DRUDGE - Key Persons

Jonathon Baker, Jr., my great-grandfather, began to keep records in 1838 of the maple sugar seasons. He wrote down what day they started in the Spring, which day they finished up, how many trees they tapped, and how much maple sugar they made. 1842 was not a good year, because the snow was so very deep, deeper than any of the settlers had seen up until then. 1844 was a very good season, with about 4 pounds of maple sugar to a tree. In 1857 their eight best trees together yielded 64 pounds of maple sugar, so that was a very good year, as they had a lot more than just 8 trees tapped. In 1860 Jonathon writes that a few more trees were tapped, so that more maple syrup could be made, as well as maple sugar, and he recorded the amounts of syrup made each year, as well. From 1816 on, they made maple syrup every year except 1874, when they had an ice storm which broke down so many trees that they were not able to get the bush cleaned up in time to make syrup. Our family has made syrup continuously in Ontario every year ever since they came in 1797, with the exception of that one year. In 1870, Jonathon Baker tapped 70 trees. One hundred years later, in 1970, my brother, Paul Baker was tapping 7000 taps from the same woodlot, and by 1980, he had increased to 8000 taps. Homemade wooden sap buckets were used for over a hundred years. I have a few of those wooden sap buckets used by my ancestors and also have a few of the wooden spiles. The wooden spiles are about 12 inches long. This is because the wooden buckets sat on a wooden stand on the ground, and the spile had to be long enough to drip into the bucket, because the bottom of the trunk sloped out. My grandfather, Jesse Baker, bought the first tin buckets around 1900.As a little girl, I remember playing around on the stones in the bush where the kettles had been for boiling syrup years ago. In 1911, Grandfather built a new sugar camp near where the kettles had been. He bought his first evaporator, a pan two and a half feet by nine feet. He tapped 250 trees at this time, using the homemade wooden buckets and some tin ones. My father, Amos Baker, gradually tapped more and more trees. The sugar camp was at the edge of the woodlot, about 50 rods from the house. They carried the maple syrup into the house in pails, using a wooden yoke which hung on their shoulders. The yoke had two ropes down, and a wooden hook on each rope, which you hooked onto the pail handle. Daddy used to deliver syrup to town, in large tin containers. He had a metal gallon measuring can and a half gallon measuring can along. When the customer stated how much syrup they wanted, Daddy filled the gallon container, and emptied it into their own container. I have several of these metal gallon containers that Daddy used years ago. In the spring of the year, the snow is very deep to start with, and by the time the sap is running the best, the bush is a sea of mud. So getting through with the tractor was always a challenge. There was one area of the woodlot that was more hilly, so it had never been tapped. In the 1940's, Daddy thought of a way to tap this hilly area. He set up a system of underground pipes which ran down to the camp. He built galvanized funnels that held ten gallons apiece, with screens and hinged covers, and screwed these funnels into the pipes. Now he had a series of funnels, as dumping stations, and they gathered the sap and dumped it into these funnels, along the underground pipeline. It worked great, because a good percentage of the trees could be gathered this way, and it saved taking the tractor and wagon tanks through all the muddy trails. Also, one man could gather this hilly area alone, while the rest gathered with the tractor and wagon tanks. At that point, Daddy had 2000 buckets, so gathering sap took a lot of time, even in those places where he still used the tractor. As a little girl, I used to help gather this pipeline.