This story was originally produced by The Keene Sentinel. NHPR is republishing it in partnership with the Granite State News Collaborative.
The thick aroma of boiling sap and maple-scented steam spills out the door of Clark’s Sugar House and into the damp spring air.
Along with the sweet smell, visitors are greeted by the smile of Dave Clark, the resident sugarmaker, and, thanks to walls of historic sugarmaking artifacts, the sense that one has stepped back in time.
Clark has buckets, taps, saws and other tools of the trade dating back to the 1890s, when his family first made maple syrup here in Acworth’s Crane Brook valley.
Like much of the agricultural industry, maple sugarmaking has become a craft practiced predominantly by older generations. Clark’s family has been sugaring for 133 years, but he said he isn’t sure what’s going to happen to the sugarbush after he taps his last tree.
Throughout the Monadnock Region, maple legacies are ending, transforming or beginning anew as people with family ties to the industry make choices about how they want to engage with that history.
An era nears its end
A poster on a wall at Clark’s sugarhouse holds meticulous records of taps, gallons of syrup produced and other stats starting in the year of Dave Clark’s birth, 1959.
He’s worked 42 years for the contractor E.D. Swett, Inc., building bridges all throughout Southwestern New Hampshire, but at this time of year he’s at the sugarhouse, where modern technology meets old-fashioned tradition.
Clark worked the sugarbush with his father, Alvin Clark, until his death in 2019.
Like his ancestors, Dave Clark makes maple syrup over a wood fire.
All the firewood comes from trees right here on the homestead, feeding about 20 cord into the fire over the course of the season.
He and Ron Batchelder, a neighbor and former solo sugarmaker, stoke the fire about every 20 minutes to keep the boil going.
But the process takes considerably less time for Clark and Batchelder than it did for those who came before.
There’s a photo on the sugarhouse wall of Clark’s grandfather, Leroy Clark, making syrup outside over an open fire in 1910.
In Clark’s childhood, there were still metal buckets of sap to be brought in from the hillside across from the sugarhouse. Now those trees and all the others in the sugarbush are linked by blue plastic tubing.
A powerful vacuum pulls sap down to a pumphouse, and from there it’s piped to the sugarhouse.
Before pouring into the evaporator pans, the sap is pushed through a reverse osmosis machine, which removes some of the water before boiling, helping the boil to form syrup faster.
Asked what his ancestors would think of the high-tech setup he’s got, Clark says, laughing, that they’d “just stand there shaking their heads.”
At 66, he still cuts his own firewood and does his own tapping, but he’s had to cut back in recent years.
“I’m getting to the point where I’ve got to find some help,” he says, reflecting on the days when he could tap 6,000 trees singlehanded.
One year, Clark pushed through seizures to finish the sugaring season before taking time off to have brain surgery.
Another year, he was in the hospital for nine weeks in the spring and missed the season. It was the first time since 1893 that the valley produced no maple syrup.
Without a next generation to take over the sugarbush, Clark is making plans to ensure it doesn’t get developed or sold off in pieces. He’s put several hundred acres into a land trust.
For now, Clark and Batchelder are enjoying the final days of this season, and looking forward to sharing the bounty with the farm’s many loyal customers.
But as for whether there will be syrup made here after him, “I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Clark says.
Carrying on a legacy
At the top of a steep driveway in Surry, a compact sugarhouse clings to the side of a hill. Unlike most of the region’s sugarhouses, this operation has been assembled entirely from scratch over the past 20 years.
It’s the passion project of Mark Woodard, a Keene mail carrier who cashes in his time off annually in the first weeks of spring.
On a Tuesday afternoon in the end of March, steam pumps from the cupola while, inside, Woodard and his childhood friend Rob Worden hasten to draw off, filter and bottle syrup.
Woodard’s setup is ultra-modern and mostly custom-made. He uses a stepped line system that allows him to vacuum sap from drop lines below the mainline on the hillside overlooking his home. He also has a reverse-osmosis system extension that uses recycled water removed from the sap to clean tanks, and an oil-heated evaporator.
