The Sugar Season (7 page)

In the late 1920s Eric Bascom bought the farm on Mount Kingsbury for $2500, paying $30 down and $30 a month to the widow who owned it. The place was called the Stone House Farm because of the smart-looking stone house built in 1837 by Zenas Slader, who cut slabs from a seam on top of the mountain and moved them to the site with a team of oxen. Eric’s brother Glenn owned the farm further down the hill. At the time of his purchase Eric was a minister in Canterbury, New Hampshire. He arranged for a tenant to manage the farm but returned in the spring to make maple syrup and grow a crop of potatoes with his brother Glenn. Eric sold his maple syrup to parishioners and, in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, peddled it house to house.

The Depression made life difficult for most everyone but none more so than ministers of churches that depended on weekly donations. In 1938 Eric Bascom’s yearly salary was reduced from $1200 to $750. In the fall one of the worst hurricanes in history hit the Northeast, with winds of 160 miles per hour cutting a swath 400 miles wide, leaving 500 people dead. The hurricane blew away barns and livestock and leveled millions of trees, destroying many sugar orchards. Hummocks, the mounds and hollows from tree trunks and roots, can still be seen in the woods of New Hampshire today.

Eric and Elida decided to move their family to the farm in Acworth, arriving early enough to plant crops in the spring. Ken stayed in Canterbury to finish eighth grade but worked in the fields that summer. When it came time to gather hay, Ken received a quick driving lesson and, at age thirteen, drove a Chevy truck while his father arranged the loads of hay. Eric continued to grow potatoes with his brother Glenn, started raising chickens, and began building a dairy herd.

Maple syrup was a crucial part of the farm. Later in his life Ken Bascom wrote about this in an article for a farming publication: “I was thirteen upon moving to the farm and descended from several generations of sugarmakers. We had 600 old metal buckets, a team of horses, a sled with a five-barrel tank, and a rough-boarded sap house. There was a 20-barrel storage tank and a 2½ by 8-foot evaporator. Being the oldest of five children, it became the lot of ‘Yours Truly’ to drill the holes and to tap in the metal spouts.”

Ken’s brother, Eric Bascom Jr., also wrote about this work in an article in the
Keene Sentinel,
looking back at the year of 1942 during the Second World War: “The sap spouts are those tubular tin pegs and tap into holes in the trees. Usually Kenneth drills the holes. Rodney sets and spouts and I, the beast of burden, follow with a stack of metal buckets, at least one for every tree. Last year when we tapped, the snow was up to our hips. This year it’s only up to our knees.”

Price controls were in place during the war, and maple syrup was set at a price of $3.30 a gallon. “Even so, Dad’s expanding,” Eric wrote. “If the war ever ends, the price will go up. Last year we tapped maybe 1,200 trees. This year he plans to tap 2,000.”

To Eric, their sugarhouse seemed like a “clipper ship with crowded sails plowing.” There were other vessels on those
seas, and he could see steam rising, “from my uncle’s shack, and Roy Clark’s. We have plumes from Gerard and Chester Mason’s in the hollow, and in the southwest, Uncle Cal’s and old Fred Green’s. There are literally hundreds of small producers around us who love the tradition and supply their own kitchens and a few village stores.”

He described the long days gathering sap:

Each of us has a pair of 16-quart gathering pails. The sides taper in at the top, with a flared rim that allows emptying a 12-quart bucket with minimum spillage. We stumble up and down banks and trek from tree to tree to sled. The steel gathering tank holds three hundred gallons, but the tank is full before we’re halfway through the section. We’ll have to return to get the rest and that’s too bad because, as we head for home, the horses think they’re done for the day. They’re pulling 2,400 pounds of sap, all uphill, yet we’re at the sugarhouse in short order. This load and the rest will keep dad boiling half the night. It is a night and day operation that blots out everything else. When we get back to the barn we’ll have nothing to do except rub down the horses, milk the cows, clean the stables and feed the stock.

In 1942 the Bascoms made 600 gallons of syrup, doubling the previous year’s crop. That meant a return of about $2000, which seemed like a very large sum to the twelve-year-old boy, as he told his father.

“About half of which is due to the bank,” his father had answered.

A
FTER HIGH SCHOOL
Ken Bascom served in the Army, stationed in Italy for eighteen months, until the war ended. He then attended the agricultural college at the University of New Hampshire, completing the two-year program. Ken considered staying to complete the four-year program but thought the final two years would be more theoretical than practical. He wanted to begin working on the farm, and by then he was married.

Ken met Ruth Baker during the summer of 1947 at a square dance in Acworth. She had come from Massachusetts to visit some relatives. At the dance the Bascom brothers announced their presence by stomping their feet all at once, something they may have learned when they lived in Canterbury near the Shaker colony. Ruth was impressed, and also impressed with the ambition of the young farmer. They were in many ways a compatible couple. She had attended Houghton College and studied business and also studied religion at the Providence Bible Institute. The wedding was held in Massachusetts, with all of Ken’s siblings taking part and with Eric officiating.

In 1950 Ken bought the farm from his father for $25,000. As planned, with their children full grown, Eric and Elida returned to the ministry. That same year Ken and Ruth built a new house, 800 feet away from the stone house and on the opposite side of the sugarhouse. Glenn Bascom sawed out the lumber at his mill. Friends and family helped raise the building. Ken named the place “Happiness Lodge.” In November Bruce was born.

