Mill Brook House News

Introducing Mill Brook House and millbrookhousenews.com!

Kathe and Steve at home with Rocky, Pepper and over a dozen home-grown pumpkins!

Mill Brook House, vacation spot and part-time rental, is now our permanent home!  Nellie Fox, the fierce shiba inu, is no longer with us and neither is lovable Sandy, champion mouser, whom we acquired soon after Nellie’s passing.  Rocky, once half of the Sandy-Rocky show, continues to enjoy the great outdoors as does Pepper, our mini-Australian sheepdog.  In 2016, they were joined by baby Max, another yellow tabby.  (Sadly, Max left us prematurely, and we adopted baby Taz in 2023.)

Mill Brook House, first renovated (2004-2006) to accommodate vacationers, has, more recently, undergone renovations to make our permanent residence possible.  We have extended the loft over our attached, two-part garage, built a staircase to the attic and a large new closet on what was once a spacious landing, completed a new guest room with its own closet (a rare commodity in this house), constructed a massive bookcase in the living room where we once tucked a trundle bed, further improved the downstairs bathroom, ditched the 1920's kitchen sink, and turned the downstairs bedroom into a glorified pantry.  To the swimming-pool-turned-garden from 2004, we added a second garden when Hurricane Irene made re-landscaping necessary, and in 2015 we built a third garden dedicated to gladioli and vegetables.  We have also launched a daylily business (see millbrookhousedaylilies.com). 

Millbrookhousenews.com will continue to offer insights and information on Western Massachusetts, occasional film and relevant book reviews, our photographs of the area, including wildlife, landscapes, and landmarks, and personal essays.  Recipes have been spun off onto their own blog, millbrookhouserecipes.com.  For more of Steve's photographs, see sternbachphoto.com. We hope that you will enjoy all four blogs!  You can comment right on the blogs or email us at [email protected].  

Mill Brook House, summer 2013

 

Maple Sugaring Along the Mohawk Trail

When nights are cold and daytime temperatures rise above freezing, sap starts to run, and buckets hang from maple trees all over rural New England.  Visitors, eager for some diversion between ski season and summer, flock to sugarhouses to watch the evaporation process, buy maple products, and eat at sugarhouse restaurants.

Colonists first learned about the sweetness of maple sap from Native Americans, who collected it from V-shaped slashes they made on the trunks of maple trees, and the newcomers subsequently developed their own techniques for tapping trees and reducing the sap to syrup or sugar.  When England forbid trade with the West Indies in 1765, colonists looked to maple sugar to fill their sweet needs.

In earlier times, farmers with a substantial "sugar bush" set up sugar camps in the woods, and the whole family would move to the camp to help with the labor-intensive process of gathering and boiling sap.  So originated the one-week "winter vacation" still observed every February by New England schools, a custom non-natives find bizarre--who wants their kids home in February when they can't go outside to play?   What began as time off from school to work at a sugar camp is, today, an opportunity to visit a modern-day sugarhouse.

During the Civil War, cane sugar became scarce once again, and maple sugar, supplied to the troops and used at home, was considered the "patriotic" alternative to sugar produced in the South.  Metal buckets with lids, such as you see here, were developed to aid in collecting sap, and the development of the tin can in these years allowed syrup to be preserved, shipped, and used year round.

Today large sugaring operations use less quaint, time-saving tubing to collect sap, but small producers still use sap buckets, and many larger operations use buckets to collect sap from outlying trees.  A single farmer may tap the trees on many properties, paying his neighbors for sap in gallons of finished syrup.  The ratio of sap to syrup is 40:1--forty gallons of sap to one gallon of syrup.  To be tapped, trees need to be 10 inches in diameter, which means they need to be c. 40 years old.  Each tap hole will yield about 10 gallons of sap, which will reduce to 1 quart of syrup.

Maple syrup comes in four different grades, named by color: golden, amber, dark, and very dark.  The darker the color, the stronger the flavor.  Which is best depends on one's personal taste.  Each has the same proportion of maple to water, and the producer has no control over which grade each boil will produce, but darker syrup tends to come later in the season.  In addition to syrup, producers usually offer maple sugar, often made into candies, and maple cream.  A favorite at Western Massachusetts' many fall fairs is fried dough smeared with maple cream.   

In the 1960's, three Franklin County sugarhouses, Gray's in Ashfield, Davenport's and Gould's in Shelburne, began offering maple-syrup-laced breakfasts during the sugar season, an early foray into the now popular "agri-tourism."

