"Vintage-1888-Scenes in a sugar bush" Poster

The American Indians in the Great Lakes Region produced it. When spring returned and the sap was running, they made slashes in the maple trees and gathered the sap in wooden troughs. It was a time of thanksgiving and the Indians offered the boiled thickened syrup as a sacrifice to the Great Spirit. The Indians taught the colonists how to gather and use it and the colonists grew to depend on it. Maple syrup was the most important sweetener in the northern colonies in the 1700s. The colonists had “sugaring-off” parties in the woods near the sugar bushes and houses. In the 1800s, it was still widely used, as white cane sugar was very expensive and being made by slaves brought from Africa to the West Indies. The abolitionists used this fact as a reason for promoting the use of maple sugar to achieve self-sufficiency for free men and not to support the slave trade