He put up this new building during a recession. Bruce thought it was an advantageous time to build because construction companies would make low bids to get the work. There were those who disagreed with his decision. For his family members who lived nearby, the new building meant an ultimate departure from the kind of family farm Bascom’s had once been. They also wondered what would happen should Bruce depart. He got several requests from relatives for options on land, should he pass away. Bruce ignored them. His accountant said he should not take a risk on a building project at this time, but Bruce dismissed that advice on the belief that accountants were, by nature, overly cautious.
For a while it looked like the accountant was right. Bascom’s struggled during the summer of 2010 and in July, for the first time in many years, lost money. Bruce had developed a large enterprise with equally large expenses. “I have to sell a million dollars worth every month just to keep things running,” he said one afternoon. During that summer he put some of the employees on partial furlough, four-day weeks.
I then asked if he regretted taking on the new project.
“Absolutely not.”
When Arnold secured the Gold Coast order the whole outlook changed. Going into the fall Bruce scoured about looking for Vermont syrup and put a statement in his catalogue that he was “looking for Vermont.” He made calls from the office and took drives up north. But the need was too great to fill by calling individual sugarhouses. Ultimately he called on his counterpart, David Marvin of Butternut Mountain Farms, who controlled the supply in northern Vermont—had it locked up, Bruce liked to say. Actually, Marvin controlled fifty percent of the syrup in Vermont. He came to Bruce’s aid, selling him eighteen trailer loads, a couple of million dollars worth—65,000 gallons. He was happy to move out inventory to make room for the next year’s crop.
By the summer of 2011, a year after beginning construction on the new building, Bruce had 5.5 million pounds of syrup in storage—not enough to fill the basement but enough, he figured, to carry him to the end of the year.
WORD TRAVELS FAST in the maple syrup industry, and as the 2012 season approached, Bruce received inquiries about his company. He got an offer from the head of a venture capital firm that entered into the maple business by purchasing a Canadian maple company named L.B. Maple Treats. Now that the financial situation had changed between Canada and the United States due to the monetary exchange rate, L.B. Treats was looking for a footprint in the United States and wanted to buy American syrup. “It would have made me a very rich man,” Bruce said of the offer, “but I would never sell.” He also received a proposal to manage the company from a Canadian named Tom Zaffis, the previous manager of L.B. Treats who was now managing the equipment division of LaPierre Company in Quebec. Zaffis believed Bascom’s would keep him interested for a long time, and his proposal to become second-in-command had left Bruce feeling very excited. He had received a similar offer from a manager in Ontario who heard of the new developments.
During that time, late in 2011, one of the companies in the second tier, Highland Sugarworks, underwent a traumatic change when its owner, Jim MacIsaac, died in the woods. MacIsaac was the newest presence in the second tier and coming on fast after starting his company twenty-five years ago, after attending the University of Vermont. MacIsaac had taken on a lot of producers and was competing with Bruce for supply in the St. Aurelie region of Maine and in Vermont. MacIsaac enjoyed working in the woods, and one afternoon in November he went out on a four-wheeler with a chainsaw to cut a tree. As it fell, the trunk bounced back into his chest. Though he tried, he didn’t make it out of the woods. “They lost their fearless leader,” Bruce said, and though the employees promised to continue as before, the future of Highland was in question.
A few days after the funeral Bruce was in the store when a young man, about twenty years old, came in with his parents. He had started sugaring the year before, putting in 175 taps. Now he was thinking about getting involved in a more serious way. They asked a lot of questions.
“How many gallons of syrup can you make with a cord of firewood?” the young man’s father asked. A cord of firewood is a stack of wood eight feet long, four feet high, and four feet wide.
“About thirteen to twenty-five gallons, depending on the kind of wood you use,” Bruce said. “There can be a lot of variation, depending on whether you use dry hardwood or softwood like pine, or mixed wood, or the trashwood you cut when pruning an orchard. There was a sugarhouse in Vermont that used dry hardwood that was two years old. It takes two years to really dry hardwood. They had two woodsheds, each with a hundred or so cords, and they filled one each year.” Bruce could have been describing the farm he grew up on.
