BELLVILLE — Carol Mowry has lived on the farm for 45 years. The view from the front porch still takes her breath away.
“I feel so lucky to live here,” she said, standing in the doorway of the farmhouse.
Countless rows of crops grow in the Mowry’s front yard. Beyond the croplands, a forest winds around and hems in the property.
The farm sits right off Ohio 13, but at the bottom of the lane, it feels like a different world. Harvest season is just around the corner. The leaves of the soybean plants are starting to yellow. When the sunlight hits just right, it looks like a field of gold.
Carol and her husband, Richard, are the third generation of Mowrys to live and work at the family farm. Richard’s father and grandfather grew crops and raised cattle, but today, the farm is best known for its maple syrup.
The Mowry farm has been in the family for a century, but the maple syrup operation is a much newer endeavor. Richard began tinkering with maple syrup production about 10 years ago after a friend loaned him supplies. He began harvesting by hand from about 60 taps.
“That didn’t produce very much at the time, so then we got 75,” he said. “Well, then it got too much like work to go around and collect all the sap.”
Richard decided to work smarter, not harder. He connected the taps to a system of tubing to cut down on the manual labor.
Today, the Mowry Maple Farm has 650 taps. More than two miles of tubes crisscross the woods, feeding sap into seven main lines. Those lines slope down to feed a 400 gallon tank in the woods. A second web of empty lines creates a vacuum between the trees and the tank.
“A normal tree will produce about ten gallons of sap a year. With a vacuum, that goes up to 30,” Richard said.
The first tap of the season can fill up the tank in just six to eight hours. Another 800-gallon tank sits down in the woods for overflow.
The sap tapping season is relatively short — it starts around President’s Day and ends when the weather gets too warm, usually in March or April.
“I need freezing (temperatures) at night and above freezing during the day. That gets the sap floating in the trees,” Richard explained. “When we had all those warm days and warm nights here this year, the trees actually shut down.”
Once the trees start to bud, any sap that does trickle out is too bitter to use.
After collection, the sap gets pumped up the hill into another large holding tank, then to a reverse osmosis machine. The machine removes much of the water from the sap, then transfers it to the evaporator.
Boiling the sap allows the excess water to evaporate out. As the excess water evaporates, the sap becomes denser and sweeter.
The sap doesn’t truly become maple syrup until it’s cooked at precisely the right temperature. That temperature varies slightly based on barometric pressure, but it hovers around 217 degrees Fahrenheit.
A simple chart that hangs on the wall of the sugar house helps determine what temperature to set, based on the current atmospheric conditions.
“We do it the easy way,” Richard said. “It’s all automatic. I just sit there and watch numbers go up and down. The old timers, they actually had to rake it around and stuff.”
Once the tank reaches the right temperature, a valve opens automatically and fresh maple syrup oozes out.
According to Richard, it takes about 60 gallons of maple sap to make one gallon of maple syrup.
Last year, the Mowrys collected nearly 12,000 gallons of sap, with a maximum potential yield of about 200 gallons of maple syrup.
Nevertheless, they insist the venture is merely a hobby. Some of the larger maple syrup professionals have thousands of taps.
“We’re small-time,” Richard said. “For me, it’s a hobby, basically. It’s a way to spend Uncle Sam’s money. I don’t make anything at it, but I’m not really losing anything. It’s just something to do, keeps me active.”
Richard spends his winters moseying through the forest, checking for leaks in the syrup lines. Deep in the valley, the tree branches covered in snow and ice form a picturesque barrier against the noise and distractions of the outside world.
Once sap season is over, the bottling begins. The sap produced in the early season is light syrup. The syrup gradually shifts to an amber hue and continues to get darker throughout the year.
The darker the syrup, the stronger the maple flavor. Richard said most people prefer the amber variety.
“People ask, ‘How do you regulate?’ We don’t,” Richard said. “Mother Nature takes care of that.”
The rest of the year is spent making and selling maple syrup products at their onsite shop. The Mowrys produce four varieties of maple syrup, along with speciality flavors. One is infused with cinnamon. Another is aged for six months in a bourbon barrel. The syrup has a hint of the bourbon taste, but is non-alcoholic.
The sugar shack also sells maple covered peanuts, puffs, sugars, seasoning blends and even maple glazed dog biscuits — all made from scratch.
Richard and Carol may not be the first in the family to make maple syrup. A stone foundation deep in the woods may have been part of an early 20th century sugar shack — but there’s no way to be sure.
A family farm for generations
The Mowrys recently commemorated the family’s 100th year on the farm with a reunion. Family members brought photographs and old newspaper clippings to put in a time capsule.
Richard’s grandparents, Arthur and Bertha Mowry, left their home south of Bellville and moved to the farm in February 1920.
The couple loaded their five children and all their belongings into two horse-drawn wagons and sojourned up the old Ohio 13, now Bellville North Road.
A snowstorm blew through on the day of the move, so Bertha heated bricks and placed them in the wagon to keep the children’s feet warm.
Arthur and Bertha farmed cropland. They also had dairy cows and a milk route in Mansfield. They had two more children after moving to the farm.
Richard grew up in another house built on the family homestead. His parents, Carl and Kathryn Mowry, balanced farm work with jobs at Westinghouse during World War II.
After the demand for wartime manufacturing ended, Kathryn went back to being a homemaker. Carl continued working at Westinghouse. He’d arrive home at 2:30 p.m. to begin his second job — rounding up the kids and heading into the fields.
Grandpa Arthur often watched from the front porch. The family grew wheat, field corn, oats and hay, most of which went towards the beef cattle operation.
Carl and the kids would also help their uncle, who farmed on a neighboring property.
“He had the equipment to make the hay and we had to harvest equipment — the combines and the corn pickers. So we all kind of worked together,” Richard said.
Like his father, Richard chose to work both on and off the farm. He joined the Air Force in 1966, a year after graduating from Clear Fork High School. He retired from active duty in 1972 and joined the Ohio Air National Guard two weeks later.
“I happened to know the officer in charge of maintenance. He hired me on the spot,” Richard recalled. “I have 35 years in federal civil service and then 42 years military. So Uncle Sam treats me good.”
Richard and Carol moved to homestead a few years later to help with the farming.
“We lived in Mansfield for five years, then we had an opportunity move here,” Carol said. “I said, ‘You tried the city for five years, I’ll try the country for five.'”
Carol was and still is a self-described “city girl,” but she’s fallen in love with the family farm.
“Most people don’t know there’s a difference between sweet corn and field corn. When I moved here I didn’t know it either,” she said. “I didn’t know the difference between hay and straw, either, but I do now.”
Legacy farms are increasingly rare, but the Mowrys already have a fourth generation represented. Their son Eric lives in his own house on the family property.
In addition to his other job, he helps out around the farm just as his dad and grandfather before him.
