First Floor: The Sugar House & the Hall of Fame
The first floor is where most visitors begin and where most spend the longest time. Four rooms — the equipment room, the Maple Hall of Fame, the sugar house replica, and a fourth display room — contain the heart of the museum's syrup-making collection and the formal recognition of the people who built the industry.
Room 2 — The Equipment Room
The equipment room holds the museum's collection of syrup-making equipment from across the eras of the industry. The room is organized roughly chronologically — earliest tools at one end, newest at the other — so a slow walk through the room is also a walk through the evolution of how maple syrup gets made.
On display:
- Spiles and taps from the 1800s through today (wood, metal, plastic)
- Sap buckets and bucket lids
- Several generations of evaporator equipment
- Filters, hydrometers, and grading equipment
- Modern reverse-osmosis components (display only)
- Bottling and packaging equipment from various decades
Room 3 — The Maple Hall of Fame
The Maple Hall of Fame occupies its own room on the first floor and is the museum's most formal exhibit space. Each inductee — selected by the North American Maple Syrup Council — is recognized with a plaque, a portrait, and a written history of their contributions to the industry. The room includes inductees from every year since the Hall's establishment, organized chronologically. More on the Hall of Fame · See past inductees
Room 4 — The Sugar House Replica
The centerpiece of the first floor and probably the museum's most beloved exhibit. A full-scale walk-in replica of a working sugar house — the small wooden building where sap is boiled down to syrup. The replica includes:
- A traditional wood-fired evaporator
- Authentic sugar-house architecture (the ventilation cupola, the floor plan, the workspace layout)
- Period-correct tools and supplies arranged as if the operation has just paused
- The smell, occasionally — when the museum runs special boiling demonstrations
The sugar house is a walk-through exhibit; visitors are welcome to step inside, look around, and read the labels at their own pace. More about the sugar house replica
Room 5 — Additional Display
The fourth first-floor room rotates content as the museum's collection grows and as renovation projects open new exhibits. Recent and ongoing displays include:
- Tubing and modern collection systems (the plastic tubing that replaced metal buckets in many operations)
- Educational displays about sap-to-syrup ratios and the role of weather in production
- Historic photographs of regional sugarbushes
- Maple-related ephemera: advertisements, tin signs, packaging from over the decades
The Audio Narration on This Floor
The audio narration on the first floor is some of the museum's most developed — particularly in the equipment room and the sugar house, where the explanations of the equipment and the process are essential context for visitors who haven't grown up around maple production. Most first-floor narration runs 5–10 minutes per exhibit.
For Those Short on Time
If you only have one hour and want to see the most important exhibits, the first floor alone will give you a substantial museum experience: the equipment room and the sugar house will tell you essentially the entire story of how the industry works, and the Hall of Fame will introduce you to the people who shaped it.
Next Floor
From the first floor, the stairs lead up to the second floor (early techniques and containers) and then the third floor (logging).