They looked at tubing and fittings, and they talked about evaporators. They wanted to know about boiling times. “Most people can boil six hours,” Bruce said. “They don’t want to boil for twelve.”
He told the family that Bascom’s was hosting a boiling seminar the next week and invited them. While they were looking at the evaporators Bruce came to me and mentioned the Tom Zaffis proposal, saying, “There’s been a new development. It will result in a major change in the industry.”
The winter of 2012 was looking promising after three feet of snow fell in late October. On the day of the boiling seminar the trucks and cars were streaming up the hill early in the morning. A worker was moved from the warehouse to direct the cars into the cornfield. Women from the office and the sugar-making section were moved to the new building to serve lunch. The guys in the Cooler were ready to take in the syrup that some of the attendees were bringing in to sell. Bruce and David Bascom had estimated that about 250 people would attend, but they rented 400 chairs to be on the safe side. As the talk began, Bruce noticed there were no empty chairs.
The seminar was held in the new building, and crates and pallets were moved to make room for the chairs and the speaker. Brad Gillian was a young sales representative at Leader Evaporator and a talented speaker and storyteller. He began by talking about his grandfather, who, he said, was an old-time Vermont sugarmaker. “He made better syrup than you could today, on a flat pan over an open fire on a brick arch.” Gillian said he had been the taste-tester in the sugarhouse, a job that often fell to children. His grandfather had no electricity in that sugarhouse and boiled by the light of a wood fire. Doing that caused you to listen to the boil, Gillian said. “My grandfather said the evaporator will talk to you. You just have to listen.”
He asked for a show of hands. “How many of you are burning wood?” About half the people raised their hands. They were an old-fashioned woodsy crowd, but there were many among them who wanted to expand.
I had been up late the night before, and went to get some coffee at the stand set up in the new bottling room. What a room it was—open and spacious with plenty of light and a view of the distant mountains. The conveyors, the fillers, the packing tables—all were fresh and new and promising.
I walked out, sipped the coffee, and looked at the crowd. It seemed to me that these seminars and also the open house Bascom’s held in the spring were an outgrowth of the sugar parties I had heard about, the parties Ken and Ruth Bascom had hosted during the sugar season each year. During those times cars were lined up all along the road. The visitors drank coffee and ate pastries, sampled the new syrup, and talked to Ken Bascom at the evaporator. There was no evaporator on this day, but the event brought people together, and Bruce was roaming about, talking to this one and that.
I saw Bruce walking my way. I didn’t know whether he wanted to talk to me, and it seemed he didn’t because he walked past me, but then he turned and said something. Tom Zaffis was “sixty-forty,” he said. Maybe he would come, maybe not. In time, for personal reasons, the Zaffis proposal would fade away. But Bruce’s excitement was still fresh on this day, and the success of the boiling seminar had intensified his feelings.
He said, while looking at the crowd, “This is why he wants to come here! This is the value of the name!”
5
THE FIRST FULL-TIME SUGARMAKER
TO BRUCE’S RECOLLECTION Ken Bascom never said one way or the other whether he wanted Bruce to return to the farm. One day I asked Bruce, “If your father was silent about your return and your mother begged you not to do it, why did you come back?” For a moment Bruce’s face reddened and his eyes went wide, like I was a teacher calling on him in English class. But then the look turned to amusement, which I thought was the difference between then and now.
“I wanted to prove I could do it better than him,” he said.
In 1965, a few months after Ken Bascom became a full-time sugarmaker, an article about him and his family appeared in a magazine called Food Marketing in New England, published by the First National Food Stores. The story took the form of a defense, and celebrated the farmer and his wife who were making a go of maple syrup production against the claims of a city dweller who stated that it was a thing of the past, strictly for fuddy-duddies, that young people didn’t care about it anymore. “‘Well,’ we said, ‘it is old, as years go, one of the few arts taught the white man by his Indian predecessors on this Continent. But we can’t disagree with you too violently on the matter of giving it attention. It’s . . . Spring around the corner . . . it’s new life rising . . . and it’s a field of human endeavor about which there still is much deep and moving mystery.’”
