SUMNER — Ninety-two-year-old Tom Bragg has been making maple syrup since he was a teenager in Buckfield.

When he got married in 1941, he bought a 35-acre farm on Bonney Road, complete with a hill full of maples and a sugarhouse from the late 1800s.

Now Bragg’s sons and a grandson help keep the sugaring going. 

Bragg hooks up the lines for his 750 taps. Most lines are hooked to a suction system designed by his son Chris Bragg. Gravity powers the sap through 300 of the taps.

Tom Bragg calls his suction lines his milking machine — a name that has stuck since Tom first saw it in operation.

Chris is still fine-tuning the process but basically a sump pump draws the sap into a barrel. When it reaches a certain height in the barrel, the sap flows into storage barrels for processing.

Chris said they drain the lines at night, so there is nothing to freeze, and they can get sap much sooner the next day. Chris made the vacuum releaser, which is part of the system, to limit the vacuum in the system.

Before the suction lines were in, the Bragg boys gathered the sap and hauled it down a high hill in buckets.

Chris and a friend, Cameron Cowett, do the tapping.

Tom’s grandson Randy gathers the sap that is not on the suction line.

Tom’s son David Bragg does the cooking, and Tom Bragg drives around the county selling the finished syrup.

“We do the work now, but Pops is the boss,” Randy Bragg said.

In addition to overseeing the sugaring operation, Tom maintains a cemetery in town. He still misses operating the town grader that was once his responsibility.

David said his father recently told him that he hopes an old injury — a falling tree branch broke his back — doesn’t slow him down when he gets old.

Randy’s 4-year-old son has his own tree that he tapped. That makes it a fourth generation in the making.

The Braggs made 50 gallons of the fine organic syrup this year in their licensed sugarhouse.