Custom Home Building | Renovations & Additions | Historical Renovations
Landscaping & Site Work | Renewable Energy
2007
Best General
Contractor
Best Kitchen
Remodeling
Classic
Contractor
26 New St., Cambridge, MA 02138
617-876-8286
www.shconstruction.com
a hub of activity at the earliest stirrings of a
northern spring. Warm sunny days alternate
with freezing nights to draw sap (about 98 percent water and 2 percent sugar, minerals, and
even vitamins) up through a tree’s circulatory
The ideal spot was on
a hillside, so that a sap
tank could be installed
above the building,
with gravity feeding the
evaporator inside.
system and into a sugar maker’s taps. Beyond
science, though, there is magic in the awakening woods. “There is something about them
that pulls like a magnet,” noted Muriel Follett
in A Drop in the Bucket, her 1941 memoir of
sugaring in Vermont.
“A sap run is the sweet good-bye of
winter,” the 19th-century naturalist John
Burroughs observed. “It is the fruit of the equal
marriage of the sun and the frosts.”
In sun or frost, the task remains the same:
sap needs to be boiled down, and syrup must
be delivered to market. In the old days of
collection by heavy buckets, it made sense to
haul the least amount of liquid the farthest
distance. That’s why early sugarhouses were
built where the sap was, deep in the woods,
their remoteness necessitating the kind of
“toggled-up and patched-together” construc-
tion seventh-generation Vermonter and sugar
maker Burr Morse remembers.
“Those old farmers couldn’t afford or
justify dragging a carpenter into the woods,”
he points out. “They just built them as they
could.” What they needed was shelter for their
evaporator — an arch of bricks forming a firebox under a set of shallow metal pans. What
they built were simple post-and-beam rectangles, with steep roofs to shed snow, rough
vertical siding, and an open cupola to let out
the resulting copious steam. (Morse cites this
fact of sugar making as another reason not to
get too fancy with the construction: “Steam is
no friend of finish carpentry.”)
The ideal spot was on a hillside, so that
a sap tank could be installed above the building, with gravity feeding the evaporator inside.
