Restored White County acreage returns the love with maple syrup production
BY KATHY MATTER | PHOTOS BY CHRISTINE PETKOV AND PROVIDED
When Rich Hines was young he loved to doodle in spare moments — and it was always trees.
“I thought trees were wonderful things,” he recalls.
So six decades later it’s not really surprising to find this former North End Lafayette kid and retired vice president of the Indiana Design Consortium living on 37 forested acres nestled along the banks of the Tippecanoe River in White County. But what might come as a surprise is his retirement hobby, which involves making syrup from the sugar maples dotting the hills and valleys of his Springboro Tree Farms. But if you’re imagining a small operation with a handful of collection buckets allowing him to make a dozen bottles of maple syrup for his family’s pancakes, erase that image.
His picturesque 20-by-30-foot sugar shack houses the most modern, gleaming stainless steel equipment available for making maple syrup on a professional level, and he turns out 1,000 bottles during a typical winter.
When Hines moved to the Tippecanoe River property some 30 years ago, syrup wasn’t really on his mind. He wanted to be a good steward to some “classic Indiana woodlands” by making them even more beautiful and enhancing the habitat for wildlife. He trucked out junk that littered the river bank and started a never-ending crusade to eliminate invasive species such as multiflora rose and brush honeysuckle that strangled native plants.
One of the first things he did was enroll his farm in a program with the Indiana Department of Natural Resources and act on advice from forestry and water management experts. Along with tackling the invasives, Hines dredged a spring-fed pond on the property and stocked it with largemouth bass, perch, catfish and more. He established a bee colony topping out at 35 hives and two million bees, and he planted a small apple orchard, dozens of black walnut trees, and pines for use as Christmas trees.
His love for the land, a passion he shares with his brother Jim, was something they both came by naturally. Time spent on their grandfather’s farm influenced the boys. Hines did tree planting with the Boy Scouts, another influence. And with their father, the brothers spent summers hunting squirrels, playing with an old rowboat and generally enjoying being out in nature at a family cottage on the Wabash River.
Prophetically, the boys and their father undertook an annual fishing float trip down the Tippecanoe River from the Oakdale Dam to the Wabash River. The trip floated them through the property Hines now owns.
“So many stories we tell are about our time in the woods,” Jim Hines says. “It left an impression that never left us.
“I’m really proud of Rich and what he’s done there, taking on this woodland and putting money and effort to get rid of invasives. Who thinks about that? Richard thinks about that. Damn! That’s pretty cool!”
Making maple syrup was an idea born out of a chance comment by a state forester about the huge number of maples on his property. It led Hines to buy a kit at Rural King that had all the supplies needed to tap three trees and collect sap that he cooked all day in a tall, turkey roasting pot.
He was hooked.
“It was 10 trees the next year, then 30 trees. Now we do 500,” he says. Instead of buckets hanging from spiles pounded into the trees in nostalgic tradition, the spiles dump their watery sap into plastic tubing that gravity feeds into a large collection tank. When the season is in full swing, the 350 gallon tank will fill at least once a day.
Instead of boiling the sap in a pot on the stove, there’s now a sophisticated reverse osmosis process, a wood-fired evaporator, a filtering operation and, finally, bottling. It takes about 50 gallons of sap to make just one gallon of syrup.
“If you cook the sap really, really slow it’s dark and robust. We make a dark amber product,” Hines says.
He religiously uses a hydrometer to make sure the sugar content matches the high end of the Vermont standard for maple syrup. Not all the syrup goes into bottles. Some goes into a bourbon barrel and ages for five months for a richer taste. While the syrup resides in the white oak barrel, temperature changes draw out the oak and bourbon flavors along with hints of vanilla.
All this happens in six super busy weeks in February and March where brother Jim, son Sam and other friends pitch in to make it all happen. Sap runs most freely when temperatures are freezing at night but up into the 40s in the daytime, and it can be a bit of a guessing game deciding exactly when to tap.
In a side operation Hines also taps a hundred walnut trees to make a syrup with a sweet nutty flavor. But he admits, “It’s four times as much effort so not as profitable.”
Overall, “mastering the process of syrup making is satisfying and a lot of fun,” says Hines. Although he gives most of his bottled syrup to charitable causes so they can raise money, what he does sell provides the cash to continually upgrade his operation.
“I never had any interest in making money,” he says. “I like supporting things that make our community better.” Our Grace Lutheran Church in Lafayette, where Hines attends, St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Lebanon, Camp Tecumseh, White County Soil and Conservation District and Toast to Mental Health (his wife, Jean, is a mental health therapist) top the long list of charities that benefit from donations of bottled syrup and honey.
“It’s a blessing,” Kim Reneau says over and over as she talks about the syrup’s impact on a particular project she heads at Our Grace Lutheran Church. Members of the church contribute to Operation Christmas Child, a project of the disaster relief agency Samaritan’s Purse, by filling festive shoeboxes with school supplies, hygiene items and small toys. Boxes collected from across the nation are shipped to needy children in countries around the globe. But each box needs to be accompanied by $10 to help with distribution costs, among other expenses.
The sale of honey and maple syrup from Hines’ Springboro Tree Farms raises enough money each year to cover distribution costs, making it possible for the project to expand.
Reneau says they’ve gone from putting together 68 boxes to 250 this year.
When parishioners see the small sales table set up in September each year, “we have long lines waiting to buy his syrup and honey. It’s just a huge blessing for our church and a blessing for the children.”
Women of the church’s altar guild bake whole wheat bread for communion and “use Rich’s honey in baking the bread, which makes it really, really good,” Reneau says.
“My grandkids love his syrup and our former pastor said a little dab of the bourbon barrel syrup in his coffee made it really special.”
Comments like Kim Reneau’s are all the payment Hines desires.
“I remember when I was in my 30s hearing a lot of older people say ‘I used to be’ this or that. I didn’t want to be the ‘used to be ad guy’ or ‘used to be marketing guy.’ I wanted to be the guy who grows trees.”
In growing the trees and making maple syrup he found a new definition of happiness along with immense satisfaction.
“Finding something meaningful to do is a key to having a happier retirement,” he says.
And “I’m still learning.” ★
If you want to read up on the maple syrup
