Page 5 - BusinessWest February 17, 2025

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Sap flows best from the trees when freezing nights are followed by warm days.
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can bring home syrup, maple cream, maple candy, and more from the store. “We see a lot of the same families every year,” Chip said. “And when
we’re boiling, we invite people to come back and ask questions, and we’ll explain the process. It’s really interesting to get people’s feedback — a lot of people have no idea how you even start making maple syrup, and people are amazed you take this product that looks like water and make it into this all- natural sweetener.”
It’s a product that has brought some sweet times for the Williams family since Milton Hubbard Williams began the syrup tradition in the mid-1800s, followed by his son, Kenneth Sanderson Williams. The original Williams sugarhouse was one of 13 located on Mount Toby in Sunderland.
In his diary, Hubbard Williams wrote, “March 6, 1853, commenced sugar- ing. March 25, 1853, traded sugar for coat and pants in Amherst.” Thirty-six years later, he was still sugaring, and on April 1,
1889, he wrote, “Gathered 20 bls [barrels] sap
for four successive days. Had the best week I ever
knew ... syrup sells readily.”
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In the mid-1960s, amid growing success and realizing the need for a better retail location, Ken- neth Williams Jr. and his brother, Milton, moved the third-generation sugarhouse off the mountain to Route 47 in North Sunderland. The final move came in 1994, when the family, led by fourth- generation operator Sandy Williams, built a sugar- house on Route 5 in Deerfield, near its sweet-corn farm.
“The reason we moved here is our farm was just right up the road in Old Deerfield,” Chip said. “We would drive over to Sunderland every day to operate the sugarhouse during the sugaring sea- son, so when this property here came up for sale, my family bought it, and we were able to move everything closer to our operation.”
“After a freeze, that next day, when it warms up, it’ll flow, but it’ll only flow for a certain amount of time before you need it to freeze again.
If it warms up and stays warm, it’ll run for a little while, and then you won’t get anything.”
In Sunderland, they served coffee, donuts,
‘sugar on snow,’ and the like, but the move to Deer-
field saw the food-service operation expand to
serving meals — first on weekends, then seven days a week for a while, and currently three days a week. They stopped growing corn up the road 2012, but the sugarhouse — and its almost two centuries of tradition — lives on.
From Tree to Plate
Some years are weaker than others because of the uncertainty of the weather, Williams said. Last year wasn’t particularly strong for sap produc- tion, but 2010 was much worse, with only about 20% of the normal crop.
“It just warmed up around the middle of March, and it never froze again. It just stayed warm. So we didn’t get any more sap,” he explained, adding that an early start to those cold-warm cycles are important. “Here at our sug- arhouse, if we don’t make any syrup in February, a lot of years it’s hard for
us to have a really good year; we find that whatever we miss early, we never
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