LUCAS – Maple syrup is more than a delicious addition to your morning pancakes. Just outside Lucas, it’s a historical tradition honored every year with the Maple Syrup Festival at Malabar Farm State Park.
The free festival has been held continuously since 1977. Siera Marth, assistant park manager at Malabar Farm State Park, said visitors gather from across the state throughout the festival weekends.
“It’s really weather-dependent,” Marth said. “Today was a little colder and wetter, but if the weather holds off we typically expect 2,000 to 4,000 people per weekend.”
The festival, which continues Sunday and again next weekend, includes demonstrations of sugaring techniques from historical times through present day. In addition, a self-guided tour of the sugar camp and sugarhouse will reveal the evolution of sugaring equipment and how maple sap is transformed into maple syrup.
After a horse-drawn carriage ride courtesy of the Central Ohio Draft Horse Association, visitors begin their trip back in time. The first fact learned is that sap is turned to syrup by removing most of the water. One way the Native Americans made syrup was to toss fire-heated rocks into a log trough filled with sap, and the heat from the rocks evaporated the water.
To improve upon the Native Americans’ method, the early settlers used wooden spiles for tapping the trees, and various types of buckets were used as collections vessels. Buckets were hung from the spiles to reduce spills. Metal spiles eventually replaced the wooden spiles, and metal buckets followed wooden buckets.
Metal spiles and buckets are still used at Malabar today, but quickly being replaced by a more modern tubing method. Marth explained the spiles cut the life of the sap a little shorter and cost more man hours to collect and empty buckets.
“The more common way is we have blue tubing lines,” Marth said. “Gravity helps, but we also have a vacuum hooked up that pulls the sap down into a releaser. The sap flows into a tank, and then we pump the sap from the tank to the sugar house. Then we run it through a reverse osmosis system that concentrates the sap, gets rid of the water and cuts boiling time down.”
Marth said maple season is relatively short, only lasting about six weeks. The season is very weather-dependent, relying on colder nights and warmer days.
“What drives sap production is temperatures, so you’re looking for freezing temperatures in the evening and thawing in the daylight hours,” Marth said. “That’s what gets the sap flowing up the tree, and that’s when you’ll see a lot of sap running.”
The short maple season is what drives a lot of visitors to the Maple Syrup Festival, with the majority of visitors leaving with an edible souvenir. Pure Ohio maple syrup, homemade maple walnut fudge, maple cotton candy, maple popcorn and a myriad of other maple products are available for purchase.
In addition to maple snacks, Marth said the unique process of creating maple syrup is the festival’s main attraction.
“It’s a process that is timeless, and it continues to progress as far as technology. However, it’s not something that people get to see all the time,” she said. “They enjoy the maple syrup, but it’s an amazing process for most people to see.
“To imagine it comes from the trees as sap and then it becomes syrup, the whole process amazes people.”
The Maple Syrup Festival will continue through March 6, 12 and 13 from noon to 4 p.m. at Malabar Farm State Park.
