Sweet sap dripping in a bucket

RAISING THE BAR
A DECATO LAW OFFICE NEWSLETTER
Issued March, 2011 (this issue written by Justin Lancaster)
Published the 2nd week of each month
Issue #2011-3 -

The Tree of American Jurisprudence: Boring its knot!
With town meeting day arriving and back roads getting lumpy, sugaring’s not far behind. I expect this will be a good season, too, because snow's deep and warmth's a bit late coming. We haven't really had a good thaw yet, so the trees should be eager to run.
I always look forward to taking my kids down some muddy roads to discover sweet sap dripping in a bucket and find roaring, sticky steam in a sugarhouse. Maybe a good donut, too, with some cider. Places nearby that you can visit are listed at the bottom of this newsletter.
I’m Justin Lancaster, a new attorney at Decato Law Office. Actually, I’m almost an old attorney now, having practiced over a span of 33 years, starting many years ago as a law clerk in Norwich. I used to be local to the Upper Valley, before being gone 30 years to California, Washington, Colorado and Massachusetts; now returned.

Peter Decato and his great team asked me to come on board to help grow services for clients in environmental, immigration and intellectual property (IP) law. IP law is one of the oldest branches of American jurisprudence. And it's fun work, helping authors, inventors and business owners with their copyrights, patents and trademarks. Inventors come in with the darndest gadgets and ideas, like new-fangled ways to feed cats daily rations when you're gone to Disneyland for the week, or a new way to bend that shower curtain outward to give more room for doubling up! We talk with these inventors about applying for patents.
A patent gives you a brief period in which you can exclude other people from making or practicing your invention. Patents were created to reward the inventor for disclosing how something is made or works. This makes possible and encourages the next round of invention. A U.S. patent protects your invention for 20 years from the date you file your application. Patents issued in the U.S. before March 1994 have now expired, so these inventions are now in the public domain.

In New England, immigration and invention are intertwined branches at the heart of healthy change and economic growth. Like the maple leaf in green, gold and red, history turns colors in the law, the community and the environment. Innovations in maple sugaring technology were created in New England by immigrants from Europe in the 1700s and 1800s. Patents had already been a big deal in Europe for hundreds of years, being granted as early as the 1400s in Italy (for a barge-based pulley system to hoist marble blocks) and in England (for a way to make colored glass).

The first U.S. Patent Act was passed into law in 1790, just a year after the new U.S. Constitution granted Congress the power "to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries". And the first U.S. Patent was issued in 1790 to Samuel Hopkins of Pittsford, VT, for a process to make pearl ash, an ingredient in soap manufacture. Hopkins' patent was signed by president George Washington and by Thomas Jefferson, as Secretary of State, who went on to become the first patent examiner of the U.S. Patent Office (and then President himself).
Of course, sugaring itself, like planting corn, wasn't invented by a European immigrant. In 1606, Marc Lescarbot described collection and 'distillation' of maple sap by the Micmac Indians of eastern Canada (Histoire de la Nouvelle France).
By the mid-1700s, the maple tree was already becoming a significant part of the New Hampshire economy, west of the Connecticut. History can quickly make a smudge of the Connecticut River as a state boundary, although not a geological one. I was born in the old Mary Hitchcock Hospital in Hanover, but I grew up in Barnard, VT. As a resident of Lebanon, now it's fun to remind folks that Barnard and Lebanon were both chartered as New Hampshire towns, in the same month of July, 1761. French immigrants were still entering from Quebec during this period, just as the British had floated in through Boston Harbor. But, the French immigrants coming south along the headwaters of the Merrimack River, past Profile Mt., would have observed fewer hardwoods than immigrants canoeing down the Connecticut to the west. This is because the White Mountains (including Washington and Jefferson) were formed only about 100 million years ago (as the Atlantic Ocean opened), whereas west of the Connecticut River you're looking at mountains, soils and ecology 100 million years older than the Atlantic Ocean itself.
Coming back to 1791, Washington and Jefferson had high hopes that a home-grown alternative to slave-produced cane sugar from the British Caribbean had been found. A Dutch company bought 23,000 acres of Vermont land aiming to hire local workers to make maple sugar to compete with cane from the West Indies. The project failed and Jefferson and Washington discussed plans to start "maple orchards" on their Virginia plantations. Most of those trees died or failed to thrive there, but Jefferson stayed a maple promoter.

