A Sweet Taste Of History Made With A Dream In Mind

Nancy Spoelstra breaks open a sorghum stalk to showcase the amount of juice inside.

Mahaska County, Iowa – In a small private campground between Leighton and New Sharon, a group of people continue the process of making sorghum syrup.

The crop is planted and grown on the two-acre plot, and in the fall, before the first frost, a group of individuals gather to harvest and then press the sorghum, cooking down the juice into syrup. It’s a process very similar to maple syrup.

The dream for the park came from Paul Vander Hart and his desire to continue a tradition from when his family arrived in the Pella area back in 1885.

The ‘stroop,’ as it was called in the Netherlands, was the syrup that was often a big part of the morning cuisine.

Volunteers tend to the sorghum press.

Having grown up with the locally grown sweeteners, Vander Hart dreamed of finding a press and bringing it to Lower Grove, where he would have an acreage and park in his retirement years.

“I had been born to the soil and sorghum making, and now I wanted to return to them,” says Vander Hart in his book. “My grandfather Gerrit Vander Hart arrived in central Iowa from the Netherlands in 1855 when he was 2 1/2 years old. My father, Gerrit Stoffel Vander Hart, was born in 1881, the oldest of my grandfather’s ten children.”

With sorghum making something Vander Hart’s family had done for a century, he wanted to see that continue.

After Vander Hart’s passing, Nancy and Clarance Spoelstra continued to share that dream.

This year, friends and neighbors continued that tradition of gathering for the harvest, using mules to help squeeze the sorghum juice in the press, and then cooking that down into the sweet syrup.

Lower Grove Park has been a place where people continue to meet, camp, and Nancy says it feels great to help carry on that tradition.

Clarance Spoelstra plants the sorghum in the spring with an old disk and tractor. “If it doesn’t run, we go borrow one of the neighbors and get it planted,” says Nancy.

When it comes time to harvest, the leaves are stripped off the sorghum plant and remove the seed head.

A wider view of the sorghum pressing operation, with the press in the middle, the cook house to the left, and storage to the right.

A sight not often observed any longer is an animal-driven machine like the press. A mule walks in a circle driving the press that squeezes that juice into a 50-gallon drum.

Breaking open a sorghum stalk reveals a juicy inner core with a slight sweetness and chlorophyll taste.

That chlorophyll is also why the liquid needs to be cooked down over the next 15 hours with the help of a wood fire. Those tending to the juice skim off the chlorophyll, as it makes the finished product bitter.

The group tends to the liquid as it cooks down, helping remove things like the chlorophyll that can adversely affect the finished product.

One hundred gallons of freshly squeezed juice cooks down to 10 to 12 gallons of the finished product.

“Not everybody likes it,” says Nancy of the finished product.

A quick taste reveals a fresh sweetness that does indeed have a different flavor from many other sweeteners.

Nancy likes people to enjoy the slower pace of the process and getting back to nature and carrying on Vander Hart’s dream, “as long as we can.”

“We hope it doesn’t have to stop,” says Nancy of the tradition and little park, but the future of the park and its tradition may be coming to an end as the land may be changing purpose soon and be put into production. “We don’t know how long we’ll be here.”

You can learn more by visiting Lower Grove Park and Sorghum Mill on their Facebook Page HERE – https://www.facebook.com/LowerGroveParkAndSorghumMill