Woodard uses his reverse osmosis machine to bring the sap up to 10 percent sugar or more before running it into the evaporator. As a result, his boil makes syrup at a rate that would astound sugarmakers of the 20th century.
The sugarhouse even has plastic sheeting on the ceiling and a gutter system to manage condensation — a perennial problem in most sugarhouses.
Although Woodard values efficiency, his main motivation in all of this is to carry on the lineage of sugarmaking instilled in him and his cousins by their grandfather. Woodard’s cousins still make maple syrup on the family farm in Waterbury, Vt., where Woodard was first exposed to the process.
“I just fell in love with it,” he recalls while testing the readiness of a draw of syrup with a hydrometer.
Even as a kid, he can remember thinking “someday, I’m going to have [a sugarbush] of my own.”
Woodard grew up in Swanzey and spent several years out west at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado before returning to his home state.
“My whole time out there, all I was thinking about was coming back and getting my own maple syrup going,” he says.
While working at another farm in the area, Woodard spent several years driving past a for-sale sign at the property where he now lives.
“I bought it for the potential,” he says. In other words, for the trees.
On his first visit to the property, he spent about five minutes in the house and almost an hour in the woods.
In 2005, Woodard built the sugarhouse with his dad, who designed and constructed many of the operation’s unique elements, like the gutter system. (“It costs me a coffee and a hot dog, and sometimes he brings his own hot dog,” Woodard jokes.)
He boiled for the first time seven years later, and has slowly built the operation up since then. Starting with about 350 taps, he’s expanded to about 1,000, meaning he can produce about 250 gallons of syrup annually.
“I just decided to dive in and do it, and I’m glad I did,” he says.
While he’s working, his wife, Kati, boils during the day and Woodard boils at night. Then he takes two weeks off from his mail gig to focus on the syrup season.
Kati is all in on the sugaring. In fact, the couple’s first date was right here in the sugarhouse.
“And she wanted to come back!” Woodard recalls, adding this was how he knew she was the one for him.
Since then, the couple has gotten into candy-making, dog bones, maple cream and other products, which they sell at the Keene Farmer’s Market, online and at malls and local stores.
“We literally live maple seven days a week, 365 days a year,” Woodard says.
Although he calls it a love, Woodard is realistic about the grind of sugarmaking. This time of year, he works about 89 hours a week at it, and notes there are plenty of “unglamorous” parts.
Woodard’s daughter has other dreams, but he’s still doing his part to train up the next generation.
A friend of the family started hanging out at the sugarhouse at 13, Woodard said. Now 18, he knows how to do just about everything Woodard does.
On the other side of the ridge of hills that separates Surry and points east from the Connecticut River Valley, a father-son duo is keeping the syrup flowing on one of the oldest family farms still operating in America.
John Graves built the homestead at Great Brook Farm in 1761, moving there from downriver in Connecticut.
Andy Westover, the son of Dave Westover and Cindy Graves Westover, will soon become the 10th-generation owner of the Walpole farm.
Andy Westover, 42, owns Westover Chimney Services, but he’s active in farm life, too, according to his parents, and always has been.
“Since he was a 2-year-old he’s wanted the farm,” Cindy Westover said.
Like Woodard, they know the joys of maple sugarmaking are won with often unromantic labor.
It’ll be a lot of work, but Andy knows that, Westover said.
“He goes, ‘luckily I like to work.’ “
Her brother Peter Graves has run most of the farm since 1994, while Andy and Dave have managed the sugaring for about 20 years.
Dave, a Keene State College graduate and a former president of Clark-Mortenson Insurance Agency, manages the marketing and sales and does most of the boiling, while Andy, who has a degree in animal science from the University of New Hampshire, is in charge of the machinery, including the reverse osmosis machine.
When they stand beside the evaporator, the beams over their heads are part of the original 1943 sugarhouse, but much about how the work gets done has changed since then.
The reverse osmosis machine brings the sap up to about 12 percent sugar before it even starts to boil. Syrup draws off automatically when it reaches the right temperature. A light-sensor device even assigns the syrup a grade — something sugarmakers used to guess at by comparing the color of the day’s syrup to other samples.
