Meet a Sugar Maker: Mary Jane & Mario Fradette

VMSMA: How’s the season going? Are you wrapped up? 

MARIO: We’re still going. The season has been going well, best ever.

VMSMA: Best season because of volume made? Or because of sugar content?

MARIO: All of the above. The sugar content started low, and then we were at 2.5%, 2.6% for about three weeks. Now we’re going back down. Our production is up six drums on our best record. Today is it for us. It will be the last boil.

VMSMA: That’s great to hear. It seems that most producers fared equally as well. Moving on to my next question, this is one I like to ask everyone. How did you get into sugar making?

MARIO: In 1959, my Father moved our family to the United States from Quebec. When he bought the farm, the sugar house was burnt down. In 1960, he built his first sugarhouse when I was six years old. When I was in high school, I used to skip school to gather sap, and I loved it!

VMSMA: An unfinished portion of the Lamoille Valley Rail Trail runs next to your property. That’s expected to be finished this year?

MARIO: That is correct. I was told by a contractor that this section of trail will be done in May.

VMSMA: With the trail being completed soon, are you excited to have people traveling by the sugarhouse? Are you expecting traffic to the business?

MARIO: At this point it is hard to say. I’m assuming we will get some traffic, we just haven’t experienced it yet, so we’ll see what happens.

VMSMA: If you do receive some traffic, do you plan on having one of your Grandkids make a maple stand on the side of the trail?

MARY JANE: We’ve talked about that a couple of times with the Grandchildren. However, our biggest issue in the summertime is we also have 130 blueberry bushes and the Grandchildren tend those for us.

VMSMA: For the blueberries, do you do any Farmer’s Markets?

MARY JANE: I retail some of them and the rest are pick your own. The rail trail will actually go right by the blueberry bushes.

VMSMA: Do you have any stories of when the rail line was active?

MARIO: There’s about a 5% incline to get up to the sugar-house, so in the fall they always had an extra engine on the train because there were too many leaves on the tracks and trains would spin. You could hear those trains, it was unbelievable. A couple of other times, the train actually detached going up and actually went all the way back to Greensboro Bend. How nobody got killed is beyond me. There was a derailment another time right next to the sugarhouse with cars full of grain. My Dad got the grain for free if he cleaned off the tracks. We had to bag it as little kids. The railroad back then had maintenance to the fence, and once the cows got out on the tracks. They used a special whistle for them, and one night my Dad woke us up and said the cows were on the tracks, and we got up to the tracks, and three cows had died. That was back in the 60s. Once I was tapping, and my Dad was in his 70s, he wanted to see how I was doing, so he drove into the center of the tracks with his three-wheeler, and the train came along, and the engineer blew the horn. I heard it and knew what was going on because my Dad said he was going to come up and see me. I ran down on my snowshoes to find the train stopped and my Dad’s three-wheeler thrown 30 feet down the embankment; luckily, Dad was okay, laughing like heck. That was the end of the three-wheeler!

VMSMA: When I toured your sugarhouse in the past, I remember that you had some unique items near the evaporator, do you mind elaborating on those?

MARY JANE: The mural that’s on the wall in front of the evaporator is something that our three girls did for Mario as a birthday gift. They came up and painted it with their recollection of how sugaring was when Mario was a little boy with horses and the gathering of buckets. The girls were 12, 11, and 8 when they painted it.

MARIO: They made me set up the stage for them, but they wouldn’t tell me what they were doing. It is very precious.

VMSMA: You also have a red chair above the evaporator. What’s the story behind that?

MARIO: My Dad was a farmer his whole life and he loved the color red. The rocking chair was something that he fixed up and painted red. It was his chair in the sugarhouse when he retired and he would sit and watch me boil. After he passed I retired the chair because I didn’t want it to get broken.

MARY JANE: So we retired it to a place that no one could sit on it. It’s up in the rafters and it’s a part of our story, which we highlight in our brochures. So his Dad still watches us.

VMSMA: Sticking with the family theme, you have a lot of family connections in your sugarbush, right?

MARY JANE: Yes, the old roads that they use to take the horses on are named after one of the Grandchildren. Like Lillian Lane, Nick’s Notch, and Becca’s Boulevard. Partially the reason for naming the roads was that Mario knew the roads backwards and forwards and he’d send me to go fix the saddle at the top of the hill, and he'd say, “if you look right, there’s this big tree with a big crook in it and there’s a saddle right below and you have to fix it.” I would get all discom- bobulated. I was a banker, so I didn’t travel the woods as much as he did. Now after naming the roads I can do them with my eyes shut.

MARIO: I had my picture taken with the Grandchildren when they were babies when we put the signs up.

MARY JANE: Throughout the years we made them take photos with the signs as they’ve grown.

MARIO: Now they come up with their friends and show off their roads.

MARY JANE: And actually there’s another painting at Jaden’s Junction which our Granddaughter Grace made. She wanted to paint a mural for when the snow machines went by, she wanted them to know that the little building was part of the sugarhouse. She made that three years ago and now she wants to repaint it now that she’s learned more in art class.

MARIO: VTrans actually called me last week because of the work on the rail trail and they were impressed with it. They think people will be looking for this as people learn about it.

VMSMA: During my last visit you told me that a tree on your property went down to Rockefeller Center?

MARIO: In 1977, a local Xmas tree buyer knocked on our door. We lived in Hardwick village then, he was interested in our 50-foot spruce tree. They offered us $250 for the tree, and I told them they had to replant the tree which they did. Then the tree went down to Rockefeller Center.

MARY JANE: They invited us to go to the lighting, but I had just had our Daughter Julie in the beginning of October so we opted not to go. Which is too bad, we should have gone in hindsight.

MARIO: Well, we didn’t think anything of it. We did go years later to see another tree. That was the only time I’ve been to New York City and I never want to go back. It was awful, haha.

MARY JANE: We like the woods.

VMSMA: For the future, do you have any plans for the operation?

MARIO: I'm building an addition on the back of the sugarhouse for storage. My Daughter and son-in-law purchased land that’s adjacent to mine in Greensboro because we have two different sites. Now we’ll have three. They’re planning on adding 4,000 to 6,000 taps and will eventually take over the operation.

MARY JANE: When we put on the addition, we’re going to make a special room for me to do canning and to make maple sugar so that it is separate from the living quarters of the sugarhouse.

MARIO: I’m going to be 69, what am I supposed to slow down, haha. I want to keep doing it as long as I can and as long as I’m healthy. I love it.

MARY JANE: We want it to stay in the family, so Marie and Bob are the ones interested and have been leasing our sugar woods in Greensboro and bringing the sap to us. They lease the trees and we pay for the sap. It increases their income, it increases ours and eventually it will be all of theirs. And our dream is that hopefully their children will take it over from them.

MARIO: We have no plans to sell it to anyone outside of the family.

VMSMA: I don’t have anything else. Is there anything else I should know?

MARIO: We’re very comfortable here, our living space is 25 feet from the arch. Not too many sugarhouses are set up like that.

MARY JANE: It’s our camp. Mario has spent many nights here.

MARIO: I’ve only been home once in the last three weeks, and I’m a quarter of a mile away. I wash the RO at night. It’s a great setup.

VMSMA: Yes, I can imagine so. It sounds like a perfect setup.

MARIO: Yes, and actually, you see this a lot in Quebec. All my friends there have some sort of kitchen setup, etc. At first, I thought they were all nuts.

MARY JANE: And now Mario is one of the nuts. 

VMSMA: Thanks for the great interview!

MARY JANE AND MARIO: Of course, thank you!