Hockey's Oldest Business – Since 1847

Stick-making factories have been around for the better part of two centuries in Canada. Roustan Hockey's is 175 years in the making.

Stick-making factories have been around for the better part of two centuries in Canada. Roustan Hockey's is 175 years in the making. 

What follows is a short version of this lengthy history that appeared in The Hockey News Money and Power 2023 magazine issue and a full version that was updated on Oct. 20, 2023.

When you discuss the genesis of the hockey stick industry, you have to start in Ayr, Ont. Situated south and west, respectively, of the larger cities of Kitchener and Cambridge, the small town originated in 1824 with an initial population of 230 people. Ayr originally was a trio of settlements and virtually all of its initial settlers were Scottish tradesmen, farmers and artisans.

By 1847, the company known today as Roustan Hockey (full disclosure: Roustan Hockey is owned by the owner and publisher of The Hockey News, W. Graeme Roustan) began as the Ayr Machinery Works, a division of the John Watson Manufacturing Company. It made farm implements including mowing, threshing and reaping tools, as well as plow handles, straw cutters, reapers and stoves. But in 1882, the company was purchased by The Hilborn Company. As fate would have it, new owner William Hilborn was a fan of the flourishing sport of hockey.

[gallery ids="15086,15087"]

Prior to The Hilborn Company’s venture into stick-making, hockey players made their own sticks. Players would saw off a piece of hickory or alder wood, carve three-foot sections and file them into hockey-stick shapes. Initial sticks closely resembled field-hockey sticks. Later, blades got longer and squarer. Finally, the stick shaft extended, allowing players to play at a more upright body position. But Hilborn changed the landscape, realizing his machine that shaped and molded plow handles could also create hockey sticks. One piece of rock elm wood generated eight sticks.

The Hilborn Company established a robust stick market by 1910, with sales of thousands of dozens of sticks. By 1912, one dozen Hilborn hockey sticks cost $1. Hilborn also was one of the first stick manufacturers to craft exclusive orders for NHL players. In 1928, Hilborn produced the first spliced skater’s stick, allowing them to use other hardwoods, as rock elm had become a scarce commodity. The revolutionary stick had separate pieces for the blade and shaft, and the public responded positively to changes. The Ayr factory was thriving, moving up to 300 sticks through each employee’s hands daily. Hilborn’s factory workers had a six-day-a-week, 10-hours-a-day schedule and were paid 30 cents an hour.

Unfortunately, the Great Depression hit The Hilborn Company hard, and the company was sold to Waterloo Wood Products in February 1931 for $25,000. The sale was one part of a larger conglomeration movement that eventually would merge five hockey stick-making companies into a single entity.

The stick industry sprouted many businesses in southwestern Ontario in the early 20th century, including the St. Mary’s Wood Specialty company in March 1908. One year into its operations, St. Mary’s Wood Specialty’s plant produced a line of 16 hockey sticks and 27 types of baseball bats. Prices ranged from 45 cents per dozen sticks to $4.05 per dozen goalie sticks.

By 1917, St. Mary’s Wood Specialty was the world’s largest stick-making factory. The company developed the first pinned-blade hockey stick, and, in 1922, it patented the first three-piece stick with a tapered blade. Meanwhile, in August 1930, the Hespeler Wood Specialty Co. – which was founded in 1905 – was sold to Waterloo Wood Products, a subsidiary of Canada Barrels and Kegs that was owned by the famous Seagram’s distillery company. It was WWP’s first purchase of a hockey-stick company, and it paid the biggest price – $85,000 – of any of the five stick-making companies Canada Barrels and Kegs eventually purchased.

In November 1930, St. Mary’s Wood Specialty was bought by WWP for $28,000, and Canada Barrels and Kegs purchased WWP less than three years later, in July 1933. All Waterloo Wood Products employees, machinery and operations transferred to the Hespeler Wood Products plant. In January 1935, the Waterloo Wood Products company officially changed its name to Hespeler-St. Mary’s Wood Specialties Ltd., and merged with the Hespeler Wood Specialty Co. All hockey stick-making plants were closed but for the Hespeler plant. And for the following 34 years, Hespeler-St. Mary’s Wood Specialties Ltd. dominated the industry, before it was sold to Cooper Canada Ltd. in July 1972.

Canada wasn’t the only nation with a flourishing hockey stick-making industry in the late 19th century. The United States also had a stick-making business – or, at least, the arm of a stick-making business. That business was E.B. Salyerds & Sons Ltd., named for founder Edward Burgess Salyerds. In 1887, Salyerds capitalized on the skyrocketing increase in interest in hockey by unveiling the “Salyerd Special Hockey Stick” – the first of its kind in the marketplace.

Salyerds’ decision to expand to America benefited Avoca, N.Y., a small village southeast of Buffalo, where a stick-making plant was built. By 1908, Salyerds’ factories in Preston and Avoca were cranking out very popular stick brands, including “Midget” and “Kiddo” sticks. Then, in July 1934, E.B. Salyerds & Sons Ltd. was bought by WWP for $40,000. It was the world’s sole hockey stick-maker with operations in Canada and America, but WWP folded E.B. Salyerds’ two plants and consolidated operations in Hespeler.

The last major hockey stick-making manufacturer in the earliest days of the industry was Montreal-based McNiece and Orchard, an athletic outfitter that also had a location in Rouses Point, N.Y. The McNiece and Orchard annual catalog sold “Extra Special” hockey sticks, and they continued to thrive in the early turn of the 20th century, to the point they supplied sticks to the NHL’s Montreal Canadiens for decades. But when WWP came calling to purchase McNiece and Orchard in September 1932, the price was $13,000. Like four of the five companies, its factory was shuttered and its labor force and operations relocated to Hespeler.

