When it comes to the helping hands of friends in Stonycreek, Somerset County, the Brant family couldn't be more appreciative this time of year.
It's maple sugar season.
"It would be impossible to even consider maple sugar season without the help of our good neighbors," said Dick Brant, who owns and operates Brantview Farms Maple Camp with his son, Dan.
Maple season comes when there is a frost at night and 30 to 40 degree temperatures in the day. The season in Somerset County centers in the month of March.
Dick Brant opts not to use plastic pipeline tubing, a more modern invention, to collect sap from trees. His maple operation does it the old-fashioned way -- by hand. Each day, they gather galvanized steel buckets, or better known in Somerset County as keelers, from the trees.
At Brantview, they hang out about 2,700 keelers each year that collect the sap from more than 3,000 tap holes each day. Each tree may have up to three tap holes, depending on its size and age. It's an age-old process that does not harm the tree but conveniently allows the sugar water to run out of the spiles into the buckets.
Most maple producers use plastic tubing and then gather the collected sap water in a gathering tank. But Dick Brant enjoys the traditional ambiance of the maple season.
"We prefer to keep it simple and do things the old-fashioned way," Brant said. "It's a family-run operation and on Saturdays and Sundays during maple season, just about everyone in this area stops by to say 'hi.' There is something about sugar season that draws the whole community in."
The old-fashioned way is not only the way the Brants do business; it is also the way they set up their camp. History abounds there with several collections of old saws and bottles. Suspended on a wraparound loft, there are old gathering tanks, wooden and galvanized steel keelers and farming equipment.
"The maple sugar business is all about history," Brant said. "So many tools and techniques have changed in the past 150 years but the process remains the same. We took some of the old things we weren't using anymore and put them in the camp for everyone to see and enjoy. They make great conversation pieces."
Brant can go around to just about any item in the camp and explain its historical use in either the maple industry or the farming era. His involvement in the maple sugar business goes back to his childhood and his line of maple producers goes back five generations.
His parents, Fred and Mary Brant, had all their children involved in operating a camp in the 1950s and then Dick and his wife, Lois, started their own camp in the 1960s.
Dick's mother's father, William Stahl, operated a camp and William Stahl's father, George, and William's grandfather, William Stahl, farmed and had a sugar camp in the 1800s.
Brant's wife Lois, their grown sons Dan and Fred, and Fred's wife Amy, and their children Levi, Will and Cyrus, are helpers. Their grown daughter, Sheila, who lives in Delaware, makes regular visits in March to help out at the camp as well.
"We make this a family event for the whole community," said Brant who hosts a catered, banquet-style meal for all the helpers every September at the camp. "It's a wonderful thing to see a rural community working together to help their neighbors."
