Maple Syrup

Willie Smail was our next neighbour to the south along Highway 16. He had a maple sugar bush across the highway from us with the sugar shack near the sharp corner in the highway.

The pictures show him boiling the sap to make syrup. To accomplish that, he needed a very hot fire in the evaporator, since the ratio of sap to syrup is 40 to 1. As my father did, Willie used a thermometer to decide when the syrup was ready to be drawn off, filtered through a special felt filter and bottled or canned.

We visited his place in March 1977 on our way to Ottawa. It must have been March Break, because Scott and Shelley are looking at the horses and Paul is just running around. Of course, that is Judy in the sugar shanty with Willie.

The horses were important to pull the sled with the tank on it to gather the sap from the trees. The snow was very deep in the woods, and the tracks between the trees were rough and deeply rutted. To gather the sap from the trees required a hardy soul to plunge through the snow to every tree, empty the buckets into a large pail and then return to the tank to dump it in. It was icy cold, wet work.

Although the job of running the evaporator was the nicest one in many ways, it seemed never ending. When the sap was running, it was difficult to keep up with it, and Willie would boil long into the night.

This kind of operation ended in Groveton when our father and Willie Smail retired.