Maple sugaring started with the Indigenous peoples of northeastern North America, who were tapping maples and boiling the sap long before Europeans arrived. Europeans who came in the 1600s learned the process from them. For a long time the main product was maple sugar, and syrup only took over in the late 1800s.
The first sugar makers
Nobody knows exactly when sugaring began, because no written records reach back that far. Indigenous sources describe a practice thousands of years old. Among the many nations that made maple sugar:
- The Abenaki of what is now Vermont. They have lived in the Northeast since the glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age, an estimated 10,000 to 11,000 years ago.
- The Haudenosaunee, a confederacy of six nations that includes the Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk), whose territory reaches from the upper half of New York State into Quebec.
- The Mi'kmaq of eastern Canada, whose sap gathering the French author Marc Lescarbot described in 1606.
- The Ojibwe, who have made maple sugar for centuries. Ojibwe families in Minnesota still make it today.
How sap became sugar
Methods varied by nation and changed over time. Abenaki sugar makers cut a diagonal gash just under the bark and set in a flat spout of cedar or slippery elm. Later spouts were hollowed sumac twigs, hammered into drilled holes. Sap dripped into buckets of folded birch bark, called Maskwaijo in Abenaki, set at the foot of the tree.
Cold did some of the work. Ice that formed on the sap overnight was mostly water, so it was skimmed off or thrown out (Abenaki children sometimes ate it), leaving less to boil. Abenaki sugar makers then boiled the sap in clay pots, set in the coals or hung over the fire, moving it from pot to pot as it cooked down.
You may have heard that Native sugar makers mostly boiled sap by dropping hot stones into hollowed-out logs. Brian Chenevert, the Nulhegan Abenaki tribal historian, calls that story inaccurate and insulting. It suggests Native people couldn't properly boil food until settlers brought metal pots. In the Nulhegan Abenaki's account, people across the Northeast had been boiling soups, stews and sap in clay pots for more than 3,000 years. Hot stones were used only on a small scale, mostly by hunters or people on the move.
Sugar first, syrup second
Most sap became sugar. Syrup, which the Abenaki call Mkwakbaga (red water), was harder to store, so it got used fairly quickly. For sugar, the boiled-down sap went into a basswood or walnut trough and was worked with a paddle and a sugar spoon until it turned granular. Or it was poured into small birch bark cones to harden into cakes. For the Ojibwe, granulated maple sugar was the main seasoning in food, and kept dry, it lasted for months.
One treat is still around. Early New England accounts describe Native sugar makers cooking syrup down until very thick and pouring it onto snow. The accounts call it wax sugar. You probably know it as sugar on snow.
A time to gather and give thanks
Sugaring was a social time. Before the reservation era, Ojibwe families spent winter in small groups. Opening sugar camp each spring brought communities back together to produce food, hold ceremonies and socialize. In the past, women did most of the sugaring work.
The Haudenosaunee hold a Maple Ceremony after Midwinter to honor each year's run of sap. Like their other festivals, it is a time to give thanks. The Kanien'kehá:ka word for maple is Wahta. Otsi'tsaken:ra (Charlie) Patton, a Faithkeeper with the Mohawk Trail Longhouse near Montreal, calls it "the leader of the trees." It wakes up before any other tree in spring, he explains. Kanien'kehá:ka people celebrate Wahta in the longhouse, drinking syrup from cups to give thanks for a gift from the Creator.
Settlers and the sugar trade
Settlers arriving in New England learned to make maple sugar from Native people, and made it the same way. In a 1722 letter, a French missionary living among the Abenaki described how the women there collected sap in bark vessels and boiled it into what he called a fairly good sugar. Ojibwe sugar makers had boiled sap in kettles of birch bark or copper. In the 1600s they began getting cast iron kettles from French traders, which made the work much easier. By the 1700s, Native people and settlers alike were boiling sap in iron and copper kettles.
Maple sugar had a political side, too. Quakers and abolitionists pushed it as a substitute for cane sugar from the West Indies, where enslaved people produced it.
From sugar to syrup
Around the Civil War, tin cans, metal spouts and evaporator pans arrived, and the maple syrup industry was born. Then, around 1890, the tariff on imported raw sugar ended, and cane sugar soon outsold maple sugar. New England sugar makers switched to syrup and sold it in cans and bottles.
By the late 1800s, the evaporator had become a flat pan with channels, so fresh sap could go in one end while finished syrup came out the other. Today's evaporators still follow that basic design. Plastic tubing for gathering sap was patented in 1959 by Nelson Griggs of Montpelier, Vermont. Vermont now makes more maple syrup than any other state, a little over half the US total in 2026.
Sugaring today
Indigenous sugaring continues. In the colonial era, some communities lost touch with the maple and its ceremonies, and many have begun to reclaim them only in recent years. In Kahnawà:ke, a Kanien'kehá:ka community near Montreal, many families have started their own sugar shacks. Ojibwe families run sugar camps on reservations across Minnesota. They may also harvest maple sugar on public lands in east-central Minnesota, a right that traces to the 1837 Treaty of St. Peters. In Barton, Vermont, the Nulhegan Abenaki keep the tradition going in their tribal forest, now with plastic tubing and a metal evaporator.
Maple syrup as it's made today traces back to what settlers learned from Indigenous sugar makers. Ours comes from a single Vermont forest and is boiled over a wood-burning fire. You'll find Amber and Dark in the shop, and the modern process, step by step, in our maple guide.
