How David Eddy became a sugarmaker
As sugaring season came to a close, Eddy reflected on his first year as a sugarmaker and what brought him to his shack.
By Anna Gilmore
For The Record
As April progresses, maple sugarers all around Vermont are finalizing their syrup production for the season and bottling memories of a process that entails hissing sap, clouds of vapor and long days.
For David Eddy, a 64-year-old lifelong resident of Hinesburg, this spring’s sugaring season was especially sweet, as it was his first full year of production at his shack off Charlotte Road.
He estimated making over 100 gallons of syrup this year, most of which he’s able to sell through friends, family, and people who stopped by after seeing the Visitors Welcome sign out front.
It’s his first season boiling his own sap, but the dream was born long before.
“I would say in the last decade or so, I’ve become really interested in sugaring. I grew up on a dairy farm here, the same farm that I’m on now. And we milked cows, and we always helped our cousins to sugar, and I always enjoyed that a lot. It’s a very labor intensive thing, but it’s a big kind of family thing and a community thing,” Eddy said.
The sugar house lies on Eddy’s 75-acre property, which he grew up on and is a portion of what was a larger, 250-acre farm purchased by his great-grandfather and grandfather in 1927. The family eventually sold development rights for much of the property to the Vermont Land Trust. Many members of Eddy’s family still live in the area and are involved in agricultural work in some way.
“Sugaring is the best time of the year,” said Anne Donegan, Eddy’s first cousin who grew up on the farm where Eddy holds those fond memories. Her family still owns and operates Trillium Hill Farm in Hinesburg where they practice traditional sap gathering with horse and carriage. She does much of the boiling herself.
“Even when he was starting to tap on his own and selling sap a few years ago, he would come by and help us tap and gather. It’s fun to see him have his dream,” Donegan added.
Alongside helping out on the farm, Eddy started playing soccer and fell in love with the sport at a young age, eventually going on to play at the University of Vermont in Burlington. He moved back to Hinesburg after college and spent his career working as a physical education and wellness teacher at Champlain Valley Union High School. He also continued to play soccer in the local men’s league until about 20 years ago, while also working as a coach at CVU. He retired almost five years ago and soon tried on a new career.
“Four years ago, I started putting up some [tap] lines in my woods. So for the first three years, I just simply sold sap to another sugarmaker,” Eddy said.
“He told me up front that he wanted to put a sugar house up and so he hired me to do excavating for it. Dave was very good to work with,” said Pat Leclaire, a friend of Eddy’s who purchased his sap for three years for his maple business, Patalin’s Sugarworks in Charlotte.
Eddy built his sugar shack throughout the summer and early fall of 2025. The project was in many ways a tribute to his parents.
“It kind of emulated something my father and mother did. My dad, Paul, built a barn and my mother, Millie, even though she wasn’t down there building the barn, she was helping any way she could and watching us kids. But I’ve always been a little bit in awe that my father could be running a dairy farm, haying in the summertime, and then basically building a barn. Instead of just hiring somebody to build me a sugar house, I wanted to do as much of the construction as I could,” Eddy said
This year, with the syrup operation up and running, Eddy isn’t feeling much like a retiree. “I’ve been telling people that suddenly it seems like I have a full-time job this year having the sugar house,” he said. There’s the boiling, filtering and canning or bottling of the syrup besides the tapping that goes on at the beginning of the season. “There are some days where I’m spending 10, 12, 14 hours doing some of this stuff,” Eddy said.
Eddy’s sugarbush currently stretches nearly 10 acres and contains 400 taps in total.
Outside of the sugar shack or during the off-season, Eddy enjoys spending time outdoors and gardening with his wife, Marie. They share three children: Tom, Emma, and Abby, all of whom are now grown-up and scattered in different cities. He remains an active member of the community and serves on the board of the Hinesburg Community Resource Center.
Sugaring has been a lesson for Eddy that retirement can be an opportunity to discover new passions.
“I knew probably before I retired that my goal was to get to about where I am right now, where I have my own sugar house,” Eddy said. “I wanted to build as much of it as I could myself mostly for the experience because I’ve never really done anything like that before, and so it was a learning experience that I was looking forward to.”
Via Community News Service, a University of Vermont internship, for The Hinesburg Record
If you build it, they will come 🫴... For the maple 🍁🍁 syrup ‼️👌😎♥️👋😸