Maple Sugaring Day at Heritage Hill

Heritage Hill State Historical Park will host Maple Sugaring Day on March 14, highlighting the historical traditions of Maple Sugaring formed throughout the fur trade era.

“The people that were living here were isolated and this was their economy for sugar,” said Joel Barthel, fur trade interpreter at Heritage Hill . “The original people that were here actually are the ones that pretty much discovered the process and shared it with the Europeans. It was also a way to break the starvation period from the winter — they would tap the trees and the sugar became a staple that they would provide to rejuvenate and get the year going. It also became a condiment that they would mix with their food for the rest of the year.”

The immersive living history event invites visitors to witness how maple syrup and sugar were produced more than 300 years ago.

Throughout the day, guests will see 17th and 18th century Native American techniques demonstrated firsthand including tapping maple trees, collecting sap, constructing birchbark sap receptacles and boiling sap down into syrup and sugar using traditional methods.

“We will be doing a traditional overnight boil of sap,” Barthel said. “This would be something that drags on for days and days, but we’re going to take it through the entire process from sap all the way to what they would normally do and bring it to a crystallized sugar… We’ll boil some of it down to the consistency of what we would say is modern syrup, and we’re also taking it further and bringing it to the crystallization phase.”

“Today we’re used to having the syrup and putting it on pancakes and things, but for them that was not a practical thing,” he said. “That would spoil and that can’t be stored very well in vessels or transported, so they would actually take it to the final stage where they crystalize it. That’s what we’re going to be doing as well.”

In the 17th and 18th centuries, maple sugar was a staple in Native Americans’ diets.
“We think in today’s terms that we eat a lot of sugar,” he said. “Imagine being Ojibwe who, in one account, describes a village of less than 1,500 making about 90 pounds of sugar per individual, and they’re eating it themselves almost completely. They’re not necessarily using it for trade… We’re used to today adding salt and sugar to everything. For them, they would have been adding a little bit of crystalized maple sugar to whatever they had — their corn mush, their meal, their meat.”

And when early colonists saw how readily available maple sugar was in this part of the country, it became a staple for them as well.

“When early colonists in the Americas saw that this was a means of getting sugar, they just accepted it,” he said. “Everybody who moved into the interior of the upper country knew that you could tap the maple trees and this would be a staple for sugar. It was just so widely available that we take it for granted. They didn’t bring in cane sugar, and those that were bringing in cane sugar out on the east coast, trading with the West Indies, they knew that it was heavily dependent upon the slave trade… People started picking up on that and saying, ‘Well, instead of getting sugar that somebody has been wrongfully held as a slave and labored and toiled over, you can toil over your own sugar or have one that has been made by an industrious person in the north. There was even a push by Thomas Jefferson and other people to completely change over to promote that we grow our own sugar in North America rather than relying on imports of beet and cane sugars.”

Beyond providing an essential part of their diet, maple sugar and the process of making it, which would traditionally have been done over many days, also provided a significant cultural and social experience.

“We take for granted that we can just buy sugar and it’s made somewhere and brought to us,” he said. “This is an activity that marks the end of the season where people are shut off from the cold winter and they’re able to gather again. It was a cultural thing… It’s something that brought people together and could produce a tangible and even life-sustaining product as a result of it.”

To learn more about Maple Sugaring Day at Heritage Hill, visit heritagehillgb.org/event/maple-sugaring-day-a-fur-trade-living-history-event.