Maple syrup brings the crowds to tiny Highland County

MONTEREY -- Highland maple festival a celebration of syrup

Highland County is famous for its high mountains, its switchback roads and its Maple Festival, one of Virginia's most unusual celebrations.

Visitors pour in here for two weekends in March to watch how amber syrup meant for buckwheat pancakes is conjured from the sugar water of stately maple trees.

The maple syrup-making process is a picturesque one of clear-as-gin sap, tin buckets, hardwood fires and smoke-filled red barns that belies the hard labor behind it all.

Today and tomorrow will mark the 51st annual event that brings an economic shot in the arm to tiny Highland, which has plenty of scenic beauty but little in the way of commerce.

"This is the biggest thing for us," said Charles Varner, the head of the Stonewall Ruritan Club. "Just about everybody in the whole county is involved in this."

The effort is a collaboration by the other half-dozen or so Ruritan Clubs, the Lions Club, the churches, the fire companies, the schools, the Chamber of Commerce and booster clubs. And that doesn't include vendors by the dozen who offer maple syrup, maple syrup candy and doughnuts as well as pork skins, hand-weaved baskets, compound bows and knife-sharpening services at many hamlets and in the bigger towns of Monterey and McDowell.

By one estimate, about 70 percent of Highland's tiny population of 2,400 people is involved in some way with the festival.

"It's very much a part of the culture here. You start work for the festival when you're pretty young," said Carolyn Pohowsky, the head of the county Chamber of Commerce.

Pohowsky estimated that 40,000 to 50,000 people from Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina will attend the festival this year. The county will pull in somewhere around $500,000.

Some of that money will be spent on syrup-covered pancakes.

A thousand people poured into the McDowell community center despite a steady rain last Sunday to eat all they could of pancakes drowned in Highland maple syrup with sausage or ham for $8.

"They love the maple syrup," said Maxine Huffman, who was manning the register at the community breakfast. "And they love Highland County's mountains."

Varner -- whose club owns and operates the community center -- said the money they make goes to scholarships for high school seniors headed to college, and to support the Future Farmers of America, the 4-H Club, the junior and senior prom and the community center itself, which is used for dances, funerals, meetings and Bible school.

"It allows us to earn money to give back to the community," Varner said.

Neither the wet weather nor the economy seemed to slow the festival down this year.

"I think the festival's picked up," said Bruce Folks of Blue Grass, who offered pure maple syrup and candies in fog-shrouded Monterey last weekend. "A lot of people want things totally natural now. It's been good despite the rain and economy."

There are about two dozen small producers of maple syrup and a dozen major sugar camps in the county, including six that are open to the public during the festival.

One of the most famous of the camps open to the public is the Ivan Puffenbarger sugar camp at Blue Grass, which burned to the ground last year. Puffenbarger is 72 and debated whether to rebuild -- until an outpouring of support left him with no choice.

"Too many people said I got to put her back," he said. "They said I was the backbone of the maple festival and it was going to hurt if I didn't."

Puffenbarger is using about 11,000 taps hammered into 2,000 maple trees to draw out sugar water that drips down 45 miles of plastic tubing connected to tanks in the shack where it will be boiled down to maple syrup.

Closing Puffenbarger's camp would have hurt Roger Mallow, who's been coming to the festival for 30 years from his home near Franklin, W.Va., to buy syrup from Puffenbarger. The two have become friends and Mallow buys a gallon of syrup each time. The price this year for a gallon is $42.99.

"That's cheap," Mallow said. "A gallon goes a long way."

Contact Carlos Santos at (434) 295-9542 or .