The Sugar Season by Douglas Whynott

Author:Douglas Whynott [Whynott, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780306822056
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

ON MARCH 8, the day after I visited Georgia Mountain Maples, I stopped at the Butternut Mountain Farms plant in an industrial park in the town of Morrisville. Butternut Mountain Farms is about the same size as Bascom Maple Farms. Both employed sixty to seventy people full time, and both ran a sugarbush, though Bruce’s was substantially larger. Bruce Bascom and David Marvin both purchased in the neighborhood of 10 million pounds of syrup each year. Both inhabited the second tier of the industry. Actually, I realized, Marvin and Bascom were the second tier of the industry in the United States. Butternut Mountain Farms was also the only other company that made granulated maple sugar in substantial quantity.

The plant in Morrisville was housed in a single building—offices, bottling plant, sugarmaking, candy making, shipping, and storage. But that was about to change. Ground preparation was underway for a new large facility that would be used for syrup storage and warehousing. It would be a new building much like Bruce’s, with some variations: Marvin’s building would have solar panels on the roof, offsetting the energy costs for both buildings.

They had known each other since college, seeing one another at maple meetings. Bruce competed with Marvin, but he also consulted with him on all sorts of things. Bruce talked frequently with Marvin when planning his building, bouncing questions off him, including the problem of whether to erect the building on Mount Kingsbury or place it in an industrial park a few miles away in Charlestown. Building it on the mountain would forever alter the farm, but Bruce wanted to be able to walk to the place from his house. Marvin told him he should do it if that’s what he wanted.

From the very beginning of my visits to Bascom’s, Bruce talked about Marvin and suggested I visit him. It seemed a generous gesture to me, sending a writer off to talk with your primary competitor, someone who had taken accounts away—someone who was, Bruce told me, the only person in the industry he envied. Marvin spoke well, he said, like a writer. And he was, Bruce thought, as shrewd a businessman as any, despite his professorial appearance. I first met David when I traveled with Bruce to Leader Evaporator for the panel discussion when the two talked to bankers about how to lend to the maple industry. I saw him again at the Maple Hall of Fame when Bruce was inducted—David was already a member, and the two were the youngest members of the Hall of Fame. With their fathers, who were also members, they formed two of the three father-and-son pairs at the Hall.

In the summer of 2010 I took Bruce’s advice and visited David in Morrisville, and we had lunch at the sugarhouse at Butternut Mountain. When I expressed interest in the trees, he told me that he would be happy to walk in his woods with me—no one came by who was interested in the woods, he said. We walked

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