The first patent on a sugaring evaporator was in 1858. About thirty years later, the G.H. Grimm Company, the major supplier of evaporators, buckets and spouts, moved from Hudson, Ohio, to Rutland, Vermont. Gustave Henry Grimm was an immigrant to the U.S. in the latter half of the 1800s, back before visas and green cards were required. He could neither speak, read nor write in English when he arrived, but within 15 years, in 1884, he had invented and patented the dropped flue evaporator which allowed for more efficient boiling of liquids such as maple sap.
When I was a kid, my Dad used to take me and my brothers and sister in early March up to the Cole farm on the North Road in Barnard, VT, to join in the sugaring. It was a beautiful sugarbush, a topnotch operation and, as many of you will have experienced, there's just nothing in the world like stepping into that steam at sugaring-off time, and tasting the most recent batch from the still warm grading jars. My parents' property had an old, run-down sugarhouse in the woods, and it was always my dream to bring it back to life.
With unquestionable judgment, I bought my first sugar rig when I was 14 years old. It was a Grimm, built in Rutland. I poured my entire savings from my lawn-mowing job into a small, classic Grimm Lightning evaporator, with one long dropped flu and two smaller flat pans. Mankind hadn't landed on the moon yet: these were still the good 'ole days of brace and bit and buckets. My brother and I bought a 1965 Ski-Doo to get around in the snow and we strapped plastic Gerry cans onto the stern to ferry sap to the sugarhouse. Not very energy efficient! All the neighbors joined in. I loved stoking that little Lightening rig. You'd throw open the arch doors and feel your legs burn as you shake down the coals and refill the firebox. That dropped flue evaporator patented by Grimm in the 1880s was my pride and joy. Opening and closing the special ports to transfer the thickening liquid from pan to pan was my carefully guarded supervisory role.


Today, Vermont is the biggest US maple syrup producer, at almost 0.9 million gallons in 2010, then New York and Maine at about 0.3 m gal, and NH and other states at a little over 100,000 gallons each. Of course, the province of Quebec, at over 6 million gallons annually, still owns about 75 percent of the world production. Although one thinks of maple syrup as a vital part of the VT economy even today, estimating total VT syrup sales at about $30 million annually still puts the entire VT maple industry below the revenues of either one of the Stowe or Killington ski resorts.
You might wonder why have we been reducing the rights of immigrants over the years? After all, immigrants and invention are still intertwined today, right here in Lebanon. For example, many inventors on the numerous patent applications submitted by Glycofi Corp. (which sold to Merck for big money) are recent immigrants. Glycofi strategically hired top-
level scientists from overseas and provided them a path to permanent residence and citizenship in the U.S. This has helped grow the Upper Valley economy, where the Merck acquisition allowed many of these same employees to buy new real estate and new cars, with their consequent real estate taxes pumping back into local schools.
Immigration law, intellectual property law and environmental law --- all of this is exactly what we do, also, now, at Decato Law Office! I look forward to meeting many of you in the months ahead.

Places you can visit to enjoy sugaring include:
-- Mount Cube Farm, Rte. 25-A in Orford, mtcubefarm.com, (603) 353-4111;
-- Little Stream Sugarworks, 17 Pleasant St. in West Lebanon, (603) 252-5219, open house on March 19&20, 10-2pm;
-- Maple Leaf Farm, 43 Dartmouth College Highway (Rte 10) in Lyme; and
-- Sugarbush Farm, 591 Sugarbush Farm Rd in Woodstock, sugarbushfarm.com, (802) 457-1757.

DECATO LAW OFFICE ● 367 ROUTE 120 ● UNIT A 1 ● LEBANON NH 03766 ● TEL NO 603-640-2020 ● www.decatolaw.com