The Maple Sugar Book

Together With Remarks
On Pioneering
As a Way of Living
In the Twentieth Century

Helen & Scott Nearing



This is a classic, kids! For those travelers out of the loop, Scott Nearing was a banished and blacklisted, socialist professor at Swarthmore College in the late 1920’s when he married a very complicated, quasi elitist, much younger woman, Helen Knothe. Actually, he stole her from a famous British guru of the day, Jiddu Krishnamurti, but not to get off on a leaky lateral as both Helen and Scott’s pre maple lives were exceedingly complicated journeys. Being unable to find suitable employment in the cities, they bought a worn-out farm in the rural hills outside Jamaica, Vermont and began subsistence farming in the 1930’s. They detailed their experiences in the famous back to the earth best seller, “Living the Good Life.” A central tenant they tout in their vegan subsistence strategy was developing and focusing on a cash crop, which they decided would be maple sugar.

Scott was dynamic, outspoken, very industrious, and complicated too. After watching and working with his neighbors, some trial and error, and much thought, he engineered a large, branched pipe system, running far up the side of a mountain, that emptied right into the sugarhouse. Think the veins of a giant maple leaf! All the trees were tapped with buckets and emptied daily into the nearest branch of the pipe system, which was less than several hundred feet away from most trees. This system, once debugged, was far more efficient than the traditional method of using a gathering tank hauled through the sugarbush by horses or oxen.

Moreover, as he thinned his woods into compact areas of solid sugar maples, the efficiency of his pipe system increased. Thinning also provided fuel for his evaporators, fuel to heat his house, wood for his buildings and even poles for his extensive gardens. As we know now, larger trees with more leaves produce better sap and thinning produces larger trees.

To alleviate his extensive fear of fire - and insurance companies and banks and doctors and politicians - he self-insured against fire and equipment failures by building two identical stone sugarhouses. They included massive stone chimneys. Traditional metal evaporator stacks heights were typically 2 times the length of the evaporator to provide the necessary draft for the fire. His evaporators required 30 feet of stack height with an I.D. of 24 inches. They were notoriously difficult to erect, support and maintain. Dry, seasoned wood is essential for efficient operation of wood fired evaporators and he designed and built a large woodshed with a track system to feed wood to the evaporators. He could run one sugar house while the other evaporator was cleaned, another essential chore, or both units at once during peak flows.

He also quickly discovered value added products and found maple sugar candy much more profitable than selling syrup. But he also discovered the rapid development of Stratton Mountain ski resort, with its increasing flow of customers, was over running his pastoral idyll. Rampant capitalism was at his doorstep…so he and Helen packed up and move to the Maine coast to grow blueberries.

All sounds great, eh? Well, there is a catch. This ain’t a boot strap story. As Helen wrote later in life, they inherited a great deal of money…from the guru lover…during the Vermont adventure. Ah, I’m sure Scott would agree, capitalism is insidious. And wait, as a postscript, he and Helen sold the property to a flatland engineer, George Breen, who decided to replace Nearing’s still too labor-intensive bucket and metal pipe collection system with plastic tubing and quickly became 3M’s largest blood transfusion tubing customer before he threw in the towel!