Discover Pure Maple Syrup

One of the most popular legends about the history of maple syrup involves a Native American chief who discovered the clear liquid sap leaking from a tree he had stuck his knife into. As the day got warmer the sap seeped into a pan on the ground. The chief’s wife, after tasting it and believing it tasted very good cooked his meat in it. The chief enjoyed the sweet taste of the maple meat so much that he named it Sinzibudkwud which means “drawn from trees”. Native Americans will often still use this word when referring to maple syrup.

Soon they discovered that cutting or (wounding) a maple tree in early spring caused it to ooze a sweet clear liquid which could be made into a sweet product they enjoyed very much. Many stories probably were modified over the years, but discovering maple syrup most likely was accidental.

Over the years they learned they could gradually reduce the sap to syrup by continually refreezing it, discarding the ice, and repeating the process. They would store up to 30 pounds of maple sugar in containers made of birch bark.
Eventually some of the Native American tribes began to cook the maple sap over fire. The tribal women would migrate to the maple groves which were called “sugar bushes” during early spring to process the maple syrup. Then troughs were made in which they collected the sap and moved it to the fire. The sap was heated by adding heated stones. Newly heated stones would be added while removing older cooler stones to be reheated. Many early Native Americans would rather use sugar over salt and used maple syrup or sugar on their meat and fish.

Early settlers imitated the Native American methods to make their maple syrup. They boiled the sap over an open fire until it reduced down to syrup. It takes about 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of maple syrup, which was a very labor intensive and time consuming operation. Not much changed over the next two hundred years, until during the civil war the tin can was invented. It wasn’t long until syrup makers discovered that a large flat sheet of metal would make a much more efficient pan to boil maple sap than using the older heavy rounded iron kettle.

Most original syrup makers were dairy farmers who made maple syrup and sugar for their own consumption, or a little extra income during the off season. They continually looked for a more efficient and faster way to make their syrup. Many ingenious ideas and processes evolved over the years, but for the most part the accepted methods stayed the same for another century. In the 1960’s it was so labor intensive and time consuming it was no longer possible for small farmers to sustain themselves. They could not afford to hire the large number of workers required to tap the trees and haul the small buckets to the evaporator house.

Another surge of technological breakthroughs occurred during the crunch of the 1970’s. Tubing systems were developed, and vacuum pumps added to bring the sap directly from the trees to the evaporator house. Pre-heaters that “recycle” heat which previously was lost were developed, and reverse-osmosis filters that remove a portion of the water out of the sap before it is boiled were developed.
New filtering techniques, “supercharged” pre-heaters, better tubing, and improved storage containers are just a few of the new technological developments being used today.

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