The Sweet Traditions Of the Sugarhouse

Terry Libby, center, brought up his son Kenneth and daughter Emily to spend every spring in the "Libbyland" sugarhouse on their scenic Chelsea West Hill farm-loving every moment of it. Notations on the sap bucket give the results of every year since the 1970s, while various implements on the walls give a nostalgic touch to the sugarhouse interior. (Herald / Robert Eddy)

All spring, I’ve intended to tour area sugarhouses and gather a patchwork of stories and traditions. But there is a problem.

Visiting other sugar makers during the rushed days of a "good run" and the long hours of boiling that follow would mean missing out on the happenings of my own family’s sugarhouse. And I don’t think I could stand that.

Sugar makers suffer from a unique and isolating feature. They share a common love for the wet, warm days of spring and the crisp, frozen nights that convince the dear maples to release liquid treasure from their veins, but they do their work alone.

When they run into each other throughout the year, they can hash over the quirks and defining characteristics of the past season. But these maple masters rarely share each other’s traditions as they take place. When the sap runs, the action ignites and there is simply no opportunity for visiting others. There's work to be done and syrup to be made. Sugar makers stick to their own land, their own trees, their own sugarhouses. When the sap runs, these become their universe.

Our own family sugarhouse ("Libbyland," the sign reads) is a handsome barn-boarded house with green trim just off the dirt road. It sits almost exactly where my great-grandfather, Frank Libby, built his just prior to World War II. Back then the Leader Evaporator company brought its touring evaporator with a horse-drawn sled for local farmers to view and order their own. He bought one and created a first class set-up.

But with the onset of the war, the bottom fell out of the syrup market. Frank Libby sold maple sugar for ten cents a pound and eventually abandoned the whole operation.

No one sugared on our land again until 1972 when my parents, Terry & Judy Libby, married and began to farm. They bought a used rig from Sid Allen in Brookfield and boiled in his sugarhouse for two years. They tapped all the roadside trees between the "the home farm," as they called it in old sugaring logs, and Sid’s place in Brookfield. Their first year they made 210 gallons from 730 buckets, a pretty respectable harvest. Every last drop was Fancy grade and they sold it for $7 per gallon.

After two successful years, Mom and Dad built a tiny A-frame at the edge of the south woods and moved their equipment home. There, for the first time, small feet scampered around the rig and small hands "helped" gather. After five years, the hobby was becoming more of an operation.

They expanded from 700 buckets to 1700. To accommodate their growing interest, they bought a no-longer-used 16 x 20 foot sugarhouse from our neighbors, the Bradshaw’s, and pulled it on skids behind the tractor over the road. My father had to stop in front of our house, climb to the peak of the sugarhouse, and hold a telephone wire up out the way in order to pass. They slid the structure onto a cement slab and used the beams and boards from Lovell Lathrop’s old horse barn to add a woodshed to the south and an ell to the east.

My initials are scraped into the cement in the north-east corner of the slab. I was five years old then and this is where I have spent every spring I can remember.

Lifetime of Memories

Over the years, the sugarhouse has had several face lifts, most recently a new roof, fresh trim and new windows. But to me, it still speaks of times gone by. Some images are captured vividly in my own memory; some have made their way into my memory via the old logs of visitors from the bustling ‘80s or from oft-told stories by Mom and Dad.

Inside, a Cabot Farmer’s Coop sign dominates the wall above the old milk house sink. Stainless steel milk pails, which recall the days up until 1984 when this was a dairy farm, sit on top of tall metal milk cans in front of the spigots for "drawing off" the syrup at the tender temperature of 219 degrees. Antique saws and yokes used by my grandfather hang on the walls high above the cement floor, which is always wet with puddles of condensation and run-off from the evaporator. A set of deer horns, a half-accidental collection of brown and green bottles lined up on a beam above a window, an old floor scale that now serves as a unique paper towel rack. An exposed beam with an array of spouts from ancient to modern. All these random collections were out of reach for us kids, but we rehearsed the story of each item in our minds.

