According to the United States Department of Agriculture, New York maple farms produced a record-breaking 564,000 gallons of maple syrup in 2011- twenty percent of all the syrup made in the United States. Adirondack Gold Maple Farm on Bear Pond Road in Thurman contributed 250 gallons to that total; Valley Road Maple produced 400 gallons, and Toad Hill Maple Farm on Charles Olds Road in Athol turned out 900 gallons. With the sap to syrup ratio being 40:1, the combined output of these Thurman, NY maple farms required the collection of 62,000 gallons of maple sap.
These three farms open their doors to the public each March for Thurman Maple Days, a celebration of this rural community’s sweet industry that is held each year the first three weekends of the month.
At Adirondack Gold, Marc “Tapper’ Kenyon leads bucket-carrying visitors into the woods to demonstrate sap collecting methods while telling his story of the maple industry’s origins. According to Kenyon, Native Americans boys, playing in the woods at the end of winter, first discovered the sweet sap as it dripped down icicles suspended from broken maple branches.
The Native Americans quickly figured out that sap would drip from a gouge cut near the base of the tree and they placed containers underneath to collect the product.
Back in the longhouse, they poured the sap into troughs and reduced it to syrup by dropping hot rocks from the fire directly into the sap. When Europeans arrived they improved the efficiency of this evaporation system by boiling the sap in large cauldrons. Today’s evaporators are long, shallow pans.
Kenyon, a third generation maple farmer, explained that when his grandfather began producing maple sugar, it was not considered viable as a major farm product. The labor intensive work of gathering the sap collected each day required hours of trudging through deep snow. Maintaining the health of the maple lot was not a concern and his grandfather would ring the large “grandmother” maples with multiple taps which shortened the life of the ancient trees.
Today Kenyon follows this rule when determining how many taps a tree can tolerate:
“If the tree is as big as me, one tap. If I can circle it with my arms, two taps; the big grandmother trees, Three taps.” From one Kenyon-sized tree, a maple producer will collect about ten gallons of sap, enough to produce a quart of syrup.
At Valley Road Maple Farm, mornings during Maple Days start with a $7 pancake breakfast complete with sausage from Oscar’s Smokehouse and the farm’s award-winning maple syrup. Co-owner Ralph Senecal takes orders while his partner Mike Hill flips pancakes in the kitchen. Senecal and Hill have produced maple products at the Valley Road farm since 1998.
Hill says he’s been sugaring since he was ten years old. Before opening the maple farm he would gather sap from trees around Warrensburg and make syrup in his sugar house located behind Jacobs and Toney’s store on Main Street.
Thurman Maple Days runs in conjunction with the New York Maple Producers Association’s Maple Weekend. Beginning in 1990 as Maple Sunday in Wyoming County, the event is now state-wide. The goal of the Maple Producers Association is to give the public opportunities to learn about the tree to table production of maple products.
Maple season in the area, if weather conditions are normal, runs from the end of February through the month of March. The sap flows when days are warm and the nights fall below freezing. According to Marc Kenyon, the Canadian season is just beginning as producers in Thurman are finishing theirs.