The Maple

Our Maple

We continue to  honor the history of sugar making in Highland County, Virginia.  We began our sugaring adventure in 2010 collecting sugar water in buckets and boiling on flat pans passed down from previous generations of sugar makers. While visiting you will see the old cast iron kettles that boiled sugar water and processed hogs, for subsistence farmers throughout Appalachia.  Come during the sugaring season and you’ll see the flat pans boiling sap right next to a modern CDL evaporator.  Interpreting the history and demonstrating the present technology of maple syrup making is a feature of a tour at our operation.

We are currently using 35 acres of our farm for maple production, and currently have about 1200 taps in the woods. Although the farm could support many more thousands of taps we continue to keep our sugaring operation small so we can continue our outreach and educational events to help folks remember the old time traditions of making syrup and to  promote the Virginia maple syrup industry. 

We use as many resources from the farm as it will allow, such is the case with our sugar house.  The woolly adelgid an invasive species that effects hemlock trees, infested some of our forest so we harvested those trees, had them milled on the property and built our sugar house.  We then used the left over slabs to boil our sugar water into delicious maple syrup.  Our two flat pans and our evaporator are both wood fired so we always have a need for more firewood.