Maple Sugaring During a Full Sap Moon

By: Christina Ely, Registrar, Plowline: Images of Rural New York

Maple sugaring, an agricultural endeavor localized to the Northeastern part of North America, goes back centuries. It is well known that the Colonists learned maple sugaring from the Native Americans who had boiled maple sap into syrup and sugar for so long that legends about how it came to be had been created. They also created two festivals celebrating maple sugaring, and had a “Sap Moon” also known as the “Maple Moon” or “Sugar Moon.”


Like ice harvesting, which I blogged about earlier this year, maple sugaring was an activity which farmers traditionally took part in each year. It was a sure sign that Spring was on its way to the Northeast. As the days became warm, but nights went below freezing the sugary sap would start to “run,” and farmers would race to gather the sap before the season’s abrupt end. The purpose of production has changed over time from the creation of a product of necessity (maple sugar) to a product of luxury (maple syrup). In the later part of the 1700s through much of the 1800s it was the production of maple sugar that was popular and useful, not maple syrup, which would spoil more quickly.


In the early, early days of production, people would use the “boxing” technique, cutting a diagonal or “V”-shaped gash in the sugar maple and then insert a reed or concave piece of bark with a wood trough or bucket beneath it to catch the dripping sap. This gave way to the use of wooden spiles around 1810, which were replaced by metal spiles invented during the Civil War. Metal buckets came some years later, with an introduction as late as 1875.

By 1850, boiling down sap moved into its own building. The “sugar shack” or “sugarhouse” began cropping up on farms and in sugarbushes across the Northeast.  

By 1959, metal buckets were beginning to be replaced by plastic tubing which proved to have greater efficiency as it could be directly connected to a large collecting tank in the sugarbush or to the sugar shack directly-saving a lot of time and labor.

In the late 1800s, boiling the sap became more efficient with the invention and manufacture of the evaporator.   The photo below shows the large and small evaporators at Yancy’s Sugarbush in Croghan, New York.  These evaporators were purchased in the 1920s by Andrew Yancey (2^nd generation family owner) and are still in use at Yancey’s Sugarbush today.  They are fueled by wood cut from the Sugarbush

Along the way, some producers stopped using horses and sleigh to collect their sap from the sugarbush, and began to use a more modern means of collecting.  Even today, some producers insist that the use of a team of horses and sleigh or wagon is the best means for collection out in the sugarbush –  an example being the two teams of horses used at Yancey’s Sugarbush today.  A  romantic reminder for some, reminiscent of days gone by.

Join us during the “full sap moon” and celebrate the end of winter each Sunday in March for our annual Sugaring Off event from 9am – 2 pm and enjoy pancakes, maple syrup and traditional maple sugaring activities.

To view more images of maple sugaring from the early 1950s through the early 1970s visit Plowline: Images of Rural New York, one of our new collection websites.

Images from top to bottom:
Maple Sugaring in Lewis County, NY, 1950. Dante Tranquille. Photographic Negative. H 2.25” x W 2.25”, F0001.2010(069)j.
Maple Sugaring in Lewis County, NY, 1950. Dante Tranquille. Photographic Negative. H 2.25” x W 2.25”, F0001.2010(069)aa.
Maple Sugaring, ca. 1965. Dante Tranquille. Photographic Negative. 35mm, F0001.2010(134)nn.
Yancey’s Sugarbush, 1972. Dante Tranquille. Photographic Negative. 35mm, F0001.2010(127)d.
Maple Sugaring in Lewis County, NY, 1950. Dante Tranquille. Photographic Negative. H 2.25” x 2.25”, F0001.2010(069)c.

The Syrup Dispute of 1956: Maple Festival and Taste-Off

By: Kajsa Sabatke, Manager of Public Programs
I’m not sure how The Farmers’ Museum became the site of the taste-off to settle an international maple syrup dispute in 1956. I do know that staff had already been preparing for the museum’s first maple festival as a way to support contemporary agriculture. The festival was originally planned to be simple and to last just one day. As a result of the syrup dispute, however, the staff expanded the festival to two days and added more activities, including contests for maple-related recipes and products, as well as an essay contest for schoolchildren. Governor Harriman also crowned the Maple Festival Queen.

