Sugar camp skips this season by james jacenich • staff writer
HIGHTOWN - Everett Rexrode has been making maple syrup all his life. But due to a slow recovery following knee surgery last fall, the 78-year-old Blue Grass Valley farmer will not have his sugar camp open during Maple Festival this year.
Rexrode has 250 acres extending from Maple Sugar Road east up Monterey Mountain with about 600-700 maple trees, some of which are ancient. He points to one he says is 300 years old. Another he had to cut down recently had more than 200 rings.
Rexrode was part of a large, extended family of 14. Three of his brothers served in the military during World War II, but he stayed home to take care of the farm that has been in the family for more than 150 years. He grew up in the house he shares with his wife, Anna Lee.
The century-old farmhouse has been remodeled and the outdoor wood furnace is sufficient to keep him warm during winter's worst nights. He's capped the three existing chimneys in the house to keep out the cold.
In his childhood, the family would take grain to New Hampden Mill to be made into flour. "The operator kept some of the grain as payment," he said.
Rexrode grew up on buckwheat cakes. "You'd eat them with a shoulder or ham, and gravy," he said. "You'd dip them (cakes) on there … Had them every morning."
He recalls hogs hanging on the fence during butchering time in the fall. "A sow would have 10 pigs. We'd butcher that many."
Looking around at the light snow that accumulated on the ground in recent days, Rexrode remembered a time when the snow was as deep as the fence that marked the line between the road and the farm.
In recent years, Rexrode has cut back on his farming operation. He has no sheep or cattle to tend to this year.
His son, Jimmy, died in a farm accident in 1999. His grandson is a junior at Highland High School and helps when he can.
"He knows how to drive a tractor," said Rexrode, with obvious, but isn't sure Jimmy will want to take over the business when the time comes.
Used to be, one could make a living on a farm, said Rexrode. Used to be almost everything one needed could be obtained from the farm, either as firewood or food. Now people need more money to survive and seek higher paying jobs, which often means the farming way of life families like the Rexrodes have espoused is on the wane.
Rexrode counts on the extra money he earns at Maple Festival, but this isn't the first year he has had to take a break. He did so a few years ago, and again when serious bout of pneumonia 20 years ago nearly killed him.
This year it's his knee. He had surgery in October and is getting around much better than he was, but it has taken longer than expected to heal and he doesn't want to risk injuring his knee by overdoing it. He is thankful for all the people who visited, called him to wish him well or sent him get-well cards, he says.
Rexrode wants folks to know it isn't for lack of help that the camp is closing this year - it's just that he has his own way of doing things and isn't ready to give up control over the operation. He plans to take time to mend his wounds and get back on his feet. He'll be back, next year, he says.
Thinking of next year, Rexrode said, "I need somebody when the trees open, so I can stay at camp and boil all the time." The sugar water flows as soon as the weather turns warmer, he said. That could happen any time. It's hard for people to drop everything they are doing to work the maple orchard. It's a 24-hour a day operation that doesn't stop from the time the water starts flowing from the trees until the syrup is in the bottles or made into sugar cakes. Rexrode doesn't like to tap the trees until they are ready to flow, feeling the quality of the sugar water is better when one waits.
His sugar shack has a modern evaporator up front, but back in the older section of the building two old pans are turned bottom-up on two brick ovens. Overhead, reinforced birch poles hold up the ceiling. "(Dr. Thaine) Billingsley told me to use birch poles because they looked antique," said Rexrode. But they couldn't support the ceiling by themselves, so he put in 2×6 rafters alongside the poles. Rexrode built the sugar shack 50 years ago at the beginning of the modern-day maple festival celebration.
Last year he produced around 300 gallons of maple syrup."You don't get much return on it," said Rexrode. "Maybe two dollars an hour. There's so much involved in it."
And it's hard to find people to do the job the way he knows it should be done. It takes a lot of energy and time to teach someone, to get them up to the level of expertise he needs in an assistant, and he just doesn't have the time or energy to do that, he explained. It can also be a dangerous job, from driving tractors to keeping the fires going. He wants to make sure he is feeling well enough to properly supervise.
"I hope to be back in business next year," he said.
Meanwhile, the sugar shack has a good coat of red paint on it and the syrup-making equipment is stored and ready for next season.
An old raccoon crawled through an opening in the back door and died in the corner of the shack. Rexrode will get a shovel and get it's body out of there, he noted.
He propped his cane against the old shack and pushed the door closed. He carefully negotiated his way across the snow and ice back to his truck. His knee was bothering him, maybe because of the cold weather, and he needed to get back to the house.
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