The editors intended to send the Bascom piece to their cynical friend, with a circle in red pencil around the words, “young people don’t, etc.”
For Kenneth Bascom is a young man and his wife Ruth is a young woman, and if it doesn’t embarrass them too much to say it (they’re real New Hampshire people, who are not the expostulating kind)—we rate them as being as high a type of young people as the U.S. produces on any level you care to name. Ken Bascom isn’t shuffling his feet in this maple business. He’s enthusiastic. So is Ruth. And they work their heads off at it, and succeed at it, and plan to double it. Ken sold his herd of cows last October. They were doing well too, eighty Holsteins, forty-five milking, and at the time they were sold, Ken was making a ton of milk a day and the herd production was 520 pounds butter fat, 13,000 milk. But maple trees interested him most, and the opportunity ahead, he feels, is great and the whole sugaring enterprise stimulating. This is thinking against a trend, an individualistic thinking, planning and operating which make our country what it is—the sort of thing that showed to the Russians who read the magazine article above that what makes America tick is people free to go against, as well as with, the tide.
Ken was hanging 6500 buckets, so many, the article stated, that stacked end to end they would stretch more than a mile. He also had 500 taps on tubing as an experiment. Ken bought sap from other sugarmakers who delivered it to his sugarhouse, and he also bought syrup. He bought it in thirty-gallon drums and paid for it by the pound. The article stated that Ken hoped someday not to have to buy syrup, once he further expanded the operation. Ken would continue to farm. He had about 600 acres under production, 150 on which he would raise hay and clover. He would also cut 200 cords of wood a year—100 cords for sale and another 100 to be used to boil sap. Two hundred cords of wood at four feet wide and four feet high would stretch 1600 feet, about three-tenths of a mile.
The article focused on the maple sugar parties that the Bascoms held at their sugarhouse each year. The parties were very successful—in 1964 there were 500 visitors. On those weekends the Chevys, Pontiacs, Buicks, and Fords were lined up along Sugar House Road, and tour buses came from Boston. To advertise the parties, Ken and Ruth had produced an informational brochure that they mailed to prospective visitors. It read,
During the season (approximately March 13–April 18) we will be serving sugar on snow, hot fried doughboys and syrup, pickles and coffee at our sugarhouse. Not every day but on the days and nights the evaporators are working. The charge is $1.00. We must have a reservation for large groups. A few days notice is sufficient. (Tel. 835-2230)
WHAT YOU WILL SEE IF YOU VISIT US:
•50 mile view of fields, valleys and mountains. evaporators.
•Gathering and/or boiling of sap.
•Filtering of maple syrup.
•Wooden, metal, plastic buckets, new plastic tubing systems.
•Complete line of delicious maple products.
WHAT YOU WILL HEAR:
•The putt-putt of tractors.
•The drip-drip of sap in metal buckets.
•The rush of sap on its way to the evaporator.
•The roar of the fires.
•Explanation of the sugaring process.
•The toot of the steam whistle announcing that syrup is being drawn off.
We do not have Florida’s climate, but we do have clean, fresh air aplenty atop our 1,500 foot Mt. Kingsbury. For this reason we suggest an extra sweater. Be sure to bring boots. We still have snow in the Spring! And don’t forget your camera!
This was a family affair, the article said. There was a portrait photograph of the three kids, of Bruce, fourteen, a high school freshman, and Judy, twelve, a seventh grader, and Nancy, ten, a fifth grader, sitting around a table having a private sugar party. A pile of doughboys—doughnuts without holes—in a bowl. A bowl of pickles nearby. Judy looks into a tea cup while Nancy samples a doughboy, and Bruce seems to be lifting a piece of maple taffy from a pan of snow—sugar on snow.