When Dave and Andy started sugaring, tubing lines were just starting to become the product of choice over buckets. They used about 100 buckets at that time anyway, but their 2,400 taps are now basically all connected to tubing. They collect sap in tanks at the bottom of the hill, then use a tractor to haul it up to the sugarhouse.
“We’ve been doing it for 22 years, and I’m still very much a student of it,” Dave Westover said.
New technology and learning have helped the process become more precise and efficient, but at the end of the day much of the result is out of any human’s hand.
“Mother nature basically decides how well we do,” Westover said.
A dry summer and fall last year may have led to a less bountiful crop this year.
“If the trees are stressed and leaves are dropping off early, that tells me we’re going to run into challenges,” he said.
His prediction proved correct, with the sap coming in this spring with a lower sugar content than is typical, meaning less syrup can be made from the same amount of sap.
Unusually warm days in late March also impacted the season, although deep snowpack partially saved the day, Westover said.
Toward the end of the season, as buds begin to form on the maple trees, sap starts to develop an off taste. Even the smell of the steam changes.
“That’s when we call it a day,” he said.
Rejoining the tradition
The sugarmaking world is a small one. Mention to any Monadnock Region sugarmaker that you’ve been to see another, and they’ll probably know his first name, his wife’s name, and how many trees he taps. And they’ll want to know if he had a good season.
For Woodard, that community has been a source of support and knowledge as he worked to break into the industry.
He’s assisted other newcomers in getting equipment set up, and when he had an issue with a part on his vacuum system, a sugarmaker from Keene and nearby Bascom’s helped him get things fixed in time to boil.
“All sugarmakers around here help each other out,” Woodard said.
Cindy Westover speculates most farmers tend to be community-minded. Her father, Robert Westover, was a Walpole selectman. Her brother is a church deacon. Her great-grandfather was a state representative. The original Great Brook farmer, John Graves, was the fledgling town’s fence viewer — a now-defunct office that entailed mediating boundary-line disputes.
Dave Westover was a long-time moderator of the Fall Mountain Regional School District and the town of Walpole, and he continues to serve in that role for the Walpole Fire District.
At the top of Forest Avenue in Swanzey is another family farm where sugarmaking and altruism seem to flow from the same trees. Here, Glen and Patti Hurd started sugaring in retirement on the fifth-generation homestead where Glen’s family has lived since before the Civil War.
He and Patti, who have been married for 51 years, bought the farm in 1990.
They cut their own wood, tap the maples on their land, and make a variety of maple products to dazzle the tastebuds and satisfy even the sweetest tooth.
The couple sells most of their production as syrup, cream or treats made by their daughter Katy, who owns Katy’s Maple Treats, but they also give a lot away.
Cornerstone Maple can be found in many a gift basket at area charity raffles, and often finds its way into the hands of people the pair meets on their travels.
Each summer, they set off to volunteer with SOWERS, a Christian group of RV-based volunteers who do maintenance and other projects at Christian camps and other ministries around the country, armed with maple products to give away to new friends.
“This is my retirement project,” Glen Hurd said of the sugaring Thursday. “... I’ve wanted to do it for a long time.”
Hurd remembers a bygone era of Monadnock Region agriculture, when, in some parts, dozens of dairies were shipping milk.
By the time he and Katy got into cows, it was already an anomaly.
A graphic from the N.H. Sugarmakers’ Association in Dave Westover’s sugarhouse shows just how much maple syrup the state once produced — more than 4 million gallons in the 1890s.
By 2016, where that data end, Granite State sugarmakers were producing less than 200,000 gallons.
Back in the day, Westover explains, every few families in New Hampshire farmed. And without wide distribution of cane sugar, sugar here meant maple sugar.
The Granite State’s golden age of maple is long gone, but through Katy and her maple treats, Glen, who fired up the arch at last in retirement, the persistence of Dave Clark and his cohort, and people like Mark Woodard and Andy Westover joining the ranks, some of the sweetest parts of that era live on.
Reporter Abigail Ham grew up sugaring with her grandfather, Leslie Ham, in Sheffield, Vt., where the family has been farming since the 1850s.