Grant Family Farm History
There is a long history of sugar making with our family. It all started back in the early 1900’s with our great grandfather Hiram (Al) Grant. Hiram built the original sugar house from bits & pieces of this & that. Some of the lumber came from an old bridge in town. The building may not have been straight, but his sugar business was. All of the sap came from the maple trees from his land and was collected into buckets, and gathered by oxen and scoot.
After he was done with making the maple syrup, our great grandmother Jessie would take some of the finished syrup and boil it down even further and pour it into wooden molds to make sugar cakes. Al would make wooden boxes to send his syrup & sugar to wherever he had orders. (Orders were sent by train).
His son Leon Grant (along with family & friends) continued the tradition in the late 30’s & 40’s. They too used buckets to collect the sap. They gathered the sap with tractors and pull cart. This was quite an advance to the oxen. Our records show that they made 200 to 300 gallons of syrup a year.
Leon’s grandsons took over the sugaring operation in the 70’s. This also was a family & friends operation. They also used buckets to collect the sap and used tractors & pull carts to gather the sap.
By year 2000 the sugar house was in desperate need of remodeling, so the family got together with friends and took the old sugar house down and rebuilt an exact replica of the original. This sugar house is equipped with some of the latest and state of the art equipment money can buy. We retired the buckets, and have one of the most sophisticated tubing systems in the area. The system we have designed lets the trees give us all the sweet sap they have to offer. We make hundreds of gallons of maple syrup each year for you to enjoy.