A Short History of Maple Syrup

Maple syrup is a sweetener that began in North America rather than arriving from somewhere else. Indigenous peoples of the northeast worked out how to tap a maple and boil its sap down before any European wrote about it. Much of what came later, from iron kettles to plastic tubing, built on that first method. This is the short version, in dates, with a timeline near the end that puts the record from 1536 to 2025 in one place. The maple syrup complete guide covers how to choose and use it today.

Before the written record

In a 2022 article for the Smithsonian's American Indian Magazine, Tony Tekaroniake Evans describes the method as the Haudenosaunee practiced it. A hole was drilled in the trunk and a piece of wood set in it as a spout, or spile, with a birch bark bucket hung below to catch the sap. Part of the work needed no fire. The lighter water in the sap rose and froze overnight, and in the morning the ice was skimmed off before the rest was boiled away. The finished sugar was dried and stored in cone-shaped bark containers. It cured meat, sweetened bitter medicines and traveled as a portable trade good. In Kanienʼkéha, the Mohawk language, sap is orontákeri, the maple is wahta, and the season of the run is the sugar moon.

The Royal Society, whose journal printed Paul Dudley's 1720 paper on maple sugar, says plainly where the knowledge came from. Methods of extracting the sap and producing sugar or syrup "were actually developed by the indigenous peoples of north-eastern North America, and then passed on to and adapted by European settlers and colonisers."

What the first Europeans wrote down, 1536 to 1606

Jacques Cartier's expeditions up the St. Lawrence, between 1536 and 1542, left an early European notice of the maple. In 1557 André Thévet wrote about the tree. In 1606 Marc Lescarbot described the First Nations harvest and what he called the distillation of maple sap. In the Thévet and Lescarbot accounts, the Europeans are observers, and the First Nations people they describe do the work. The history of honey article tells the other half of how people sweetened food before refined sugar.

A colonial substitute for imported sugar, 1719 to 1792

In the English colonies, maple was argued for as a substitute for imported sugar. Paul Dudley, Attorney-General of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, sent the Royal Society a method for making sugar from the maple tree. It was read on 29 October 1719 and printed in the Philosophical Transactions in 1720. Dudley's case was practical. He reported that local physicians thought maple sugar "not only to be as good for common use as the West India Sugar, but to exceed all other for its Medicinal Virtue." Two years later, in a 1722 paper on making molasses from apples, he noted that at Woodstock, "a Town remote from the Sea," West India molasses was "dear and scarce."

Seventy-one years after Dudley's paper, the case turned moral. In 1791 Benjamin Rush wrote to Thomas Jefferson praising maple sugar because, unlike West Indian cane sugar, it required no enslaved labor. According to the Massachusetts Historical Society, Jefferson ordered 60 sugar maples that July from the nurseryman William Prince of Flushing, New York, to plant at Monticello. The order was completed in November. On 27 March 1792 Thomas Mann Randolph wrote to him: "The Sugar maple, it appears, is the most delicate of the whole number, for all of them are totally lost." Jefferson's garden book later counted only eight survivors.

From kettle to evaporator to tubing

The equipment changed over the nineteenth century. The Quebec producers' history records wooden buckets giving way to lidded metal ones, and the iron pot giving way to the evaporator. The University of Vermont began studying maple in the 1890s, when C. H. Jones of its Agricultural Experiment Station worked on how sap flow depends on the weather. In 1946 Governor Mortimer Proctor gave the university the farm in Underhill that became the Proctor Maple Research Center. Its first sugarhouse went up in 1948.

In the twentieth century the changes reached both the sugarhouse and the shelf. The Quebec producers' history says maple syrup was first classified into five categories in the 1920s, and that the 540 ml can arrived in the early 1950s. In the same account, tubing systems arrived in the 1970s, carrying sap from the tree to the sugarhouse without buckets, and reverse osmosis in the 1980s, removing water from the sap before boiling. Research at Proctor, notably Frederick Laing's, helped improve how plastic tubing is installed and how vacuum pumps are used to raise sap yields.

