Words: Jillian Conner | Photography: Julie Richards

Location: Osborne Family Maple - Ferdinand, Vermont

Deep in the woods of Ferdinand, way up in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, sits a modest cabin and a stunning sugarhouse. On a winter’s day, you’ll find a snowmobile parked in the driveway and fresh moose tracks traversing the trails, left as their maker foraged for what browse it could find amidst feet of snow. There are people with deep roots here who tend this place: the Osborne family.

Ferdinand sits on the rim of the Nulhegan Basin, one of the coldest lowlands in the Northeast. Here, you can find the wildlife of a Canadian Boreal forest: lynx, fischer, bobcat, moose and deer, bear. The silence is deafening, unless a breeze comes through to rattle the remaining winter beech leaves, and there is a certain spark of mischief you can sense in the area.

For generations, the Osbornes have worked their family tract of 80 acres, mostly tapping trees to boil maple syrup and cutting firewood. But what started as a small family operation has evolved into a growing business run mostly by Jon Osborne. You can call him Ozzie.

"ONE CLICK WILDER."

Ozzie has a deep love for this land. He’ll tell you it’s his favorite place in the world, that there’s something here you can’t put your finger on. He’s lived in other locales, traveled a lot, but something always draws him back to the Kingdom, to Ferdinand. It’s just “one click wilder”, he’ll say.

A couple of years ago he left his job as a GIS director to go full-out on the maple business he and his parents began together. With the support of his wife, Kate, and a crew of three others, 4,000 taps have grown into 7,000. These days the business sends about 1,600 gallons out of their renovated garage-gone-warehouse each year, with a goal to reach 3,200 before too long. After Ozzie’s last day gathering GIS data for conservation projects, his lifestyle transformed overnight.  

Maple sugaring might conjure Rockwell-esque images of steaming sugarhouses and old tin buckets nailed to trees. Maple syrup is as ubiquitous with Vermont as fall foliage and rolling, green hills. To the uninitiated, it magically appears on the shelves of general stores bottled in plastic jugs, mason jars, or leaf-shaped bottles, seemingly out of thin air.

But turning sap into syrup is no small task and not for the faint of heart. It requires patience, grit, a certain tolerance to the elements, tolerance to changing weather and finicky equipment. Months of work go into those fancy bottles you find on store shelves. So, in the deep winter, you’ll find Ozzie out here every day of the week, along with his crewmembers, preparing for the first spring sap run of the year. 

The sugarbush stands at attention every day with its grid of tubing, witnessing the creatures passing through, the snow gathering during a midnight storm, Ozzie and his crew completing their work. The snow is deep, demanding snowshoes to trudge from tree to tree, where the men drill new taps and check for broken lines or fittings.

Even if it’s below zero, the team is out in the woods, their long days are bookmarked by a modest fire and lunch fixings laid on the back of the snowmobile, and packing it in before it gets too dark.

In early spring, when the sap begins to run, it’s time to boil. Ozzie will spend countless hours tending to the arch in his sugarhouse, often late into the night. The work of boiling sap can be monotonous, mentally taxing, and compared to the work in his woods, sedentary. 

Through it all, Ozzie and his team are dressed in Johnson wool. Perhaps it’s fitting, given that D.A. Barrows, the great-grandfather of Ozzie’s wife, Kate, was one of the first co-owners of Johnson Woolen Mills. Or because as a boy, Ozzie remembers pining for his first pair of spruce green wool pants (“woolies” as they became known). It was a right of passage to be handed down a broken-in set from your cousin or, if you were lucky, a brand new pair straight from the mill.

This tradition bleeds through the Northeast Kingdom. One of Ozzie’s crew members, Dave, recalls a day from his youth where the enthusiasm of getting on a barely-frozen pond to fish outweighed his better judgement. After falling through the ice in his green woolies, he warmed right up on his walk home, though the pants themselves were frozen stiff. 

Maybe it’s fitting simply because wool’s reliability is an invaluable addition to a workday full of changing conditions. Well-built, durable, locally-made, authentic: all qualities Ozzie values in his life and work. “It’s what we’re all about. Everything we’re doing in these woods is the real McCoy, and the same is true of Johnson.” We couldn’t agree more.

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A special thank you to the Osborne family and their crew for this behind-the-scenes visit and for all they do for the Vermont community and the sugaring industry. Head to osbornemaple.com to learn more and support their hard work with a true taste of pure Vermont Maple syrup.