maple trees) on his property that we always tapped and we gathered that sap, put it in milk cans, and brought it to our house to be boiled with our sap.

Our sugar bush was on the Muck Road on land that Daddy owned there and also on the Rice Place that Daddy owned as well, but that was a little harder to get to.  Our sugar shanty was what we called the old cellar next to where I now live.  It was a neat little place and there was the neatest old velvet settee in there that Jerry and I used to take a nap on while we would sit with Daddy while the sap would boil.

Daddy would harness the team and use the stone bolt to carry all of his supplies and head out to the sugar bush.  He would use the bit and brace to drill to drill a hole in the tree, then drive the spile into the tree and hang the hook over the spile and hang the bucket on the hook.  The sap would drip from the spile into the bucket.  The temperature would have to get above freezing during the day for the sap to run and if the wind was out of the south the sap wouldn't run.  Once the trees were all tapped the real work began.  All of the sap had to be gathered and taken to the sugar shanty where it had to be boiled down to maple syrup.  It takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup.  We used milk cans to haul the sap from the sugar bush to the sugar shanty. It was hard work to lift all of those buckets off the trees, empty them into another bucket, then carry it to the wagon, and dump it into the milk cans.  Once back to the sugar shanty the big heavy milk cans had to be carried down the stairs and dumped into the boiling pan.  Many nights, Mother would stay with the fire while Daddy did the milking, then we would all stay for the evening, until the syrup was ready.  We would fill containers with the syrup and let the fire go out.  Mother would bake fresh biscuits and we enjoyed them with butter and fresh hot maple syrup.  Yummy!

Daddy and Al

After Al and I moved back to Pennsylvania in 1981 my brother and Dad wanted to build a new sugar shanty, so a plan was devised to purchase an old barn from William and Stella Irwin in Catlin Hollow,  They lived beside of the Catlin Hollow Cemetery.  We all worked at tearing the old barn down and hauling it down to Jerry's house on hay wagons.  Once it was all hauled and sorted the building was started.  A very fine sugar shanty was built at Jerry's house, once completed, it was painted barn red to match the rest of Jerry's out buildings.  Then the guys had to cut fire wood to keep the fire going to make the syrup.  A lot of the scrap lumber was also burned up at the same time.  Tim McConnell made a new sap pan and we purchased a hygrometer to make sure we were boiling our sap the correct length of time.  We also purchased specialized containers for our product.  We were ready for February to arrive.

Francis Spencer, Al, and Daddy

When it came time for us to accomplish the task that we had done as kids, it was sure good to have Daddy there to guide us along.  Jerry was still employed, so Daddy helped to get us started.  Jerry had a pair of Belgium work horses that he dearly loved to work with, so sap was hauled with horse and wagon just as it was when we were kids.

As a side note, Jerry and Al had worked to get the barn ready before Jerry got his work horses.  Once the stalls were all ready for the big horses, Jerry brought them in to the stalls with the new cement floors, but the horses ears rubbed the ceiling!  Oh, how we laughed!  I, being a smart aleck, made Jerry a "ear lowering kit" which I think contained some large rubber bands for the ears! My brother got that "funny" look on his face, you know the one that says, “Yea, you got me!”

Francis Spencer, Al, and Daddy

The horses pulled the wagon which had a holding tank in it to carry the sap gathered from the trees back to the sugar shanty.  Joanne and I helped the guys gather sap each morning and enjoyed doing it.  Francis Spencer got into the act also.  He was always eager to help out when there was a project going on, especially if it had to do with horses.

One afternoon, when the sap was really running, Daddy thought he and Al should take the tractor and a barrel and go up on the hill to gather some sap.  As Al told the story, they were going up the hill on the Ford tractor with a barrel full of sap. The tractor was off balance from the extra weight and nearly rolled over.  Al jumped off in one direction and the barrel of sap went in the other direction. It scared the heck out of both, Al and Daddy.  The barrel went all the way down the hill, almost to the creek before it stopped.  I am not sure if they ever told Jerry.

Al, Francis Spencer, and Daddy

Daddy would always want Al to take some of our eggs to the sugar shanty, so they could cook them in the sap as it boiled.  Eggs hard boiled in sap are a tasty treat!

