Last weekend, a number of local maple syrup making businesses sponsored a coordinated open house. After years of promising to visit the one around the corner from us, we finally did. They had a museum featuring the history of making maple syrup, going back to Native American practices, as well as featuring a display about the 1957 Newbury Award winning novel Miracles on Maple Hill, written by a local author, Virginia Sorensen. However, another item in the museum gave an account of certain events in Vermont during the Civil War as though it were historical, but it strained even my credulity (and that’s saying something). Like everything else, you can find the story on the internet.
The story concerns supposed details of what has been called the northernmost hostile action of the Civil War, the St. Albans Raid, which did in fact happen in St. Albans, Vermont. Agents of the Confederacy traveled north to Canada, regrouped, and in October of 1864, recrossed the border into Vermont, and staged a raid in the small town. It did not end well for them.
However, according to the account I read in the museum (and linked above), the true objective of the Confederate agents was to sabotage Vermont’s maple sugar industry. This is not as absurd as it might sound at first. Before the adoption of the sugar beet, the only source of sugar in the north was maple trees, so maple syrup was a crucially important component of the Vermont economy. However, there were other problems with the story...
The Confederate agents [...] quickly infiltrated the Vermont woods and began reaping a terrible toll on the vital maple sugar industry in that spring of ’64. Most of the damage was done by night, with the operatives traveling the wooded paths and pouring out the valuable contents of the sap buckets. Other methods included sabotaging equipment and polluting the raw sap.
Within a month the spring harvest was in serious jeopardy with desperate farmers were standing guard in the woods at night. The state economy teetered on the brink of bankruptcy and desperate measures were needed. A savior came in the form of Webster Finkle, president of the Bank of Vermont in St. Albans. The St. Albans bank had been built with a huge vault, capable of storing a tremendous amount of money. St. Albans however, was a poor rural community which had suffered greatly from the maple syrup recession. The great vault in the St. Albans bank was nearly empty, and available to hold the state’s precious stockpile of maple syrup. And so, as the maple syrup season drew to a close, the precious stockpiles of syrup that had survived the Confederate onslaught found their way to the steely confines of the St. Albans bank. For the time being the state’s economy was saved.
Never mind that the syrup collected in tiny St. Albans can’t have represented a large fraction of the maple syrup collected all over the state. Also, these infiltrators who were trying to be discrete would have had to arrive in late winter to disrupt the maple harvest, and then stick around until October for the raid. You’d think somebody would notice these strangers hanging around for so long. And for some reason, I never learned about the Great Maple Syrup Recession of 1864. I typed “maple syrup recession” into my search engine, and it laughed at me.
In October of 1864, Confederate agents converged on the small Vermont town, meeting at a nearby inn to finalize plans. As luck would have it, a free black woman named Aunt Jemima was working as a waitress at the inn. She overheard the Confederates plotting to attack the St. Albans bank and that night slipped out and warned the local constable of the impending attack.
The next day [Confederate agent] Bennett and his associates stormed into town, crashing into the bank with intentions to blow up the vault. Once inside they discovered an empty vault; sticky syrup residue told them that their mission was a bust. Thanks to the timely warning by Aunt Jemima, the local farmers had held an all-night boiling session and the bottled syrup was well on its way to Montpelier.
As the Confederates exited the bank they were met with a hail of bullets from dozens of Stannard’s veterans dressed in farmer’s overalls and hidden in nearby buildings and on rooftops. For a time the scene resembled Pickett’s charge, with dead and wounded Confederates lying in the streets. The survivors quickly mounted up and galloped out of town with a Yankee posse in close pursuit. To this day folks from the Green Mountain state still honor the memory of the brave Aunt Jemima who risked life and limb to warn the citizens of St. Albans of the impending danger. And thus another Vermont legend was born.
Brave Aunt Jemima apparently does not warrant mentioning her last name, though she was rewarded for saving the maple harvest of 1864 by becoming America’s most beloved racist trademark.
No reputable account of the St. Albans Raid mentions Aunt Jemima, or even maple syrup. By the way, Stannard’s veterans (upon whom the Confederate agents were purportedly attempting revenge for their acts at Gettysburg) were in Brattleboro at the time these events occurred, in the opposite corner of Vermont. Also, maple sap is boiled down to syrup immediately after harvesting; they wouldn’t have waited until October to do that.
Historically, Aunt Jemima entered the public consciousness as a stock stereotype character in minstrel shows during Reconstruction. Her pancake mix first appeared in 1889, and she was trademarked by Quaker Oats in 1937.
I have been wracking my brain trying to figure out why anyone would create such a ridiculous story about the Civil War, maple syrup, and a stock character from minstrel shows. The only thing I can imagine is that it’s a myth devised to explain how it is that a black woman became the trademark for maple syrup from a place where there aren’t many black people. Or maybe it’s just a ploy to sell more syrup.
Enough fake history. Let’s move on to the comments, found below the fold. But first, here’s a word from our sponsor:
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