The Official U.S. Maple Syrup Almanac 2015 | Page 10

A devastating
scene unfolded at
Boyden Brother’s
Maple last April.

Fire Prevention
Photos courtesy Howard Boyden

How to
keep your
sugarhouse
and dreams
from going
up in flames
10

By DEBORAH JEANNE SERGEANT

H

oward Boyden didn’t see it coming: the fire that destroyed
$20,000 worth of equipment, supplies and sap to make about
20 gallons of syrup, plus one-third of his sugar house structure.
He had stoked his wood-fired evaporator at Boyden Brothers Maple in Conway,
Mass. the morning of March 22, and by
mid-day, Boyden was boiling sap in the tradition of his father and grandfather.
He noted the fire felt unusually noisy.
“I said, ‘That thing is really crackling,”
Boyden recalled. “I thought I must have
spruce [burning], but I soon realized [the
crackling sound] was coming from the

woodshed.”
The wind had driven into his openended woodshed a piece of burning material that had escaped smokestack that stood
15 feet above the sugarhouse’s roofline. It
didn’t take long for 15 cord of dry wood to
become overwhelmed with flames.
Despite his losses, Boyden considers himself “the luckiest guy in the world,” he said.
“Sugarhouses don’t get saved. They’re old
U.S. Maple Syrup Almanac

2015