New Year - '51

The year 1951 was the first that I spent away from home. I was on an LDS church mission to Eastern Canada. My companion and I were living in Midland, Ontario. Right after the new year started, we were invited by one of our gospel investigators to go with them to the bush country (forest) to cut cord wood and make maple syrup. It was on a Saturday our "Preperation Day" so we went. The man we were with had been there two or three days before and tapped several maple trees to collect the sap used in making maple syrup. He had a kiln set up to render the sap and assigned me and my companion to gather the sap, fire the kiln and render the maple sap into maple syrup. The kiln ws an open oblong pan divided into three equal parts. The pan measured six feet long by two feet wide and four incnes deep. The dividers had small holes about the size of a match stick in the corners to allow the sap to flow from one section to another during the rendering process. The kiln was built on a slight downward slope, back to front to allow the sap to go from one section to the next. We spent two hours gathering the gallon size buckets of sap. We started the fire under the kiln and took turns chopping wood and keeping the fire going. By putting the sap in the high side of the kiln and heating it to a boil, as it went from one section to the next it became more concentrated. By the time the sap had reached the last section, it was starting to thicken up to the consistency of maple syrup. We found that it took about ten gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. At the end of the day, we had rendered six gallons of syrup. You can imagine that with the kiln being open that there were some impurities in the finished product. We strained it through my T shirt (the only near clean thing we had) into gallon jugs. It was delicious! You've never tasted maple syrup 'till you've tasted the real thing made from scratch.