Of the three, only Davenport Maple Farm, up Little Mohawk Rd. off Route 2, still offers breakfast during the sugar season. (See Sugarshack Restaurants in Western Massachusetts.)  Gould's has ceased all operations for the present.

Gould's Sugarhouse

The evaporator at rest

Gould's evaporator in action

Monitoring the syrup

 

While Canada, mainly Quebec, produces 80% of the world's maple syrup and Vermont leads the U.S. with around 1 million gallons, Massachusetts, ninth in the nation, produces about 60,000 gallons, worth 5-6 million dollars, and interest in this local industry is growing.  Eighty percent of our 300 plus producers are located west of I-91. Sales of Massachusetts syrup are mainly within the state.  For more information visit www.massmaple.org.

                           Syrup flows from the evaporator

Maple syrup production benefits the environment by preserving forests and woodlots, important habitat for birds and other animals.  By making commercial use of forested areas, sugaring saves them from other uses that might destroy the trees.  Sugaring preserves approximately 15,000 acres of open space in Massachusetts.  It also allows local dairy farmers to stay in business by giving them additional income.                  

Unfortunately, maple sugar production everywhere is is threatened by the invasion of the Asian longhorned beetle, which destroys hardwood trees, particularly maples.   It was  discovered in Worcester, MA, where 25,000 trees were destroyed to stop its spread.  Today officials urge people to keep an eye out for the pest and, most particularly, never to transport firewood from one location to another, but always to burn local wood.  For more on the beetle and how to identify it, see www.beetlebusters.info.

Maple syrup is high in antioxidants, minerals, especially manganese, vitamins, especially Riboflavin (B2), and low in fructose.  For recipes that use maple syrup, visit millbrookhouserecipes.com.

Historic Deerfield’s Leap Year Celebration

In John Ford’s enormously seminal film The Searchers (1956), two men spend five years searching for a young girl who has been abducted by Indians. When they find her, she has entered her teens and become one of the chief’s wives. At first she declares her allegiance to the tribe but later changes her mind and agrees to return home with the men. The reasons for her change of heart are never explained, nor did they need to be for a 1950’s audience. The girl had obviously come to her senses, remembered her past, and realized the advantages of returning to “civilization.” Such was not the case, however, with most white women captured as children and raised up in Indian tribes.

One of the best documented cases is that of Eunice Williams, daughter of a prominent Puritan clergyman, who, with her father and brother, was captured in the 1704 raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts, by Mohawk Indians and their French allies and marched 300 miles to Montreal through deep snow. The raid was a small piece of the War of the Spanish Succession—the one that made Winston Churchill’s ancestor Lord Marlborough famous—which had spilled over onto the American continent. The raid took place before dawn on February 29 and is commemorated every leap year by the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association. (Pocumtuck is the name both natives and colonists used for Deerfield at one time.)

This year’s commemorative events included lectures, reenactments, and demonstrations of colonial housekeeping crafts.

 Re-enactors, many of whom had come considerable distance, staged the battle that took place after the attack on Deerfield when militiamen from Northampton and other nearby settlements, seeing flames, marched to Deerfield and engaged the French and Indians as the last of them were leaving the burning village. Turned back by an ambush, the militiamen were unable to rescue any of the captives. This year about twenty re-enactors, pretending to be Frenchmen, English colonials, Mohawk and Abenaki, stood in for what had been a battle involving about 300 men. This left much to the imagination, but a narrator helpfully told the story while the actors “did battle” on a field at the Deerfield Academy.

As for Eunice Williams, although her father and brother were eventually “redeemed” (ransomed) and returned to Deerfield, she never went home. Captured specifically to take the place of a Mohawk child who had died, and converted to Catholicism by her Indian family, who lived in close proximity to the French, she refused every attempt by her father and brother to persuade her to return. As a teenager, she fell in love with a fellow tribesman, and, although dubious about the inter-racial union, the local padre married them when they declared they would live together unwed if he did not. Throughout his life, her brother, a clergyman like his father and tortured by fears for her immortal soul, wrote to and of her, and, on occasion, she and her husband visited him, pitching their tent in his yard in preference to sleeping in the house. Eunice herself remained illiterate, so we have no record of what she actually thought about her life with the Mohawk, although her actions speak quite loudly.

For more on Eunice Williams and the conundrum she posed for her family, see John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive (1994). To observe the next commemoration of the 1704 raid on Deerfield, you’ll have to wait until 2020.