![]() ![]() The new shop/sugar shack is in the same location as the building, according to a letter written by Great-Grandpa Henry, that (200 years ago) "was originally the sap house and contained a large brick fire box and huge iron pot used to boil down the maple sap.” This method of boiling will create some very dark maple syrup as you keep adding sap to the same batch of syrup and thus the sap that is in the pot the longest will caramelize a lot which leads to super dark syrup. ![]() What did maple syrup production look like 200 years ago? This freed up thousands and thousands of previously farmed acres to return to forests with the only obvious artifacts being the thousands of miles of stone walls that exist in the middle of the woods now! Also, in those forests, there are a lot of maple trees to tap! At Cragged Mountain Maple, we’re excited to find and share the unique stories and histories relating to the hill country of New England and maple syrup. For many families, these huge societal changes were good reasons to say goodbye to a subsistence lifestyle in the harsh climate and topography of central New England. Farming families moved away because of the advent of the industrial revolution and the availability of superior farmland in the Midwest. That experiment, with the massive amount of effort and labor involved to start those farms, only lasted a couple of generations. It was only two hundred years ago when Europeans moved into central New England and cut down all of the old growth forests to farm sheep, cattle, and grain, and thereby creating farming communities to support these ambitious efforts. In contrast, forests of modern-day New England hill country have undergone consistent major disturbances in being logged at least half a dozen times. ![]() Historically, changes in the forests of the hill country, like ours on Cragged Mountain, were primarily due to fires and the receding glacier. Why are there stone walls in the forests of New Hampshire? ![]() There is only one ingredient, the naturally occurring sap from maple trees, and that ingredient is harvested in a way that the same trees can be tapped year-after-year and live on, happy and healthy, to be tapped by a farmer's great-grandchildren 100 years later. That said, maple syrup is, without a doubt, one of the most intrinsically sustainable products possible in the modern-day. With the industrialization of the modern day, exemplified by some farms producing on over 1 million taps, there are inherent losses of quality and culture for the sake of the benefits of scale. The maple syrup economy has come a long way since the days of subsistence New England hill farmers collecting sap in buckets in the lean weeks of early spring. Learning the process of producing maple syrup in the same space where those farmers made maple syrup has been awesome and humbling to imagine how much more difficult and isolated life was for folks running farms two hundred years ago. Living the past four years on Cragged Mountain, in the same space that rock-picking farmers lived just a few generations ago, continues to spark my curiosity about how the past connects to the present. It was a different world, and even that world was generations removed from the original hill country farmers on Cragged Mountain in the early 1800s. The photos show glimpses of what life in the countryside of New England was like before the industrial revolution had transformed society into the modern day. Flash forward 90 years - my mom developed the negatives and brought the photos back to life! They were left behind in the original post-and-beam farmhouse that stands to this day. My great-grandfather found glass plate negatives at Cragged Mountain Farm in 1926 that were originally taken in the late 1800’s. The history of Cragged Mountain Maple and the maple syrup we bottle for you is rooted in New England hill country. History of Subsistence Farming in New Hampshire Why did people start farms in New Hampshire in the 1800s? ![]()
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