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logs and stacking it outside the sugar shack for next year's sugaring time.

Life went on during those years as the boys became men and left the dairy farming business for other things that interested them more. One by one the five dairies were sold off and eventually the sugar bush was also. Sugaring never stopped in our part of the world. Each sugaring season sugar bush owners would look forward to taking time out of their farming lives to see how much extra cash they could bring in with this profit making venture.

Farms that had a sugar bush, whether it is large or small, were farms that sold at a premium in Saint Lawrence County or in the nearby counties.

Then about 1976 a friend of mine bought a nearby farm and discovered she had about 300 good maple trees and did not know how to sugar. I did and she asked me to help her. Twenty years later things had changed. We still tapped the trees, but instead of buckets hanging on them we had clear plastic tubes attached and running through the woods into a large vat. This vat was a collection point near Sue's sugar shack where she had her firing vat set up to cook the sap. Since Sue did not have a bunch of hired hands as we did from the five dairies, I rounded up four of our friends with their kids and we had a good old fashioned "Sugaring Bee" one weekend. We did all the things that I mentioned above including "sugar on snow", cooking hot dogs, and getting the pint, quart and gallon containers which were filled with the syrup after it was boiled down. All the "workers" were given a fair amount of syrup to take home with recipes for making maple sugar candy and other things.

It was a wonderful time bringing back memories of 20 years before that and it was a learning time for the kids who had never had that experience, plus a time of friendship and fellowship for the adults, especially for those who had never sugared before.

Learn more about this author, Arlene Wright-Correll.
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