Mohican Indians shared with Missionary John Sergeant and teacher Timothy Woodbridge the secrets of tapping sugar maple trees and boiling the sap into syrup. A sweet thought.

The Rev. Samuel Hopkins explained in 1753: “About the middle of February is the time when the Indians of Housatunnuk leave their habitation and go with their families into the Woods, to make their year’s stock of sugar; and the season for this business lasts until the end of March, and sometimes to the middle of April. Therefore, when the Indians went into the woods and took their children with them…”

Hopkins said Sergeant didn’t like the children being away from their schooling for so long, so he accompanied a group that went with Captain Kunkapot “above the Mountain,” Mr. Woodworth with Lieutenant Umpachene below, “and live with them during that season.” After three weeks, Sergeant and Woodbridge switched places.

Hopkin said the Stockbridge “extract the sap by cutting the tree on one slice, in such a form as that the sap will naturally gather into a small channel at the bottom of the hole cut, where they fix into the tree a small chip, of six or eight inches long, which carries the sap off from the tree into a vessel set to receive it. Thus they tap a number of trees; and when the vessels are full they gather the sap and heat it to such a degree of consistence as to make sugar. After it is boiled they take it off the fire, and stir it till it is cold, which is their way of gathering it. The sugar is very good, of a very agreeable taste, and esteemed the most wholesome of any..,.”

Somehow the story evolved that the winter trips were to Tyringham valley. As Native American Studies scholar Lucianne Lavin points out, maple sugaring was done by all Indians who lived near maple groves (and birch and walnut groves were tapped as well). The Moravians talk of the Sharon Indians tapping maple trees. It was an important trade commodity to other Indian communities south of the maple forests. Maple syrup has more than 50 antioxidants, and a third the calories of cane sugar.

The Rev. L.S. Rowland said, “The Indians developed an industry here in Tyringham long before the white men arrived, viz.: the art of making maple sugar from the large grove that surrounded the Garfield home (McDowell’s). Store sugar, carted from Hudson, the commercial center of early Berkshire, was expensive. So each spring the settlers made and stored their own soft maple sugar in wooden buckets to alleviate the high cost of sweetening.”
The Ausotunnoog Chapter, DAR, in Lee, organized in 1913, took its name from the river, reporting it “a name borne also by a tribe of friendly Mohegan [sic] Indians… Down near the Tyringham Valley lay the Hoplands, favorite resort of the Indians in maple‐sugar time.”

Rowland claimed “traditions of Indian occupation are connected with transitory encampments during the maple sugar season by small parties from Stockbridge. It is related that Captain Enoch Garfield, grandfather of Hon. Harrison Garfield, when a boy of fourteen, coming up from Tyringham to look after cattle, discovered a wigwam near the present park, whose occupant, a solitary squaw, treated him to maple sugar.” This would have been in about 1760.

Tyringham Old and New was also specific: “tradition has it that the friendly Stockbridge Indians were accustomed to camp every spring upon Camp Brook, flowing through Robb de P. Tytus’s present Ashintully Farm, catching the sap in birchbark buckets as it ran from the trees. The claim has further been made by a local historian that in this way and on this spot the white man first learned to make maple sugar.”

For years, out‐of‐state newspapers seldom ran Tyringham news items without mentioning maple sugar — stretching the legend even more. The Chanute Daily Tribune in Kansas and Wilmington Dispatch of North Carolina, for example, in 1911 reported on Marshall w. Stedman’s gift of a Tyringham rake to President William Howard Taft. “Stedman is of the third generation of rakemakers on Hop Brook,” the papers said, “the region where the American Indians first taught the white man to make maple sugar.”

The Tomahawk, published from the White Earth Agency in Minnesota, said in 1917, “There is a tradition that Tyringham was the place where the white man first learned the manufacture of maple sugar, being initiated into the secret by the Indians.”