The Orebed Sugar Shack - Part 1

On the very first day of St. Lawrence County's "Maple Weekend," I drove 40 miles southwest to the tiny farming community of Dekalb Junction, where I attended an open house at the Orebed Sugar Shack, a maple sugar house. I parked way back off the road and walked to the sugar house, passing this lovely old barn on the way:

The sugar house was straight ahead and, judging by the number of parked cars, would be crowded:

Indeed, it was crowded inside, but I got to photograph the evaporator, where the St. Lawrence County Maple Queen was explaining the operation:

Young people were offering tours, so I accepted this young woman's offer and she led me outside for a demonstration of the old fashioned way of tapping trees - a method still widely used around here:

I noticed that chickens (or turkeys - they were awfully big) were roasting. I saw plates of hotdogs being carried around, but didn't see them for sale and never figured out who, if anyone, was eating all that food:

The next stop on my tour was at this demonstration of how it takes 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of maple syrup. I asked if there were 40 jugs there and she said, "Oh, more or less." I counted them in the picture and got a total of only 27 - some of them only half full. But it was still a good thing to learn that it takes 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of maple syrup. Hey, I remembered it, didn't I?:

Then we came to an illustration of the old fashioned way of boiling down sap to make syrup:

The sap was heated over a wood fire and progressed from one channel to the next as it thickened. The last channel had a thermometer so that it could be the final determiner of when the syrup was ready:

Outside, she showed me the modern sap collection technique. The blue lines were gravity fed transportation from the trees to the vacuum powered, larger, black lines:

All of the pipelines carried the sap to this modern collection hub, where it was then pumped into the evaporation room:

Back in the evaporation room, Bill, who appeared to be the patriarch of the operation, was explaining the process. But there was still more to see at the Orebed Sugar Shack and I'll post Part 2 tomorrow: