By Barney Lohan
Friends of MacKenzie
The Maple Educational Program at MacKenzie Environmental Center was established back in 1974 by one of our staff educators. We have a huge stand of maples here at the center, and it seemed like a great opportunity to teach Wisconsin kids about the long history of maple syrup production in Wisconsin. The program has grown from about 400 students a year when it began to almost 1,500 a year today, and we feel that our maple program is as good as any in the state. But without the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund, we would not have been able to connect so many children with one of their state’s oldest traditions.
 We begin preparing for maple syruping in January, and the season lasts through March. Groups and students visiting the center during this time get to see the tapping of a maple tree, and they also learn about the syruping processes used by Native Americans and the pioneers who came to Wisconsin in centuries past.
Maple syruping was and still is our biggest program, but in 1998, we needed a boost. The program was stagnating, and we were still using the same decrepit lean-to for evaporating the syrup that we had been using for over 20 years. We needed a new life, and we found it in the Stewardship Fund. We decided to raise funds to build a historically accurate “sugar shack” for making the syrup in the traditional way, and we applied for a matching grant from the Stewardship Fund. To our joy, we received the grant, and our new sugar shack was the pride of the program.
Two years later, we received another Stewardship grant, this time for a finishing house, where the maple syrup could be boiled through the final stages, bottled, labeled, and stored. We use older methods for producing our syrup, and this labor-intensive process is all done by our volunteers. It takes about 25 gallons of sap to produce a gallon of syrup, and in a good year we can produce up to 60 gallons. In spite of our primitive methods and very small volume, we won a blue ribbon for taste at a recent maple producers’ show.
The Stewardship Fund brought life to a group and a program that were dying. It has been the catalyst for growing our program to reach more kids with this unique historical experience. We have more volunteers than ever before, and we recently received a generous donation that will help us set up an endowment to keep our programs growing in the years to come. Good things come in the future as a result of Stewardship.
|
