During this spring of social distancing I sat at home and read Karl Marx’s Grundrisse. The Grundrisse is a working-out of the ideas that would eventually make up the three published volumes of Capital. But Marx died before he could put much of the material in the Grundrisse into a more finished form, so it remains maybe the best overview of Marx’s total vision of how capitalism functions.

Also this spring, the geographer David Harvey taught a course on the Grundrisse at CUNY and posted his lectures to YouTube. At one point he asked his students for feedback — what were they getting from the text and lectures? In appreciation of the work he’d put in, I also sent him an email.

The email’s as good a summary of where my research has been taking me as anything I’ve written, so I’m posting it to my own blog as a way to mark my progress.

I’m a librarian by trade, but my training and research interests are in history, and I’m currently researching the history of maple sugar production in the early American republic. Specifically, I’m looking at a set of three attempts, between 1790 and 1795, to produce maple sugar on a large enough scale that it could replace cane sugar imported from the Caribbean.

One of the key insights that I’ve picked up from the Grundrisse is that of viewing the circuits of capital as a totality. I’m finding that thinking about both how sugar was produced and how it was distributed and consumed is, well, productive.

Cane sugar was produced on large plantations with an almost industrial character — a great deal of investment in the form of fixed capital, but still reliant on enslaved laborers and a focus on a single staple product for export. After harvest and an initial refining process in the Caribbean, cane sugar was then shipped to the United States (or Europe), where it had to be refined again both to fix damage from travel, and to make it the purer, whiter grade desired by genteel consumers.

In contrast, maple sugar was produced in the northeast US and in Canada on small family farms, with little investment needed, free labor (whether family members only or occasional wage labor), and as an adjunct to the larger farm production, with most of the sugar kept for personal use and some being sold at local markets. Maple sugar was refined to a level similar to a Caribbean brownish muscovado but not further.

What the investors in large-scale maple sugar wanted to do was usurp cane’s place within the totality of production, distribution, and consumption, by mass-producing maple sugar in a quality similar to what was shipped from the Caribbean, transporting it to urban seaports, then having existing refineries transform it into a high-grade white sugar.

There were three major attempts to harvest maple sugar on a large scale between 1790 and 1794. The proprietors were William Cooper, in Cooperstown, NY; Henry Drinker, at Union Farm on the Susquehanna in southeast PA; and Gerrit Boon, near Utica, NY. These were independent but not unrelated attempts; Drinker was Cooper’s biggest investor, while Boon visited both Cooper and Drinker’s operations.

All three failed. What’s interesting to me, and what the Grundrisse gives me a lens for understanding, are the ways in which they failed, and how the initial vision for the projects gradually retreated.

Initially, as conceived by Cooper, Drinker, Benjamin Rush, and a circle of Philadelphia Quakers who invested in both Cooper and Drinker’s attempts, the maple sugar industry was intended to strike a deathblow to Caribbean sugar plantation slavery. Farmers and their families, settled in the forests of Pennsylvania and New York, would produce raw sugar equal in quality and quantity to that of the sugar islands. They would do so using simple tools rather than industrial facilities, and laboring for only a few weeks of the agricultural year.

But Cooper’s first attempt, in 1790, produced only relatively small amounts of a poor-quality sugar that the Philadelphia refiner Edward Penington had difficulty refining and selling. Cooper and Drinker had hoped to gain the endorsement of the country’s elite. But Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, having been sent samples of maple sugar, expressed support publicly but in private denigrated the quality and refused to serve it at their tables.

The next year Cooper tried to increase the quality of his maple sugar by building a refinery in the woods, based on descriptions of refineries at Caribbean plantations. We don’t know exactly what went wrong, only that he shipped only a very small amount of sugar out of Cooperstown in 1791 and closed up his operation soon after.

Drinker’s operation at Union Farm attempted to produce maple sugar for several years but, like Cooper’s, never seems to have produced enough to create a return for its investors.

Boon’s also failed, but in a more interesting way. Boon seems to have had no interest in antislavery; he was a Dutchman employed by a sugar refining and mercantile house in Rotterdam, had experience on Caribbean sugar plantations, and owned slaves at his central New York home. He was simply looking to use his expertise to make a killing for his firm. His attempt was based around a significant investment in fixed capital: creating a system of troughs and gutters to collect the sap and draw it by gravity to the refinery. Modern maple syrup farmers can pull that off with a system of plastic tubing and a vacuum pump, but Boon’s handcrafted wooden troughs warped and leaked. The experiment was deemed a failure and Boon’s firm instead invested in the burgeoning land speculation market.

I’ve been thinking primarily about production, and a little about consumption, but before watching your lectures and reading the Grundrisse, I hadn’t considered the other circuits that flow within the totality of cane sugar/maple sugar production. Credit is one: from where do Cooper, Drinker, and Boon get their initial investment, and how does that affect the progress of their attempts? And I don’t know as much as I’d like about the farmers or laborers who did the actual work of harvesting and refining maple sugar as I’d like.

As we drove by a small sugar house, we saw smoke and steam rising from the vents in the roof – they were making syrup today.

We’d never been to Wayne LaPier and Family Maple Sugar House before, and we’d just come from a pancake breakfast at another maple farm. But the woodpile stacked to the side of the building suggested that LaPier’s was an old-fashioned operation, one that still ran on wood for fuel rather than gas or electric. And a sign out front advertised an open house.

