Making Kentucky Maple Syrup connects with memories of a nearly forgotten past
“Did you make this here in Letcher County? I remember when...”
SouthDown Farm started selling maple syrup in 2017. I will never forget the time an older man in his mid-eighties came up to our stand to ask if we made this maple syrup here in Letcher County. I said, “Yes sir, this is genuine Kentucky maple syrup”. He began to tell me that when he was a boy, he used to help his parents make maple sugar each spring...In an instant, this octogenarian was transported back to his youth. He began recalling memories of a time when life was difficult and people worked hard for basic necessities like sugar.
He told me of how his father would take a brace and bit and drill a tap hole in a sugar maple tree. He would then take a hollow reed and pound it into the hole, putting a container on the ground to collect the crystal clear, slightly sweet sap dripping from the tree. He would make rounds with a mule and a corn sled collecting the sap transporting it back to the house. At the house, his mom would help tend the fire under the open top cast iron kettle hanging over the fire. They would boil the liquid down beyond maple syrup turning it into golden maple sugar. You see, these hardy mountaineers were not concerned with the luxuries of maple syrup on their pancakes and waffles, these folks were working hard for the basic necessities that we take for granted, like sugar. He explained that in the 1930’s they needed sugar, as sugar was expensive and difficult to get in these mountains. So with great resolve they made their own sugar from the abundance of maple trees in the cold, dark hollows. He explained how his mother would make cakes of maple sugar using tin cups greased with lard for molds. She would then wrap the cakes of maple sugar with wax paper and store in a tin box. He told of his mother wrapping up pieces of maple sugar and putting them in daddy’s dinner bucket where he would savor the sweetness during a long day working down in the coal mine. He explained to me that they were not the only ones to make maple sugar. Everybody did it. You could look up and down the creek on a late winter’s day and see smoke boiling up into the sky where neighbors were boiling down maple sap.
Since then, many elderly folks have come by to talk to us about their memories of making maple syrup. Sugar-making was a common practice in Appalachia. I have learned that what we are doing is not new or innovative; we are simply tapping into a distant memory, a memory that has almost disappeared, a tradition which was once a common activity. Previous generations made maple sugar out of necessity while we are are applying technology with a hope that syrup production can be an economic driver in this changing coalfield economy.
