An etching from an 1879 edition of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper shows men collecting sap outside Rutland, Vermont. Vermonters originally made maple sugar, rather than syrup, because it kept longer. After state-by-state production figures started being recorded in the mid-1800s, Vermont was recognized as the leading producer of maple sugar. Later, the industry switched to making mostly syrup, and Vermont again became the top producer, as it remains today. Photo courtesy of Mark BushnellVermonters have learned the hard way not to get their hopes up about spring. The season here is long and cruel. Any stretch of warm, sunny weather will not be followed by more of the same, as it might be in other parts of the country, places where spring means green grass, flowers and confidently putting away one’s winter clothes. In Vermont, warm days in early spring are just a tease of what is still months away. Between winter and actual spring, some Vermonters have lightheartedly identified five mini-seasons — “fool’s spring,” so named because it is soon followed by “second winter,” then “spring of deception,” “third winter” and finally “mud season.”Thus it has apparently always been. A letter printed in the Vermont Gazette in February 1791 — a month before the state joined the Union — complained about the coming months during which Vermonters could do little. “(W)e cannot perform journeys by reason of the depth of the mud, our fields are not arable, sled(d)ing is at an end, and our grain is threshed: in a word there seems to be an interregnum of all business,” lamented the writer, who signed the letter with the pen name “Clergyman.” (Pseudonyms were frequently used in newspapers of the period for a variety of reasons, including trying to keep the focus on a writer’s ideas rather than their identity.) During this pause, no work could be done, “save that of making sugar.” The writer was referring to maple sugar, the granular sweetener produced by cooking down maple syrup. At the time, maple sugar was more popular than syrup because it was easier to store and had a longer shelf life.Clergyman’s letter was an impassioned plea — supported by economic and ethical arguments — for Vermonters to take up sugar making on an industry scale. The letter was timely, arriving as it did at the start of a national movement to promote domestic sugar production in the United States, which helped produce a maple sugar bubble.European settlers in the Northeast had learned how to sugar from the indigenous population, who for untold ages had been tapping maple trees and boiling down the sap to distill its sugary goodness. But when Clergyman wrote his letter, most Vermonters who made maple sugar only produced enough to meet their own families’ needs. It was a wasted opportunity, he argued. “It is evident, at this time especially, that peculiar exertions ought to be made for the furtherance of the sugar manufactory,” he wrote.A detail from a 1853 print depicts Native Americans boiling maple sap. Photo via Library of CongressMost people bought their sugar from the Caribbean. But a variety of factors — hurricanes, earthquakes and uprisings by the enslaved people who made the sugar — had recently restricted the supply and caused the price to double.Clergyman considered sugar making an act of patriotism, since it produced goods in America and kept money in the nation’s economy rather than sending it to one of the European countries operating sugar plantations in the Caribbean. “(T)he old proverb forever holds true that a penny saved is as good as a penny earnt,” he added. Clergyman hated that friends would sometimes apologize for serving homemade maple sugar: “It gives me pain, it destroys all the pleasure of the visit, when I set down at the teatable of a friend to hear the too common complaint, Oh we are poor folks, we have nothing to give you but homemade sugar.” As if maple sugar were inferior to imported cane sugar.Worse still was when a friend would serve him imported sugar with pride. “(I)t gives me still greater pain when I sit down to a friend’s table, furnished with loaf-sugar [as Caribbean sugar was called], which I have no reason to doubt was the purchase of a drained purse, perhaps of the last shilling.”Clergymen proposed a radical shift in how Vermont farms operated each spring: “Now suppose every husbandman in this state, at this leisurely time, should exert himself with all his labourers equally the same as he does in haying and harvesting, what would be the event?”Answering his own question, Clergyman wrote: “Why this state, at a moderate calculation, would be four thousand pounds richer this present season!” It would be “commendable” for farmers to “take time by the foretop” — i.e. hurry — and buy more equipment to make more sugar. It would be better for farmers to work within