Inside we met Wayne LaPier, 75 years old, who has run this operation since 1985 when he bought it from his father. He’s standing next to the evaporator, the key piece of equipment in making maple syrup, and the producer of the smoke and steam that alerted us a boil was taking place.

Sap used to be collected in wooden or metal pails and then carried to the syrup house. Now a system of plastic tubing connects the trees and gravity carries the sap down to a drum for collection.

Those drums are gathered when they fill, brought to the syrup house, and poured into a larger collection tank.

Sap from nearby trees bypasses the collection drums and is pulled directly into the sugar house via a simple vacuum system hidden in a back closet.

In another closet sits this reverse osmosis machine. It takes the sap from the collection drums and vacuum system and rather like a household water filter, separates the water from the impurities – except in this case it’s the “impurities” that become the syrup. The process cuts the fuel needed for running the evaporator by two-thirds.

After going through the RO system, the syrup is stored in an overhead vat and gradually drained into the evaporator. Wayne bought this evaporator when he took over the operation in 1985. It’s made by the Canadian company Dominion & Grimm. Matthew Thomas’s Maple Sugar History blog has a short history of the firm, including an advertisement from 1909 with an evaporator that looks very much like this one.

There’s a pile of wood ready to be burned.

The rest of the family is moving the wood into place…

…so Wayne can keep the fire going.

Sap boils inside the evaporator, further reducing the water content.

Wayne uses a hygrometer to test the syrup from the evaporator. When the syrup reaches a particular density, it’s nearly ready for consumption.

It only needs to run through a series of filters…

…and the result is fresh, warm syrup, with a flavor much richer than even good syrup that has been packaged and stored.

Reader, should you ever have the chance to drink hot maple syrup right from the evaporator, please, do not pass it by.

Thanks to Wayne LaPier, Christine, and the rest of the family for letting us stay for an hour, answering all our questions, and giving us a taste of the syrup at its best.

Thomas, Matthew M. Maple King: The Making of a Maple Sugar Empire. Published by author, 2018.

The eponymous “Maple King” of Matthew Thomas’s book is George C. Cary (1864-1931), founder of the Cary Maple Sugar Company of St. Johnsbury, Vermont. In Thomas’s telling Cary was not only a producer of maple products, but a key figure in the modernization of the industry. Before Cary, maple sugar was produced a few hundred pounds at a time by small farmers and sold to consumers for household use. But after Cary, maple sugar had become a commodity. Small producers sold to large “packers,” who mixed their purchases together and sold a standardized product measured in tons rather than pounds. The primary purchaser was now large commercial interests rather than individuals.

Maple King is organized chronologically, and serves both as a biography of Cary himself and a history of the rise, fall, and rebirth of the Cary Maple Sugar Company and its associated brands. It makes sense to write the two together, for Cary and his business were, Thomas argues, inextricably intertwined. Cary began the company with the money he had made purchasing maple sugar to sell to tobacco manufacturers. It ran on credit through the 1910s and 1920s, much of that credit backed by Cary’s personal wealth. When Cary was no longer able to finance operations the company fell into bankruptcy.

The book begins with the limited scale of maple sugaring in the early nineteenth century and the industrial progress that began after the Civil War that transformed the maple products as it did the rest of American agriculture. It follows how Cary entered the maple sugar business and how he steadily moved from a role as middleman to become a producer, refiner, and marketer of maple products. Succeeding chapters detail Cary’s expansion beyond his own company, via the purchase of failing competitors, partnership with successful ones, and innovative marketing of his products. The culmination of this period was Cary’s dominance of bulk maple sugar production in the United States by the 1920s. But by the end of the decade business had slumped, hit hard by the Great Depression, as credit tightened and the tobacco companies that were Cary’s primary customers pushed for lower prices. The result was bankruptcy, after which pieces of the Cary empire were split off, sold, and sold again, up to the present day. Yet one brand in particular – Maple Grove Farms – has stayed strong.

One of my favorite things about Maple King is Thomas’s use of both documentary sources and material culture. Company documents, newspaper accounts, and archival photographs are key to the narrative. But Thomas is especially interested in the built landscape of the Cary maple empire, including the company plant and Cary’s residence in St. Johnsbury, the stores and restaurants that marketed Cary products to tourists, and the farms and sugarbushes in outlying areas where Cary sourced its raw materials.

Cary’s story is that of a self-made man, skilled in the world of business, not just rising to the top of an industry but creating one where there was none before. And what Cary created really was an industry: bulk purchasing, bulk refining, and the sale of a commoditized product. Today the iconic images associated with maple syrup include log cabins, trees hung with buckets, and a strapping man in a red and black checked shirt. These are very much the opposite of the landscape of mass production that Cary created. And yet, it was Cary’s own marketing machine that sold us the images of rustic sugaring.

When I first read Maple King I wondered how Cary’s business compared with another large maple sugar operation of the early twentieth century, Abbot Augustus Low’s Horse Shoe in the Adirondacks. I was happy to read on Thomas’s blog Maple Sugar History that his next book will be on Horse Shoe.

In the meantime, Maple King is an excellent narrative of the transformation of the maple sugar industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, well worth reading for anyone interested in the histories of maple sugar and maple syrup, Vermont, or industrialized agriculture and forestry.