Long before Vermont was a state — before it was even a British colony — the maple trees of this region were already giving up their sweetness every March. Sugaring is one of the oldest food traditions in North America, and Vermont has been at the center of it for centuries.
The Abenaki Origins
The Abenaki people of Wabanahkik, the traditional homeland spanning present-day Vermont and the wider Northeast, perfected maple sugaring long before European contact, refining the practice over countless generations of oral tradition. Sugar-makers tapped trees with cedar or elm spiles set into diagonal notches, letting sap drip into woven birch-bark baskets called maskwaijo. To concentrate the sap without fire, they let it freeze overnight and skimmed away the ice — essentially the same principle behind today's reverse-osmosis machines. What remained was boiled down in clay or soapstone pots. Sugaring operations were traditionally led by Abenaki women, who ran the sugarbush and made the repairs season to season. The Abenaki word for this time of year, Sogalikas, translates to “time of maple sugar making.”
European settlers learned these techniques directly from Indigenous communities in the 1600s and 1700s, gradually swapping wood and bark tools for metal ones — but the core method has never really changed: tap a tree, collect the sap, boil away the water.
The Tools That Made It Possible
Vermont's old sugarhouses ran on tools that look almost nothing like today's stainless-steel operations. Early tappers cut a flat, chip-like gash into the bark; by the 1830s, that gave way to rounded wooden spiles driven into a neat auger hole, a change that did far less damage to the tree. Sap was gathered by hand into wooden buckets — often cedar or spruce, some painted a distinctive maroon red — and hauled to the sugarhouse using a neck yoke, a wooden crosspiece worn across the shoulders to balance a full pail on either side. It was slow, cold, unglamorous work.
Before dedicated sugarhouses became common in the 1850s, sap was boiled down over open stone arches outdoors, often into hard cakes or grain sugar rather than syrup, since sugar was easier to store and ship than liquid. The evaporating pan — patented in 1858 and improved in 1864 with baffles to control the flow of boiling sap — changed everything, making it practical to boil larger volumes efficiently indoors. Sugarhouses spread across Vermont's hillsides soon after, and many of the ones still standing today trace their roots to that era.
Through the 20th century, wooden buckets gave way to galvanized metal ones, and horse- or ox-drawn sleds replaced the shoulder yoke for hauling sap down from the sugarbush. Today, most Vermont producers run miles of plastic tubing straight from tapped trees to the sugarhouse, pulled along by vacuum pumps, with reverse-osmosis machines pulling water out of the sap before it ever hits the evaporator — a modern echo of the same freeze-and-skim trick the Abenaki used centuries ago.
Becoming Vermont's Signature Industry
What started as a household staple grew into a defining regional industry as transportation improved and demand for real maple syrup spread beyond Vermont's hill towns. By the early 20th century, Vermont had already become the leading maple syrup producer in the United States, and the state formalized its quality grading system in the 1930s to protect that reputation — a system that, in updated form, is still in use today.
Vermont has held the title of the nation's top maple-producing state almost without interruption since 1916. The scale of the modern industry is hard to overstate: the state now taps more than 8 million trees each spring, up from roughly 2 million taps in the early 2000s, and recent seasons have produced over 3 million gallons of syrup — worth tens of millions of dollars to the state's economy.
A Living Tradition
Despite all the modern equipment, sugaring in Vermont still runs on the same seasonal rhythm it always has — the handful of weeks each late winter when nights drop below freezing and days climb just above it, waking the trees long enough to send sap flowing. Many sugarhouses open their doors to visitors during Vermont Maple Open House Weekend each spring, and “sugar on snow” — hot syrup boiled down and poured over fresh snow until it sets into a taffy-like treat — remains one of the state's oldest and most-loved rituals, largely unchanged since the days of wooden buckets and neck yokes.
Shop the Collection
Browse our full collection — inspired by Vermont's lakes, and the traditions that surround them.