At the end of the season, Joanne would always take the last of the syrup to the house and finish cooking it down there.  She would often make maple cream and maple candy.  We all used maple syrup to cook with throughout the year and had some to sell.  Once the trees began to bud the sap would be too dark and that would be the end of making syrup.  The taps had to be pulled and all of the equipment cleaned and put away for the next year.  By then we had probably seen a robin, or a flock of wild geese, and lots of what I hated the most, mud.  Spring was definitely in the air!  

Friends in High Places

Gladys Bartlett, Harvey, Rosamond, and Daddy

For as long as I can remember, every Saturday night there was a group of people at our house to play cards.  Canasta was usually the preferred game. They started playing after Daddy finished milking about 7:30 pm and sometimes the game would continue on  until the wee hours of the morning.  Bill and Annamae Kane, Harvey and Rosamond Meadows, Paul and Gladys Bartlett, Budd and Emma Spencer, adding new members to their group as people died or moved away.  These friends stayed friends throughout their lives and did everything together. New Year's Eve they always had oyster stew together and played cards and that continued until Daddy died.

Rosamond and Harvey Meadows

We kids played board games and Daddy would play checkers with us.  His favorite game was Haystack with checkers and he was good at it. Some of my best memories are winter evenings as we sat in the little living room after Daddy had finished milking and we would listen to programs on the floor model radio like Amos and Andy.  Jerry and I would play checkers, draw, color and play on the floor and Daddy would tell us that he would play a game of checkers with us.  Man, he could see the jumps and clean up the board in a hurry and we would all laugh.  Mother would be knitting us mittens and she would think it pretty funny, too.  By 9:00 we were all in bed, but we had a radio upstairs and we always had music in the house and in the barn, and to this day, it is difficult for me to go to sleep without music.  We all loved music.

In 1952 my parents discovered a new invention that some of their friends that lived in high places enjoyed...television.  That changed card night and we started going to Uncle Ted and Aunt Catherine Goodwin's house to watch television on Saturday nights.  Mother would make snacks to take with us and Aunt Catherine would have prepared things for us to enjoy also.

Catherine and Ted Goodwin

I believe the favorite show was wrestling; I would get a real charge out of watching my dad and Uncle Ted enjoy the matches.  They about wore out the chairs that they sat in as they would watch Pat O'Connor and I can't remember the other wrestlers names they would watch.  Then there was the tag team matches, and I thought Daddy and Uncle Ted would take out the seats of their chairs, they would get right up on their knees and holler at the television, they certainly did enjoy the evening.

Sometimes on Friday night we would go to Mark and Rena Coveny's house on the Orebed Road and watch television with them.  The men folks enjoyed watching boxing.  I liked to be able to go early enough to watch Groucho Marks, I always thought he was funny.  I didn't like the fights and would usually fall asleep.  I did enjoy going to Rena's house, she wrote poetry and that amazed me and she would always let me read some of the things that she wrote.  She also had beautiful flowers and helped Mother to grow Dahlias.

Emma and Budd Spencer

Daddy finally got the idea that maybe we could get television at home if we ran a line down from the hill.  He talked to some  people in Mansfield about it and a man came over with equipment to test for a signal.  They found a signal for one, maybe two stations, and with the help of a booster or two, it could be done.  It would be expensive, but could be done.  Daddy decided he wanted to try it and wondered if Uncle Clyde and Aunt Charlotte would be interested in it also, so they split the cost.  Rodney and I were in the sixth grade in 1953 and we got a television for Christmas!  What was on television?  Football!  DARN, we didn't know anything about it, but we left it on, because we could.

Many a night Jerry and I would walk that television line with a stick to knock the snow off just so we could watch television that night without interference, or if there was a storm, a limb would come down on the line break the line and off we would go to make the repair.  It was a job we kids learned to do. We would usually do it while Daddy did the milking.  Daddy would go if it was something that we couldn't fix.  We would take the tractor part way and one of us would go up and the other one would go down to make the job quicker.  Later we added another antenna to pick up more stations and extended the line so more neighbors could also have television.  I don't remember Daddy ever charging his neighbors and if there were repairs, I suppose he and Uncle Clyde paid for it.  Quite a bit different from today's cable and satellite TV!

