Durant-Peterson House volunteer Chuck Bauer boiling maple sap, 2021.
Emma Louise (Durant) Lane was born and grew up in the 1843 Durant-Peterson House, now a museum in the LeRoy Oakes Forest Preserve in St. Charles, Illinois. She began a diary around 1895 that described her life and experiences from her childhood to the end of her life. This remembrance, written on March 14, 1921, was about her family tapping their sugar maple trees and boiling the sap down into maple syrup and sugar. The process is similar to what is demonstrated at the Durant-Peterson House during Maple Sugaring Days on the first weekend in March.
“There were many rock maples in the ‘flat’ across the creek [on our farm]. [A]n uncle, Aziel Stone, Mother’s sister Mary’s husband who had lived in the ‘sugar bush’ region of Michigan, came from Kenosha, Wis. to visit us one spring and he suggested tapping the sugar maples and making sugar or syrup. Father bought tin pans to hold the sap. Uncle made spouts of sumac which grew in abundance and was flame colored in autumn. The spouts were made by pushing out the ‘pith’ and driving one end into a hole bored in the tree.
We had a big iron kettle and sap was poured into that from the pans and barrels. When enough [was] collected we were all invited to the sugaring off. How well I remember the big kettle hung on a pole, the pole supported in the crotches of heavy stakes driven into the ground. It was a royal time for us younger children and the maple sugar and syrup had the flavor of the maple and, of our own wonderful at that, ‘mine own’ means much.
There was to have been a second boiling but one night it turned very warm and rained and I suppose the snow melted far up creek for the morning our quiet little creek had changed to a whirling torrent covering the meadow and carrying [the] tin pans downstream. When it subsided, we retrieved the tin pans down the creek for a mile, but many were carried to the [Fox River].”[1]
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[1] Emma (Durant) Lane, The Diaries and Memoirs of Emma (Durant) Lane (1852-1922), St. Charles, Illinois: 1870-1922, ed. Alexander G. Rose III (Baltimore, 1978), 112, Preservation Partners of the Fox Valley Archives, St. Charles, Illinois.