The Joy of a Sugar Bush
And the Price of Maple Syrup in 1918 and 2011
[Published February 26, 2011]
Left: Harley Rudesill sampling sap ca. spring 1951
Two years ago my brother-in-law Andy decided to start a small maple syrup making operation— called a “sugar bush”—in the woods surrounding his home. His motivation was for mostly for the joy of it as it is a great way to bring family and friends together after a long winter. Jane and I have been heavily involved with Andy’s operation and expect to do so again this year. We call our family sugar bush the “Jewel of the Spile.” A spile is the name for the hollow peg driven into the trees that directs sap into a collection bucket. Our little operation has just over 100 taps and that results in producing maybe 75 to 100 gallons of syrup each season. Roughly 40 gallons of sap boiled down produce a single gallon of maple syrup. We have an open-air pan in the woods, fueled by a wood furnace that is the heart of the syrup-making operation. On weekends friends and family gather to collect the sap and taste the various stages of the nectar from the maple trees. It can be a lot of fun. We have had many wonderful times and made many memories from the family little sugar bush operation. We are getting excited about the new season about to start!
OK, but what’s the history connection?
Right: Tillie Rudesill canning maple syrup ca. 1951
I wish I could say that one our Ducklow long-past ancestors had a sugar bush too and that it earned the family funds to supplement their primary income. I cannot (at least not yet). However, producing maple syrup was one way many Wisconsin families earned a living the 1800s and into 1900s and it seems very likely that someone in the family ran the own sugar bush. My immediate family was involved in helping our neighbor, Conrad Stein, in running his sugar bush when I was a teenager in the 1970s. Conrad’s small operation gave him a little extra spending money from the sale of syrup and our family got the joy of helping a kindly old neighbor, with good exercise in the springtime warmth, and a reward of a gallon of syrup for our season’s work.
Right: A collection bucket and spile hanging off a maple tree 2009.
Here is a connection to history - specifically maple syrup price history in Western Wisconsin. Today my wife was looking over a section of the Spring Valley Sun-Leader from 1918 in doing some of her own family research. The June 1918 Sun-Leader had a small note that the going price of maple syrup was $2.25 a gallon! This price stuck me as kind of high for 1918. So I started a bit of research to put this price in context.
In 1918 a typical family in America made an income of about $1,500 per year. This breaks down to about $29 per week or $0.73 per hour for a 40-hour work week. So a gallon of syrup cost many families about three hours of income. Today pure maple syrup runs in the range of $35 to $60 per gallon, depending upon whom you know. Using $50 as a nominal price, it would take about two or three hours of wages for many American families to buy a gallon of “liquid gold.” So the $2.25 price in 1918 and the $50 price in 2011 are roughly on par. The run-up in price from $2.25 to $50 over 93 years is the result in having an avarage annual inflation rate of about 3.5 percent over the period.
Left: Quart of maple syrup from the Jewel of the Spile operation
So there is the history / economics lesson all linked back to the upcoming maple syrup season. I wonder how much maple syrup I have left in cupboard? I’m getting hungry for some pancakes!
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Footnotes: The 1950s era pictures were too good not to use. They are ancestors from my wife's family.
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