My parents kept a sugaring log through the years. I often sat on a narrow bench between two studs in the wall on the back side of the arch and poured through the notes, receipts, and memories. That first year without the cows, my Mom commented in the log how it seemed strange for her not to be milking when my Dad was boiling into the evening. There were sign-in sheets from days with lots of visitors. On the back of one receipt, my father pledged to buy my mother a new refrigerator with the earnings from the next year’s syrup crop.

The jobs for my two brothers (Kenneth & Paul) and me in the sugarhouse have evolved with our ages. We took turns trudging up the steep hill behind the sugarhouse to the 3200-gallon storage tank, where we leaned over the opening and dropped a yardstick on a homemade extension into the sap to measure it. Bursts of cold air would rush around the rig when we slid the woodshed door open to refill the wood rack.

Upon entering the sugarhouse, the first question we’d always ask is, "How many times have you drawn-off, Dad?" The answer let us know if there was syrup to be canned, wood to gather, or sap to be measured.

Hours of maple vapor drifted by as I learned to play cribbage while perched on a tippy stool fashioned from a Hood milk can cover and a four-legged tree branch. The table was always covered with food—a crock pot of homemade baked beans, Mom’s raised donuts, a case of Adirondack soda, a jar of dill pickles. Ketchup, chips, eggs to hard-boil in the sap. Dad’s favorite sugarhouse meal was an arch-grilled hot dog wrapped in sour dough bread. I took naps curled up on that little bench with my feet propped up against a milk can.

The Drawing-Off

The commotion would always subside for a moment when Dad would fill the glass sample bottle with fresh syrup and drop it into the line-up of graded bottles to determine this batch’s grade. He’d always walk to the southeast window, hold up the grading kit in the natural light, and stare into the amber colored glass for his answer. Once the grade was set, he’d raise the fresh syrup up and grasp the twisted fencing wire handle gently before tipping the bottle back and passing the liquid gold over his lips as if to taste a delicate wine. (The syrup is hot and thin, yet rich and lazy in your throat. It never tastes like this again.)

We’ve had Easter dinners and birthday parties in the sugarhouse. We’ve eaten raised doughnuts and sour pickles. And the days I brought my classmates there in elementary school were among my proudest. We’d serve up sugar-on-snow in the same large pans that my mother made pickles in each summer. If there was a risk of the snow melting too early, we’d fill a few pans and freeze it for a later day.

Things in the sugarhouse are a bit more modern now than when I was young. We use a filter press to strain the syrup rather than the old cone-shaped felt strainers. We help the fire along with a forced-blower. And now there is a wood stove in one corner to keep my children warm as they nap on the couch beside it. But we still cook hot dogs on the arch and share nips of blackberry brandy with visitors. We still play cribbage and warm our backsides to the point of melting in front of the blazing arch. We hang only buckets and we still gather the sap in empty five-gallon joint compound buckets.

And there is still nothing colder than a crisp splash of wet sap down the front of you when you are knee-deep in snow trying to straddle a snow bank and the gathering wagon.

Unique Traditions

To a visitor from outside Vermont, maple sugaring is likely to be all tied up in stereotypical, commercial sugarhouses or activities and experiences you can enjoy or buy on Vermont’s main drags. But for those who live it, the traditions are uniquely personal, invisible to the outsider. The ones I’ve described here are the memories engrained in the seasons of my family’s history. They are priceless to me. But every family, every sugarhouse, creates its own traditions; they have common ingredients, but very unique recipes.

Many of our best friends, extended family, and neighbors tap their trees and boil their sap each spring just as we do. But we rarely visit their sugarhouses and watch the steam billowing from their cupolas and the sparks rising from their smokestacks in the night sky.

How can I possibly visit them to learn their secrets or taste their syrup? If I did, it would mean missing a cribbage game or a nap on the couch amid the maple vapor, or a chance at the first nip of hot-off-the-draw syrup. These are the things I just can’t miss.

So, my tour is on hold. I can’t drive down the road knowing that our sugarhouse is filled with activity. If I could just get Mother Nature to work with me, the sap would run elsewhere on opposite days, and I wouldn’t have to miss out at home to catch up with everyone else.

By Emily Marshia