TIN, LEAD & FLIES, HMMMM, GOOD:

The shift from tin closes the door on a container that was critical in allowing the maple sugar industry to flourish 150 years ago.

"It wasn't until the Civil War that the maple syrup industry was born, with the introduction of the tin cans and the invention of metal spouts and evaporator pans," according to a history of maple sugar making by the University of Vermont's Agriculture Network Information Center. "Most early producers were dairy farmers who made maple syrup and sugar during the off-season of the farm for their own use and for extra income."

That transformation of maple sugaring into a salable commodity gave rise to the Vermont Maple Sugar Makers Association itself, which was founded in 1893.

The 1908 catalog for products from Dominion and Grimm advertised tin containers at 25 cents per case. Some people still remember what sugar making was like in the old days.

Harris Lyman, 81 and uncle to Dale Lyman, said his father, one of the first presidents of the Vermont Maple Sugar Makers Association, hauled his sap by horse to the family sugarhouse in Hartford's Jericho neighborhood.

After boiling, the sap was poured through filters into large milk cans, after which it was ladled, by hand and by funnel, from the milk cans into the individual tin containers.

Back then, they were just plain silver-colored tins, without any image at all on them, produced by, as Lyman remembers it, Crane Can Co. out of Boston.

Working in the August heat, plagued by flies, Lyman's father would use a dowel to tap a metal seal into place on each tin, and then screw the container shut. He found a niche in supplying gifts that corporations gave to their workers and customers.

"Pabst Blue Ribbon would take 6,000 half pints, and Westinghouse would take a few thousand half pints," Lyman said.

Lyman said that, when he was 6 years old, which would have been around 1941, he remembers watching as his father sat with a group of other sugar makers around the dining room table in their farmhouse discussing one of the earliest efforts to brand Vermont maple syrup as a distinct, and superior, product.

"The lithograph around the cans, I remember them picking what it would look like," Lyman said.

Just a few decades after the now-iconic lithograph was chosen, there were early signs that the tin can's days might be limited.

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