Funks Grove, Pure Maple Sirup

Just off Route Sixty-Six in McLean County sits a grove of sugar maples that has been selling sirup commercially since eighteen ninety-one, when Arthur Funk opened the first commercial camp. The Funk family arrived here in eighteen twenty-four, drawn by the timber and soil, and the grove they planted outlasted them all. They spell it s-i-r-u-p, without the Y, the original English spelling, and they have stayed with it across seven generations.

The grove includes the Funks Grove Nature Preserve, a protected parcel of about nineteen acres. Motorists on the old two-lane have been pulling off for a jar since the nineteen thirties. It is one of the few Route Sixty-Six stops where what they sell is exactly what has always been here.