the local economy rather than engage in more distant trade. “Would it not be more commendable than to send their grain after rum, sugar and foreign molasses, with many other frivolous articles, which are purchased only because they are foreign. It is a lamentable consideration, that so many of our good citizens have such an itching desire, such an insatiable thirst after foreign and imported goods.”New York State had recently appointed a committee to “enquire into the manufactory from the juice of the maple tree,” he wrote. If New York could see the value of locally made sugar, Clergyman asked, “Shall we then who are citizens of Vermont, who live in the very bowels of that kind of sweetness, be inactive? Shall we resemble the fool who has a price put into his hands but no heart to improve it; let us rather… now, in the dead of winter, exert ourselves in preparing our sap and store troughs. In this manufactory we neither rob nor injure any man, we only take what bountiful nature liberally bestows.”Only at the very end of his letter, once he had made his long and strenuous economic argument for maple sugaring, did Clergyman mention the ethical reason for doing so. “Another consideration may be mentioned, viz. that by stopping the importation of sugar from the West (I)ndies, we shall diminish the plea of necessity for enslaving the natives of Africa; by which we shall gratify the feelings of benevolence, and render essential service to the cause of freedom,” he wrote.This anti-slavery argument was the main motivation behind the national movement. Given his chosen pen name, this might also have been the principal reason for Clergyman to write his letter. He might have wanted to leave the ethical argument until after he had, hopefully, won readers over with his assertion that maple would benefit them and their state financially.Sugar had recently become a political tool. Antislavery activists in England organized a boycott of Caribbean sugar in 1788 to drive down the cost of sugar, thereby making the slave trade less profitable. Prominent Americans took up the cause, some noting that, unlike the British, their countrymen had a ready substitute for boycotted sugar. William Cooper, founder of Cooperstown, New York, and father of novelist James Fennimore Cooper, started a maple sugar business in 1789 and became a leading proponent of creating large-scale maple operations. That same year, Declaration of Independence signer Dr. Benjamin Rush founded the Society for Promoting the Manufacturer of Sugar from the Sugar Maple Tree. Rush extolled the virtues of maple sugar in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, then U.S. secretary of state, arguing that it would free the country from the need to import slave-produced sugar. Indeed, Rush wrote, the country might even create a maple sugar surplus to export. The anti-slavery argument resonated with Jefferson, although Jefferson’s deeds often fell short of his ideals: he himself continued to enslave hundreds on his Virginia properties.Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, believed that if Americans produced enough maple sugar, they could strike a blow against slavery by helping drive down the value of cane sugar made on plantations in the Caribbean. Photo via Wikimedia CommonsAmericans could soon even read about the moral virtue of maple trees and the sugar they yielded in a poem by diplomat David Humphreys, which included the lines: “Bleed on, blest tree! and as thy sweet blood runs,/ Bestow fond hope on Afric’s sable Sons.”Four months after Clergyman’s letter appeared, two future presidents, Jefferson and then-Congressman James Madison, were visiting Vermont as part of a tour of New England and New York. At a dinner in Bennington, Jefferson spoke of the benefit that the new state’s abundant maple trees could bring to the young nation, freeing it from dependence on foreign sugar, then one of America’s largest imports. News broke during Jefferson’s tour that a Dutch company had bought up land in Vermont to establish a major maple sugar operation. The scheme ultimately failed, however, apparently because Vermonters wanted to work for themselves, not a foreign company.When he returned to Monticello, Jefferson had a grove of maple trees planted, not realizing that the Virginia climate was ill-suited for making maple sugar. He encouraged Americans to have their own maple groves to provide a ready supply of sugar.That’s a sentiment that Clergyman would have shared. “For my single self,” he wrote in his letter to the Gazette, “I feel prouder to tell my friends, around my board, this is sugar of my own making, and with more pleasure I present them with the bowl thus filled, than with the most refined loaf-sugar.”Read the story on VTDigger here: Then Again: An impassioned plea for maple sugaring. ...read more read less