Wintertime in the Country

Francis and Daddy with King and Queen

For as long as I can remember,  Daddy would tell about the difficulty he faced when it came to removing the snow just so he could clean the barn and simply get out of the drive way.  This was before he had a tractor to put a blade on to push the snow with.  He had to use horses and use a stone bolt behind the horses, which actually just packed the snow down.  The picture above shows King and Queen the horses, and Francis Spencer, who was our cousin and our farrier and one of our best neighbors ever and with Daddy and Laddie, our Collie dog.  You can tell that it was really cold, by the breath showing from the horses.  This picture was taken in 1946.

Eugene Drew with Ned and Dutch

Daddy cleaned the barn by hand in those days and used a wooden box placed on a set of bob sleds. In turn, that box was also unloaded by hand.  Hard work!  He continued to do it this way in the winter time until he was able to purchased a manure spreader with steel wheels in the late 1940's.  This picture was taken in February, 1941.  The horses are ones that Mother and Daddy started farming with Ned and Dutch.  The little boy standing by the wagon is my cousin, Eugene Drew.  He stayed with Mother and Daddy while his Mother and Daddy were getting a new baby brother.  (Uncle Pete and Aunt Eloise and cousin Dan)

You can see from the third picture that there was some really deep snows back then, and some hand shoveling was done and from what I remember we didn't have snow shovels, we used scoop shovels and we used those things for everything, I remember riding down hill on them, shoveling coal into the stove, shoveling corn into feed bags to get a grist ready, scooping up oats into a bag, any type of grain that would be in the granary.

When we got the first snow of the season, we always used the scoop shovel to shovel snow up against the house, as that kept the wind from blowing in around the foundation.  Once we had the first snow, it usually stayed all winter long.  It often came on Halloween night and the ground would stay white for the rest of the winter.  Which was fine with me because I hated mud.  With snow on the ground there was always something for us kids to do.  Snow on the ground kept the pipes going to the barn from freezing. I don't think I ever remember of the pipes freezing and the barn was always warm from the body heat of the cows.  Jerry and I always liked to go to the barn with Daddy at night and play with the kitties or  play in the pile of fresh straw that Daddy would have thrown down from the loft, to bed the cows with.  When we got older, that was my favorite job, bedding the cows with fresh straw and feeding the baby calves.  I still have a scar on my finger where a calf bit me, when I was teaching one to drink from a bucket.

Daddy

In 1941, Daddy started driving school bus for Charleston School District which presented a problem.  He had to be able to get out of the drive way. so he and Francis Spencer devised a way they could plow the driveway with a plank on the stone bolt with extra weight on the stone bolt.  Daddy put chains on the school bus and he was able to pick up all of the kids.  Bob McConnell told me he was amazed at the ease Daddy showed in being able to to negotiate the rural road to get the kids to school. Daisy tells me that she remembers riding on this bus and the majority of the bus was made from wood, she said that she caught her toe on something near the door and fell and hurt her leg one time, she her memories of the "wooden bus" are not the best.

 I remember Daddy telling of one snow storm when it was particularly difficult to get all of the kids picked up. He got to the school a bit late and the principal met him at the door to tell him they were going to dismiss school, so he could take all of the kids home again.  He said he told the man,"All right, sir, we will go home.", and turned and asked the kids if they all wanted to ride downhill instead of going to school.  Everyone was happy!  The older boys had to help him push the bus up the hill that day to get the kids home, but they didn't care, they were going sledding.

Bob McConnell always said that Daddy was the best school bus driver he ever had.  All of us kids loved Bob and grew up having a lot of respect for him.  He always drove the truck that took our calves and cows to market and brought us livestock to us when we needed a new cow, or even a rabbit, or a goat.

 *A little side story about Bob McConnell.  He came to load a couple of hogs for Daddy and he couldn't get them to go up the ramp into the truck.  Daddy suggested putting a pail over the pigs head first, well it worked like a charm and Bob used that trick from then on.  Bob loved sharing that story with us kids and later sharing it with the grandkids.  Every-time he came he had a dime in his  pocket for us kids and later it was a quarter for the grandkids and when he died, my son who had just been here from Florida to visit with him, wanted to make sure he had a quarter in his hand when he was buried.  Bob McConnell, a well remembered friend and neighbor.