Of all the states invited by Governor Harriman, all but one (New Hampshire) and Quebec submitted entries for the taste-off. The governors of both New York and Vermont attended the first day of the festival. Three taste-offs were held that weekend: Governor Harriman sponsored a cup for the official taste-off judged by five newspaper food editors; New York maple producers offered a Producer’s Cup to be awarded from a vote taken by producers; and a final tasting of the general public pulled from the day’s attendees was provided by The Farmers’ Museum, who donated the Consumers’ Cup.

As a sign of goodwill, the two governors exchanged maple trees from their respective states. Governor Harriman accepted the gift of the Vermont tree and both governors ceremoniously planted that tree on the tavern green at the museum where you can still see it today. Our farmers use that tree for a portion of the sap that we use to boil down to syrup during Sugaring Off Sundays at the museum. A tree from New York was also sent back to Vermont with Governor Johnson.

I think I’ve kept you in suspense long enough. Which state/province won? The governor-sponsored taste off of the unmarked syrup ended in a tie for first between Vermont and Michigan samples. (New York placed a respectable 3rd.) New York also made a comeback the second day of the festival, when producers from New York won both the Consumers’ and the Producer’s Cups.

All images are from The Daily Star (Oneonta, NY), April 7, 1956.

Sappy Puns + the Syrup Dispute of 1956

By: Kajsa Sabatke, Manager of Public Programs

Until last week, I had no idea that in 1956, a multi-state (and multi-nation) dispute over maple syrup was settled at a maple festival in Cooperstown at The Farmers’ Museum. I also hadn’t realized just how many puns could be created by the journalists who documented the story during its four-month duration. I heard about the festival from a coworker who saw it mentioned in a Director’s Report for the New York State Historical Association and quickly began uncovering the details through the New York Times archives, a couple of local newspapers (the Cooperstown Freeman’s Journal and the Oneonta Daily Star), and the Nashua Telegraph in New Hampshire. My favorite article title came from the Times: “Syrup Tiff Oozes Into Sweet Talk: New York, Vermont Get Off Limb but Maine and Canada Hack Away Over Maple.” Are you intrigued yet? Here’s the boiled down version of the story, at least as much as I’ve been able to piece together in the last week:

In January of1956, Governor William Averell Harriman asked the New York Legislature to officially adopt the sugar maple as the state tree, thereby formally accepting the votes of New York schoolchildren who had chosen the tree to represent the state on Arbor Day in 1889. The sugar maple was already the state tree of Wisconsin, West Virginia, and neighboring Vermont. Upon hearing about the proposal, Vermont’s Governor Joseph B. Johnson sent Harriman a telegram poking fun at New York syrup and offering to share the state tree if New York could prove that its syrup was even half as good as Vermont’s. In response, Harriman challenged Johnson to a “free and fair” taste-off of syrups.

After the initial exchange between the two states, other officials jumped into the dispute. The governor of New Hampshire claimed that the state produced better syrup than both Vermont and New York, argued that the two states “wouldn’t dare to match sweetness with New Hampshire.” A Canadian syrup exporter, in response, declared that 75% of Quebec’s annual syrup crop was exported to New York, New Hampshire, and Vermont (hinting, I assume – although I didn’t see the original statement – that the U.S. syrup must not be that great if they were buying so much syrup from Canada). Maine then jumped into the action when a State Development Department official pointed out that 750,000 pounds of that 25,000,000 the Canadians claimed to export came from Maine, where Canadian crews came to tap and cook the sap.

In the end, as a result of all the claims to syrup superiority, Governor Harriman invited the governors of nine other states (Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota) along with the premier of Quebec to attend the New York State Maple Festival in April, the first such festival organized by The Farmers’ Museum, and bring samples of their best syrup for a taste-off.

And who won this competition? I’ll tell you next week in my next post. In the meantime, please stop by The Farmers’ Museum this Sunday for the first of our Sugaring Off Sundays. (Facebook fans will get a free token to ride the carousel!)