A photograph from 1956 speaks to the name Ken Bascom gave to his home and to his maple syrup business and sugarhouse—a Sunday morning breakfast scene, with Ruth
wearing a red dress, ladling syrup over a pan of baked French toast. Ken, wearing a white shirt and dress pants with his hair combed back, leans over the table to cut portions for the kids. Bruce, almost six years old, is sitting on the chair with his legs drawn under him, anticipation on his face. Judy, age four, waits politely. Nancy, a toddler, pulls at the tablecloth and tries to climb up on the table. This too seems to be among the best America has to offer—their own maple syrup, their eggs, their milk, their Sunday—and Ruth, in her amusement, seems to know completely.

By then the Bascoms had hosted the sugar parties for more than half a decade, and they kept improving upon them. They were building a mailing list that would reach a thousand names for the parties and for mail-order business. Their brochure for 1957 listed syrup at $5.75 per gallon and $1.75 per quart. As the kids grew older, they began to help at the parties. They could gather snow in baking pans for sugar on snow. They could help make maple candy and maple cream. They could wipe the syrup off the tablecloths. They could gather sap.

Ken had a serious accident in 1958 while working in the woods, when he cut down a tree and a heavy limb hit him on the forehead. His brother Rodney found him lying unconscious, his face blackened. At the hospital his pain was so intense that Ken asked someone to bring him a gun, half-joking—they realized that if he could joke about, it he would probably be okay. Eric Sr. and Uncle Glenn boiled that year, while brother Rodney managed the farm. Ken and Rodney were working in partnership, managing two farms, but they weren’t making much of a profit. Then, in one of those moments that changes everything, Ken neglected to
thank Rodney for doing all of the work while he healed, and Rodney took offense. It didn’t help that the year before when they were gathering sap Ken forgot to tell Rodney that his wife was in labor, with Kevin. Rodney moved his family to Concord and worked on a dairy farm, then at the farm at the University of New Hampshire. He created a sugarbush in the town of Nottingham.

Ken was back in full force the next year in 1959. He tore down the sugarhouse his father built and constructed a new one on the same site, with a concrete floor. The building looked like a barn, or even a house, but with doors in the roof that opened to vent out maple steam. He painted the building brown with yellow trim and red doors. At one end of the building Ken erected a sizeable smoke stack, thirty feet tall and thirty inches in diameter. He bought a used steam boiler from a laundry near Lake Winnipesaukee and converted it to be heated by wood. Steam at 325° could bring sap to a boil almost instantly. Ken engineered the plumbing of the steam system himself. The steam pipes sat within an evaporating pan four feet wide and ten feet long. He built the sugarhouse large enough to hold fifty visitors and made ten picnic tables to seat them. For the parties they covered the tables with red-checkered tablecloths, according to tradition.

Ken was constantly thinking about ways to improve the systems and increase the capacity of the sugarhouse to accommodate more taps. By 1965 he had added a second evaporator, this one oil-fired with a five-foot by ten-foot pan. It was highly state of the art for its time, this pair of evaporators working in sequence, with the oil-fired unit doing the first part of the boil and the wood-fired steam evaporator
finishing off the syrup. The system doubled his production per hour. For a touch of fun, Ken rigged up a steam whistle that he blew when the syrup was ready to be poured, and that could be heard miles away. The guests, wandering around looking at the buckets, taking in the view, knew when to come to sample the new syrup.

The decision Ken made to leave dairy farming and go into maple production did not come easily. Where Ken lived, no one had done it before even though the region around Acworth was the most productive in New Hampshire. But Ken knew someone who succeeded full time in the maple business, Bob Coombs, in Jamaica, Vermont. Not only was Coombs running a large syrup production operation with more than 20,000 buckets, he was selling equipment as well. Coombs also bought syrup from other producers, with many loyal suppliers who would sell only to him spread out through New England and upstate New York. He packed syrup for stores and sold it wholesale on the bulk market. Coombs had two trucks running routes throughout New England. His son Arnold began making deliveries as a teenager, driving to pick up barrels of bulk syrup in New York when he was only sixteen.

Ken had seen that the future in dairying had limitations. He had also come to a point where he didn’t want to work with animals anymore. He wanted to work with trees. Ken sold his horses first of all, the workhorses that pulled a wagon with a sap tank. He butchered his chickens and hung them from the clotheslines to drain. That was part of life on the farm. When Ken butchered a cow occasionally, he did the killing in the barn but cut the meat on the kitchen table. The work left saw marks on the table, but later they bought a
new one. In Ken’s mind his dairy cows were his meal ticket, and he had developed the herd his father started those years ago to a prime condition. He sold them in October 1964. A month later, as though to mark the new era, Ruth gave birth to their fourth child, Bradford.

There was another reason for the change. Ken Bascom was an athlete when it came to the work of farming. He would have made the national team if there were one. Ken worked seventy to eighty hours a week, six days a week, with a half-day off on Sunday for church except during sap season, and there were few who could keep up with him. But Ken expected others to keep up, including the tenant farmers who lived in the stone house. Ken fired anyone who didn’t measure up. He fired workers who smoked because he didn’t want to pay for cigarette breaks. He was in that generation of farmers who yelled a lot. In that year before he sold his cows, five tenant families moved on and off the farm.

“Because he expected them to work eighty hours a week just like he did,” Bruce said. “My father’s main problem was that he couldn’t manage help. He was a tyrant to work for.”

Of course, no one worked more for him than Bruce did.