When we first heard of the sugar shack belonging to Anna Gruner Adolph in the 1800s, the many Gruner and Adolph descendants of the twenty-first century had to know more about it. It was a saga about her begging to be told.

Anna was already a larger than life family figure. Born in a country of castles and old kingdoms, she attended Court balls in her youth, fought off poverty when she became a widow with four children, came to America and put her two teen-aged sons to work clearing the land to become successful farmers. She was a remarkable woman.

Now suddenly fast-forward to the twenty-first century. Bruce Gruner, president of the Gruner Heritage Reunion for the 2005-2010 term, was surfing the Internet when he found an item of interest for sale on eBay. It was an old postcard that was titled “Anna Adolph’s Sugar Shack.” It was represented to be of the postcard vintage used from 1904-1914, but writing on the cards itself dated the sugar shack to about 1865. That and the location of the building as “North of Hodunk 2 miles” placed it in Branch County, Michigan, the home of Anna Gruner Adolph from 1856 until her death in 1891.

Bruce immediately put in the winning bid for the postcard and soon afterward got together with several other family members to learn more about the sugar shack. First we had to review what we knew about Anna herself.


Anna was born in 1819 in Reichenberg, Bohemia. Once an independent fiefdom in the central crossroads of Europe, Bohemia is now a part of the Czech Republic. In the middle 1800s it was the scene of peasant uprisings and civil strife as serfdom made its final gasp. Germany was conscripting German youths in Bohemia into their armies to put down the rebellions. Four of Anna’s brothers had gone to America by 1848, but Anna was already married to a soldier and had young children. Her husband died of TB in 1854 and her brothers urged her to come to America. She was delayed until 1856 when she finally was able came over to settle on a small farm her brother Wenzel had procured for her in Girard Township, Branch County. Land ownership in America, even with small farms, had proven to be a profitable enterprise in those days, even for families like the Gruners who had managed woolen mills in their native country and knew little of farming.

Anna’s eighty-acre farm required a lot of clearing, but her two sons immediately went to work and soon the farm was productive. It was on the edge of a lake that even today is noted for its variety of fish. Together with the availability of small game, and good crop yields, the family was always able to enjoy an abundant table. Life in America had not made them wealthy, but it had treated them kindly.


The family history had been well documented in a Branch County history book as well as family records, so we knew a great deal about Anna’s early days in America. Still, there had been no record of a sugar shack in the family annals. Charley Gruner, Bruce’s brother, began to search records in the office of the Branch County Register of Deeds. It was a time consuming task because of so many land transfers in that era among the Gruner and Adolph families.
Charley finally found the only piece of property that fit the description as being two miles north of Hodunk. Orson Randall (whose daughter Emily married Wenzel Gruner) sold it to Anna Adolph on March 20, 1866. The deed indicated Anna paid Orson one thousand dollars for the property described as follows:

The West half of the South West quarter of Section number Seven, in Township number Five South of Range number Six West, lying in the County of Branch, and the State of Michigan.

There was another deed recorded six years later (December 3, 1872) in which Anna sold the property back to Orson Randall for twelve hundred dollars, but reserved several acres of the property for future use.

The west half of the south west quarter of Section number Seven (7) in Township number five (5) South of Range number six (6) west Branch County and State of Michigan. The party of the first part reserves the timber upon one acre of land above described and has five years to get off the same, also reserves the use of three acres of the cleared land for a term of three years also reserves the rails used in fencing the same.

Charley reasoned that Anna (or her son Philip acting on her behalf) had no need for the ninety acres of land and sold it back to Orson, reserving for a short period a stand of maple trees and the land on which the sugar shack was located.

Charley found the property. The ninety acres described in the deeds is located on the north side of the Cady and Gower Roads intersection and extends to the Union Township line. It is low wetland, most of it still forest. There was a sawmill in nearby Hodunk, so Orson may have considered timberland a valuable asset.


The sugar shack is gone, but there is still a mystery raised by the postcard. It can be speculated that Anna, probably with the aid of her sons, put up the shack some time between 1866 and 1872. Sometime between 1910 and 1914, someone saw the 40-year-old weather beaten shack, liked the scene, photographed it and offered it for sale as a postcard. Anna had died in 1891, but someone in the family, knowing of the connection, bought the postcard and wrote the message on it in pencil. Chances are her son Philip bought it and wrote the pencil notation. The printed notation was done in red ink and would have been done many years later, perhaps by Philip’s son Seymour.

We are satisfied that we know where the sugar shack was located and who built it, but we also needed to explore why it was built. The first thing to remember is that in the 1800s sugar was a scarce and expensive commodity. You didn’t go to the nearest general store and purchase a five pound bag of granulated sugar. You took honey from bee hives, or if you were lucky enough to have the right kind of maple trees on your property, you made your own maple sugar.


It was the Native Americans that taught the colonists how to make maple sugar. By the middle eighteen hundreds it was a widely practiced art. First a hole had to be drilled into the tree in the spring when the sap was running. Then a “spill” or “spile” was inserted so the sap could run out into a container.

The maple sap had to be slowly boiled down over a long period to make sugar and so the “sugar shack” came into being. It was a sheltered place for a stove or fireplace on which to hang a series of kettles in which to boil down the syrup. As the syrup got thicker in one kettle it was ladled into the next one and fresh sap could then be added to the first kettle. In that way they always had the last kettle full of nearly completed syrup or sugar.

When the syrup was thick enough it was stirred much like we do today in making fudge and poured into molds. There was no good way to preserve syrup in the early days, so except for that to be used quickly, of it was made into sugar. The process required a lot of time and labor. By the 1800s there were many improvements in the process, including an “evaporator,” a specially designed flat pan with channels for the sap to flow through it as it boiled. In that way it is said fresh sap could always be added at one end and finished syrup could be drawn off at the other end.


We have no way of knowing which process was used in Anna’s sugar shack, but they were resourceful people, so we have the feeling they used the best technology available to them at that time.

Submitted and written by: Marian Zang G-75-42, with much of the information furnished by Charles G-23-31, and Bruce Gruner G-23-32 14 June, 2007
14 June, 2007

Black and white photo/post card of Sugar Shack submitted by Bruce Gruner G-23-32
Color photos and copies of deeds submitted by Charles Gruner G-23-31