Ruth Bascom was a town girl from Milford, Massachusetts, who had been a secretary before she met Ken. The article stated, “On the maple side, all the family pitch in. With Mother Ruth as the head chef, the maple products are turned out in the family kitchen. Ruth brings her business training to play on the books of the maple business. She receives no pay. Ken says he figures she deserves the latest in kitchen and household appliances. One year she went without however—‘I was broke. I had bought a bulldozer,’ he says, grinning.”
The Bascoms were active in their church and in community organizations. The Acworth 4-H club met in their living room, but it had grown so large that Ken built a garage with a room above where the club could meet. Ken held offices in the Grange, served as an Acworth selectman, as the director of the Farm Bureau, and was a member of the advisory board for the State Department of Agriculture. He was president of the New Hampshire Maple Syrup Producers Association and active in the North American Maple Syrup Council.
The article closed with a note about the extent of the work on a maple farm. It took two days for the three- to five-man sugaring crew to get to all the 7000 buckets. In a normal season of six weeks, buckets were emptied from six to as many as twelve times—42,000 to 84,000 times in all.
KEN BASCOM’S FATHER, Eric Bascom, was born on a farm about a mile away from the maple farm, on the other side of Langdon Woods. His father, James Bascom, was a farmer noted for his cleverness—he made a windmill from a wagon wheel—and for his ability to produce light-colored maple syrup. Eric Bascom attended a theological school in Maine, where he met his wife, Elida Frost. Ken Bascom was born there, in 1925. Eric and Elida became ordained ministers; Elida was the first female ordained minister in New Hampshire. They had four more children. Eric Jr. became an ordained minister in Springfield, Massachusetts. Rodney became a farmer and logger and taught at the University of New Hampshire. Paul became an agricultural statistician with the US Department of Agriculture. A sister, Shirley, raised a family in Tilton, New Hampshire.
In the late 1920s Eric Bascom bought the farm on Mount Kingsbury for $2500, paying $30 down and $30 a month to the widow who owned it. The place was called the Stone House Farm because of the smart-looking stone house built in 1837 by Zenas Slader, who cut slabs from a seam on top of the mountain and moved them to the site with a team of oxen. Eric’s brother Glenn owned the farm further down the hill. At the time of his purchase Eric was a minister in Canterbury, New Hampshire. He arranged for a tenant to manage the farm but returned in the spring to make maple syrup and grow a crop of potatoes with his brother Glenn. Eric sold his maple syrup to pari
shioners and, in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, peddled it house to house.
The Depression made life difficult for most everyone but none more so than ministers of churches that depended on weekly donations. In 1938 Eric Bascom’s yearly salary was reduced from $1200 to $750. In the fall one of the worst hurricanes in history hit the Northeast, with winds of 160 miles per hour cutting a swath 400 miles wide, leaving 500 people dead. The hurricane blew away barns and livestock and leveled millions of trees, destroying many sugar orchards. Hummocks, the mounds and hollows from tree trunks and roots, can still be seen in the woods of New Hampshire today.
Eric and Elida decided to move their family to the farm in Acworth, arriving early enough to plant crops in the spring. Ken stayed in Canterbury to finish eighth grade but worked in the fields that summer. When it came time to gather hay, Ken received a quick driving lesson and, at age thirteen, drove a Chevy truck while his father arranged the loads of hay. Eric continued to grow potatoes with his brother Glenn, started raising chickens, and began building a dairy herd.
Maple syrup was a crucial part of the farm. Later in his life Ken Bascom wrote about this in an article for a farming publication: “I was thirteen upon moving to the farm and descended from several generations of sugarmakers. We had 600 old metal buckets, a team of horses, a sled with a five-barrel tank, and a rough-boarded sap house. There was a 20-barrel storage tank and a 2½ by 8-foot evaporator. Being the oldest of five children, it became the lot of ‘Yours Truly’ to drill the holes and to tap in the metal spouts.”
The Sugar Season Page 4