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Sugartime in Somerset: Learn how to make maple syrup on the mountain

Weather permitting this weekend, the sugar water will be running and kettles will be afire. Visitors to the Somerset Historical Center can watch how maple syrup was made in the 18th and 19th centuries before touring 14 sugar camps to see how it’s made today.

The Maple Weekend Taste & Tour in and around Somerset County runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. Also known as “Sugar in the Mountains,” the event is a collaborative effort between the Historical and Genealogical Society of Somerset County and the Somerset County Maple Producers Association.

Historical Society executive director Mark Ware suggests that visitors stop first at the historical center, located at 10649 Somerset Pike, Somerset. There, visitors can pick up a brochure with information and a map for the complete tour, which also can be downloaded from www.SomersetCountyMaple.org. Admission is free, although the society would like donations and the producers will be selling their products.

Volunteers and artisans will demonstrate some of the historical trades used in the early maple industry such as coopering, hickory brushes and wood spile making. Children’s activities, craft demonstrations and historical information will be included.

Ware said the center’s production facility doesn’t have all the “fancy bells and whistles,” but it does have one modern evaporator that will be demonstrated at the tour. The highlight, though, should be the iron kettles and lean-to sugar camp that will be used to make “spotza,” a uniquely Somerset County name for a maple syrup taffy.

“Spotza is a taffy treat you make by taking the maple syrup and cooking it, and then you drizzle it on the snow,” Ware said. “It makes a clear, gooey, chewy taffy. It’s a local favorite.”

Locals aren’t sure of the derivation of the word, but Somersetters have several nearly unique words in their vocabularies; another is keeler, or an old-fashioned sugar bucket that syrup producers hang on the maples to catch the sugar water. Today, modern producers connect hoses to the trees to collect their catch.

Samples of the taffy and other maple syrup products will be available there and at other tour spots.

“Within five miles of here, there are a couple of camps that you can visit,” Ware said. “You can spend a day doing the tour and get a lot of food to sample. You also can see how different operators work at different camps.”

Kyle Hillegas of Hillegas Sugar Camp said samples of most of his products will be available, including candy, cream, sugar, maple cotton candy, maple coated peanuts and maple walnut topping for ice cream.

“Hopefully, as long as we have sap, we’ll make sure to have a boil” this weekend, Hillegas said. “We should be producing maple syrup. But if we have four or five days of 15-degree weather beforehand, we obviously won’t be able to do that.”

Somerset County is the largest producer of maple syrup in Pennsylvania, which is about the sixth largest producer of all the states, Ware said. “We have the highest elevation, the perfect climate for producing,” he said.

And, some of the local producers have “some really high-tech camps out there that are using reverse osmosis machines to reduce the water,” Ware said.

“The evaporators look to me like a large train locomotive,” he said. “And they are energy efficient today, which is important when you consider that it takes 30 to 40 gallons of sugar water to make a gallon of syrup.”

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Shavers Creek Environment Center in Huntingdon County has scheduled its annual Shavers Creek Maple Harvest Festival for March 19 and 20, beginning at 10:30 a.m., at the center located at 3400 Discovery Road, Petersburg. This event, which costs $3 to $10 with children under 5 free, celebrates the first harvest maple sugar harvest of the new year and helps people learn about the maple sugaring process, in colonial times and currently. The educational aspects of the festival include learning how to identify and tap sugar maple trees, visit the “sugar shack” to watch sugar water being turned into syrup and other activities, including an all-you-can-eat pancake and maple syrup meal. More information is at (814) 863-2000 or at www.raystown.org under the “events” tab.

Mirror Staff Writer Cherie Hicks is at 949-7030.

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