Maple sugar-making was a natural activity for colonists in the Eastern Townships. It required only rudimentary implements and the end product was a substitute for expensive, imported cane sugar. This drawing of a sugar bush appeared in the Canadian Illustrated News (May 11, 1872). As the patches of snow indicate, trees were tapped early in the spring before the ploughing and seeding was begun. One of the men has returned with two buckets of sap while the other prepares to take them to the large iron cauldrons boiling in the shanty. The sap was collected from wooden troughs (later, metal buckets) hanging below small hollow spikes which penetrated about an inch into the south side of the trees. Fifty litres of sap produced about a litre of syrup, but most pioneers boiled this down further to yield sugar when it cooled.
Annual production fluctuated greatly in quantity and quality, depending as it did upon the delicate balance of warm days and cool nights. Two hundred and fifty trees could yield from 180 to 270 kilograms of sugar in a good year, but the number of trees a family could tap depended on the manpower it had available. The well established Compton Township farmers did not average 225 kilograms until the late 1860s when the French-Canadian colonists in Winslow Township were still producing about ninety kilograms each. The Winslow Scots obviously met only their own needs, for they averaged about twenty-two kilograms a year. The work was far from easy, as a local observer wrote in 1863:
sugar-making, aside from the taste of the article produced, is not a particularly sweet or agreeable employment, and if any one has been disposed to consider it as such, a very short experience of sap-gathering, or eyes blinded by smoke, soon takes away all romantic interest in the work.
In 1858 George Stacey, an English colonist, also stressed the hard work involved, but he did find something good to say about the job:
It is a good crop this year, and boiling the sap down is a demanding operation, as the cauldrons tend to boil over, and someone must be perpetually at hand to cast in a bucket full of raw sap to steady the rise. Usually we boil near the house, but if the maples are far in the woods, we boil there, and the smell of woodsmoke is very pleasant as it passes among the trunks of the forest trees. We have to gather a great pile of wood so as to be sure of keeping the fires going steadily, and the work often goes far into the night.
