History Lesson: Gum industry flourished in north country

OSCEOLA, New York (WWNY) - There are plenty of flavors of gum these days. Cinnamon, spearmint, wintergreen, but have you ever tried spruce? It was the hot commodity in the 1870s.

“And there were factories set up throughout the United States,” said Inga Davey, who’s operations manager for the Lewis County Historical Society, but the sourcing of the raw material was very popular here in the northeast, specifically here in the Adirondacks and the Tug Hill Forest.

That’s right. Among the many things grown in the north country, gum was another harvest. It came from the hardened sap of spruce trees and had to be scraped off by hand.

“People moved here specifically to take part in this business because it was booming around here and the main area where the spruce hub was was in Osceola,” Davey said. “Farmers, woodsmen and hunters would go into the forest and manually cut spruce gum off the spruce trees for some extra income.”

With the area producing so much raw gum, the Adirondack Spruce Gum Company opened up in 1888, first in Port Leyden.

“They had a factory there and it ran about a year and a half when the building caught fire,” Davey said. “They picked up their business and moved to Gouverneur to start there.”

The gum is made from the hardened sap by steaming it to a liquid form, straining its impurities, and cooking it in a copper pan. Once it cools, you’ve got gum.

“Spruce gum was mildly sweet and had a sprucy flavor to it,” Davey said. “It was very hard and brittle so you had to put it in your mouth and let it soften before you could start chewing.”

As you can imagine, people started to prefer the softer, sweeter gum flavors once they became available and spruce gum became less relevant. Production petered off in the 1940s.

But the trees remain, and the sap remains, so if you’re an adventurous soul with strong molars, the gum remains.

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