By Stephen Smoot
In 1949, public school students and civil organizations voted to select the sugar maple as the Mountain State’s official tree. Interestingly enough, this took place a generation after the wide scale home-based production of maple sugar and syrup had declined due to the drop in price of white refined sugar.
Maple production in West Virginia, however, has been re-established. Many have found sweet profits in making not only syrup, but an entire array of related and inspired products. To boost the product profile, the West Virginia Maple Syrup Producer’s Association has established Maple Days as a yearly celebration and opportunity for producers, sellers, consumers, and other enthusiasts to enjoy all things maple.
In Hardy County, the Wardensville Garden Market served as the center of maple madness. Caitlyn Lovely shared that “we are very excited and very appreciative!” She also stated that the shop “supports West Virginia local farmers and local businesses” by selling a variety of products.
This includes maple which “sells pretty well.”
Wardensville Garden Market signed up to be featured on the interactive map as a seller. The popular tourist stop not for profit shop uses proceeds from its sales to support youth agriculture education programs. Lovely explained that they “teach life skills to young people, such as daily responsibilities” and other so-called “soft skills” that employers often say are lacking in the younger generations.
“Future generations show what they are capable of in the workforce” managing tasks at the shop.
All that said, Maple Days has not attracted participants in the same numbers as elsewhere. Pendleton County, for instance, saw several producers, sellers, and others featured as stopping points for Maple Days.
For Chris and Melinda Grimes of Circleville, their mission relies heavily on maple. The Grimes family owns and operates Mountain Cajun Getaways, a retreat for veterans to come with their families after completing deployments.
Chris Grimes, a veteran himself, has stated that families undergo tremendous strain when service people go on deployments. The retreat brings those families into an environment where they can reunify after long deployments in a safe and supportive environment, talk through their problems, and come back together stronger.
Mountain Cajun Getaways also hosts coffee chats where veterans can congregate together to swap stories, help each other work through problems, and create fellowship that evolves into community.
“It all goes back to that fellowship,” Chris Grimes shared.
In the time of year where they tap maple sap and transform it into delicious syrup and other problems, veterans and their families can, but are not obligated to, chip in and help. They usually do because, as Chris Grimes explains, people like to “see how something is really made.”
Last Saturday, the Grimes family welcomed family, friends, and visitors to enjoy his Louisiana-born wife’s authentic Cajun cooking and buy from a wide selection of products made almost entirely from foods grown or gathered in the region.
“This all started for the vets,” said Grimes. All sales of their products go to support the mission of their veterans’ non profit.
Across Snowy Mountain, near Sugar Grove, Cool Hollow has produced commercial maple syrup for over a decade. Ricky and Sam Harper, a husband and wife team, transformed the family farm from its traditional use entirely over to maple.
Sam Harper explained that up until the 1930s, “the trees were tapped.” On the site where she and her husband constructed their modern production center (called by all producers a “sugar shack” regardless of size or capacity) had sat where the farm traditionally made maple.
“They cooked it down to sugar instead of syrup,” she stated, adding that “they used it for bartering.”
By the 1930s the cost of refined white sugar had dropped to the point that “it didn’t make sense to make your own sugar.”
Until the 1990s, Cool Hollow focused on cattle. Droughts in the 1990s convinced the operators that the property had insufficient cattle to support livestock on any scale anymore.
Sam Harper explained that a Highland County producer tapping trees on an adjoining property told her husband, then a teenager, that “he had a lot of potential” in a maple operation that :he had never considered.”
Production started in 2014. Today, the farm focuses solely on maple and sells syrup to retail shops in cities as far away as Wheeling and Beckley, shipping their syrup directly to customers even in Alaska.
They currently use just under 5,000 taps and plan to expand capacity to 7,000, which would approximate about 10 percent of all taps in the state.
Both the Grimes family and the Harpers shared stories about meeting mass producers from major maple areas – Grimes meeting a major producer from Canada and the Harpers one from Vermont.
In both cases, they offered samples to taste.
In both cases, those from Canada and Vermont expressed a preference for the Mountain State product, but why?
Sam Harper stated that maple products can acquire from the environment different attributes that affect taste. Maple can taste different from season to season, from region to region, even from tree to tree.
Louisa Householder, from the West Virginia Beekeeper’s Association, has brought her family from Bridgeport to Maple Days for three years in a row. She explained that, like honey, maple exhibits terroir.
Terroir, as Householder explains, “gives natural maple syrup different flavors.” These subtle differences come from environmental factors including soil, temperature, processing technique, even tree genetics. Householder also echoed the idea of community when it comes to buying locally made maple, saying “it’s always important to know your producer.”
Like Householder, most of those going to Maple Days come in from outside the region. They stay in area lodging and make circuits among favored producers and sellers, making the event just as much about tourism as about agriculture.
The second Maple Day will take place on March 15.
