 |
||
 |
||
 |
|
||
|
||
|
        |
The Mummas: Hoosier Maple Syrup Makers
Mrs. Mumma explains, “Back then if you didn’t make it yourself, you didn’t have syrup. Back in those days you raised about everything you ate.” Syrup was not a part of life for Rosalie when she was growing up, and she was not enthused when she was first introduced to the idea of making it. John still kids her about the first time he brought some maple syrup home for his bride. She defends herself, “Well what you bought from them wasn’t fit to eat!” She told her husband then, “If you think I’m making that stuff you’re crazy! I’m not doing it!” She smiles. “Nevertheless, we did start making syrup.” The Mummas started off using an arch and evaporator that John built. The first year they produced 18 gallons, and have grown to 190 gallons in their best year. The most trees they’ve ever tapped were 440.
What do they think this season will be like? “Well, I’m gonna tell you. It’s a big question. We’ll wait till this snow all blows off, then I’ll go tap an old tree and see how it runs. It may be one of those years that you better not even tap,” explains John. I ask if the Mummas have ever had one of those years that wasn’t even worth tapping. “No,” but a friend once told him he wished he’d never tapped one year. “Last year wasn’t a very good year, but we made some,” Rosalie says. They made 50 gallons of syrup last year. Mr. Mumma has seen a lot of changes since his childhood days when the kids carried sap up the hill in buckets. Carrying buckets of water was never easy, so in those days lots of folks hauled it from trees to the camp on sleds. But not the Mumma family. “Dad said, ‘Boys, carry it in! You’re not gonna tear the hill up with a sled!’ So we carried it in; we didn’t haul it in! We put it in a barrel out here, then Mom boiled it down the next day in an old iron kettle.” He estimates his parents tapped 40 to 50 trees. John and Rosalie live on the property that once belonged to his parents. In the 42 years that the Mummas have been making syrup, their operation has grown and improved. Their first stove was one that John built. It had grates from an old furnace, and was lined with fire brick. Their pan was an old molasses pan with wooden sides, which could have caught fire. He wanted a metal pan, so he took a 4 foot wide piece of metal and had the edges turned up to make a square box. He then soldered the ends, making a “plain flat pan.” They used that pan for several years.
Rosalie tells us “Of course you mudded your pans on back then. You got that old clay mud and put it around it, then put your pan on it. That’s how you sealed it.” The old furnace eventually wore out and the Mummas got busy with other things, and took five or six years off from the syrup business. Then in 1978 they got a new set-up and haven’t missed a year since. When it was time to upgrade, they found the arch, or furnace, from a local man who hadn’t used it for years. It was a heavy, iron arch and needed a lot of work. The Mummas hauled it home, but didn’t even have a place to house it. It rained the next day, so they covered it with tin, then started building around it. “That first year we ran out of time,” Rosalie recalls. “We had the wood in, so we just put tin up there, and the next year we finished the building off.” John remarks with a laugh, “Poor people have poor ways!” When it came time to get a cover for the evaporator, rather than paying three or four hundred dollars, he had a friend cut the tin, and John lapped the edges the way he wanted them. “I got that tin for 10 or 15 dollars.” The Mummas explain the cover releases the steam out of the pipes, and also keeps fire ash and debris out of the sap.
The Mummas work hard to produce high quality pure maple syrup. They have a very clean, efficient system. They get some help from a neighbor and a grandson, Scotty, but for the most part they do all the work themselves. They have 375 taps and only put one tap in each tree. The trees cover roughly a 10 to 15 acre hillside. Today they gather the sap in an 140-gallon tank pulled on a 3-point hitch behind a tractor. They have two holding tanks in the sugar shack, which each hold 300 gallons. One day Mrs. Mumma and Scotty collected 1,100 gallons of sap. Mr. Mumma believes “The secret to making good syrup? It runs today; cook it down tomorrow.” This means cooking every day of the maple season, which can start the last week of January and go through the middle of March. Their day starts at around 4:30 in the morning when John lights the fire and starts cooking the sap they collected the previous day. He never leaves it unattended. They have one friend, Woody Barton, who “can run the evaporator. But I wouldn’t let anybody else run it. They’d burn the pan up.”
When the sap reaches 26 gravity Mrs. Mumma takes it into the house and finishes it off on the kitchen stove, then cans the syrup while it is still hot. They sometimes finish the process at 9 or 10 o’clock at night. The Mummas won’t even guess what this season will bring. But they’re ready. They have 30 ricks of wood ready, enough to make about 250 gallons of syrup. And Rosalie has enough jars washed to hold 95 gallons. They will need 40 gallons just to fill the standing orders. She has also started preparing food for the long days ahead. “I got some pancake mix because John said, ‘When you’re busy they may have to eat pancakes and sausage!’ I’ve got five cakes, three loaves of zucchini bread, and I’ll have a pecan pie up there in the freezer. And walnut fudge.” The Mummas are some of the hardest working people I’ve ever met, but still act as though they have all the time in the world to talk with curious visitors. They say they’ve slowed down, but it doesn’t show. Mrs. Mumma still drives a school bus route twice a day, and in the summer their gardens attract drive-by admirers from all over the county. We at SouthernIN.com would like to thank the Mummas for sharing their time and wisdom with us. |
|
All Feature Articles, artwork and photographs ©1999 by Dervish Design. Some information on the 'County Info' pages is taken directly from brochures published by Visitors Bureaus and Chambers of Commerce.
Owen County residents, John and Rosalie Mumma have been making maple syrup together for the last 42 years. They are what most people would consider syrup veterans, but at 77 years old, John still sometimes refers to how the “old-timers” do it. Maple syrup has always been a part of Mr. Mumma's life. “I can remember carrying water up the hill at the old home place when I was four. That was in 1926, and I’d carry a half gallon in one pail.”
The Mummas ordered a stainless steel evaporator and drove to Wisconsin to pick it up. They called twice before making the drive, but instead of the stainless steel pan they ordered, the company had an English tin pan. So the Mummas turned around and drove home. They got on the phone and had a stainless steel pan shipped to them - well almost. They still had to drive to Columbus to pick it up.