A commodity with a reserve

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada puts Canada at more than 75 percent of world production in 2025, 90.0 percent of it from Quebec. That concentration is what makes a Quebec stockpile matter. In 2004 the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers created a quota system controlling production. Its reserve, NPR reported in 2019, is meant to remove the boom-and-bust cycle of an agricultural commodity and hold prices high. NPR put the value of that reserve at 280 million Canadian dollars.

In July 2012 a routine inventory check at the federation's warehouse in Saint-Louis-de-Blandford found barrels filled with water instead of syrup. Quebec provincial police arrested 16 people. The stolen syrup was worth more than 18 million Canadian dollars. On 31 March 2022 the Supreme Court of Canada upheld a fine of more than 9 million Canadian dollars against Richard Vallières, one of those convicted of fraud, trafficking and theft.

The label, rewritten in 2015

The United States Standards for Grades of Maple Syrup, in effect since 2 March 2015, set a minimum of 66 percent solids by weight for maple syrup. Grade A is capped at 68.9 percent and sorted into four color and taste classes: Golden Color with Delicate Taste, Amber Color with Rich Taste, Dark Color with Robust Taste, and Very Dark Color with Strong Taste. Processing Grade syrup, which does not meet the Grade A requirements, cannot be packaged in consumer-size containers for retail sale.

The timeline

What the history explains

Put in order, the record shows two long shifts. The first is from sugar to syrup. The Indigenous product that traveled was dried sugar, and Dudley, Rush and Jefferson all treated maple as a sugar to replace imports. The modern product is a pourable syrup in a can or bottle, sold under grade standards. The second shift is in how syrup is judged. Maple syrup was first sorted into five categories in the 1920s, according to the Quebec producers' history. Since 2015, American Grade A syrup has been classed by color and taste, so a very dark syrup can still be Grade A.

Runamok's Vermont syrups include Sugarmaker's Dark Wood-Fired Vermont Maple Syrup (shop Runamok Sugarmaker's Dark) and Sugarmaker's Cut Pure Vermont Organic Maple Syrup (shop Runamok Sugarmaker's Cut). The Runamok maple producer guide covers the producer behind both. Maple also works as an ingredient, as in Bushwick Kitchen's Trees Knees Spicy Maple (shop Trees Knees Spicy Maple) and McCrea's Tapped Maple caramels (shop McCrea's Tapped Maple caramels). The caramel complete guide covers another sugar that cooks take deliberately to dark.

For using it, the maple Old Fashioned and cocktails guide puts syrup in a glass, the cocktail syrups and cordials recipe shows the basic method maple can stand in for, and the maple granola recipe bakes it in.

Sources & Further Reading

• American Indian Magazine (Smithsonian NMAI): The Indigenous Origins of Maple Syrup, Tony Tekaroniake Evans, Winter 2022
• The Royal Society: A spoonful of sugar (Paul Dudley's 1720 maple sugar paper)
• The Royal Society, Making Science: Paper, A method for making sugar from the maple tree in New England, by Paul Dudley
• Maple from Canada (Quebec Maple Syrup Producers): History
• Massachusetts Maple Producers Association: Maple History
• Massachusetts Historical Society: Maple Sugaring, Thomas Jefferson's Sugar Maples
• Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Monticello: Sugar Maple
• University of Vermont: About the Proctor Maple Research Center
• University of Vermont Libraries: Maple Research Collection
• USDA Agricultural Marketing Service: United States Standards for Grades of Maple Syrup, effective March 2, 2015
• Supreme Court of Canada: Case in Brief, R. v. Vallières, 2022 SCC 10
• The Canadian Encyclopedia: Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist
• NPR: How Quebec's Maple Syrup Stockpile Can Impact an Entire Global Industry, 2019
• Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada: Statistical Overview of the Canadian Maple Industry, 2025
• The Pantry Dispatch: Maple Syrup, The Complete Guide