When I use the phrase “The Godfather of Maple Syrup” I’m being facetious. Despite the Great Canadian Maple Syrup Caper, maple syrup production is a benign industry and the people who make it happen are a big-hearted lot. How could it be otherwise? After all, they make something that brings joy and puts smiles on faces throughout the world. Instead, I want to use this post to acknowledge Howard Williams, the man who got things going at Williams Farm and set his son, John, on the path to becoming something of a maple syrup connoisseur.
True to life in small town Ontario, there are many points of intersection between my family and the Williams. By way of example: before John and I became related by marriage (by marrying sisters), we discovered that we were already related by marriage. Yup. We’re in-bred white boys. Or how about this? My great aunt Kaye taught Howard when he went to high school in St. Thomas, ON. Later, Howard took over the family business, Williams Funeral Home. In fact, both my great aunt Kaye and my grandfather were “done” at the Williams Funeral Home. However, by that time, Howard had sold the business, opting for a career in teaching.
Howard’s career change took him to Simcoe County where he and his wife Judith bought a farm property in Hillsdale and built a log home. This wasn’t a pre-fab log home; all the logs came from their woodlot, giving the farm its name: Pine House Farm. It started out as a hobby farm and it was in this time that Howard began to experiment with tapping trees and boiling sap.
Back in the day, there was an expectation that the family farm would be passed down through the generations. Nowadays, the family farm faces serious competition from large scale operations. Coupled with the fact that many farm children follow the trend of migration to urban centres and it’s easy to see why people talk about the death of the family farm. In taking over his father’s hobby farm and scaling up production, John has bucked the trend. It’s still possible to make a small farm viable in niche markets like organics and, of course, maple syrup. So Howard retired to Barrie and John took over the family farm.
In 2007, John sold the Hillsdale property and moved further along Highway 93 to Wyebridge where he had identified a property with a good woodlot which was better suited to organic practices. Since there was no longer a pine house, he changed the name to Williams Farm. Despite the various moves over time, traces of Howard’s old life can still be found at Williams Farm. One day, poking around the barn, I discovered a wooden crate that had once been used to ship bottles of embalming fluid. Curiously, the principles for managing the flow of maple sap from tree to evaporator are similar to those for managing the flow of cavity fluid from bottle to cadaver. From a certain perspective, the transition from funeral director to maple syrup producer is a natural one. You might say it runs in John’s veins.