Once the five major hockey stick-making companies were acquired by WWP by 1934, focus on the growth of the business zeroed in on the centralized production plant in Hespeler. The stick-making plant came to be what the city was regarded for – well-made hockey sticks and baseball bats.

Once the newly named company pressed forward, it continued to make elite-quality sticks and bats. As the years passed, the strength of the Hespeler-St.Mary’s brand only grew. A wide array of sticks – branded as “Green Flash,” “Blue Flash” and “Mic-Mac” – were huge successes for Hespeler-St.Mary’s.

The evolution of the hockey stick also continued under the umbrella of Hespeler-St. Mary’s. Original models of sticks were one-piece models with blades carved from tree roots, but NHLers who used them wanted more flexibility from the sticks. Two-piece and three-piece models soon arrived, and a mortise joint held the blade in place. Industrial glues bonded the stick’s heel.

In July 1972, Hespeler-St.Mary’s Wood Specialties Ltd. was sold to Cooper Canada. Prior to its foray into the stick-making business, Cooper Canada, under the name Cooper Weeks – an amalgam of the names of its founders, Jack Cooper and Cecil Weeks – made money making ski and snowshoe harness sets, as well as hockey shin guards and gloves. In 1969, they introduced the plastic hockey stick replacement blade, mainly for use in road hockey.

For 15 years, Toronto-based Cooper Canada flourished as North America’s primary stick-making company. But in May 1987, Cooper Canada was purchased by Montreal business Charan Industries for approximately $36 million. Then, in February 1990, Charan sold its Cooper brand to Canstar Inc., the parent company of Bauer Hockey. Yet within five years of purchasing the company, Canstar sold all Cooper Canada’s hockey assets to global sporting goods giant Nike Inc. for approximately $395 million.

As the hockey stick-making business moved into the modern age, the planet’s biggest sports apparel and equipment maker, Nike Inc., bought into the hockey-stick market in a massive way. When Nike purchased the hockey business from Canstar, the Beaverton, Ore.-based company revealed Nike would keep its separate identities.

Two years after Nike purchased Charan’s hockey-equipment arm, the name of Nike’s hockey division changed to Bauer Inc. And two years after that name change, in December 1998, a new business was formed: Nike Bauer Hockey Inc. was Nike’s hockey properties’ new name. The famous stick-making plant in Hespeler continued producing popular sticks, but the flatlining of growth in the rollerblade business hurt Nike’s bottom line, and the hockey business didn’t approach the $1-billion level some industry analysts forecasted it would. Prices were expensive for many products, a strategy some hockey-equipment executives accurately projected would limit the overall hockey market. Hockey sticks, now comprised of materials ranging from aircraft aluminum to graphite and bullet-proof kevlar, sold for between $40 and $100. It was not at all cheap for families to fund their hockey dreams. Changing strategy was necessary.

Consequently, cost-cutting and contraction became part of Nike’s business plan for its hockey division. The firm’s Quebec-based skate and helmet plant downsized in three phases before moving production to Asia. In 2003, Nike Bauer announced it would be closing its Hespeler stick-making factory the following year. However, it proved a brief shutdown. In a matter of weeks, a new era began for the Hespeler plant when five of the plant’s longtime employees stepped up in June 2004, formed a new business named Heritage Wood Specialties Inc., and purchased the Hespeler stick-making plant. The stick-making employees had to put up their own money – and the funds of Canadian investor Mark Fackoury – but, together, they kept the Hespeler factory afloat.

As it fought to persevere, the Hespeler stick plant looked to take a bigger stake in the hockey business. Fackoury and the employees poured funds into purchasing extremely expensive equipment from as far away as Finland, and even as their competition slowly died off, HWSI found a way to hang on and outlast hockey plants around Canada and the U.S. Still, there was a finite amount of money that was going to be spent on the employee-owned plant, and if they were going to survive, they ultimately decided in 2018 they needed a new owner.

But even then, there was a sense the Canada/U.S. hockey stick-making market was pushing toward a “last man standing” environment, where one company would eventually take over virtually the entire hockey stick-manufacturing business. Nike, which wanted out of the hockey-equipment business to focus on the soft-goods business of jerseys, clothing and shoes, no longer was willing to continue pouring its monies into HWSI.

A decade earlier, back in 2008, Montreal native and fervent hockey fan W. Graeme Roustan, with a partner, purchased the Nike Bauer hockey division for approximately $200 million, less than half what Nike paid for what was Canstar, and became its chairman. After taking Bauer public on the Toronto Stock Market in 2011, where it had been previously listed in 1994 as Canstar, Roustan left as chairman in 2012.

By 2016, Roustan owned the Christian Hockey brand, and in 2018, he acquired The Hockey News media platforms. He had the brand and the advertising platform, and all that was needed for a fully integrated vertical strategy was a factory to make hockey sticks in Canada.

In 2019, he acquired HWSI and renamed it Roustan Hockey. Roustan found a new home for the plant in Brantford, Ont., the birthplace of Wayne Gretzky, not far from Hespeler – and operations were relocated to the brand-new facility. In 2020, he invested millions of dollars in a brand-new factory in Brantford, which was twice the size of the Hespeler factory that the business had been housed in since 1905.

For more than a century, the Hespeler plant manufactured more than one hundred million hockey sticks for hockey players. But it was time for a new direction, and keeping jobs in Canada was crucial for Roustan. He did that by moving operations to Brantford. He had achieved the company’s goal
of being the “last man standing,” and, as a result, a new era for the stick-making industry had begun.

Most of the Hespeler employees followed their job movement to Brantford, and local politicians welcomed the company and its employees to the community. There remain challenges for the stick-making business in Canada, but everyone involved felt the new energy and renewed purpose Roustan brought to the table. By the end of 2021, the move to Brantford was complete.

Roustan recognized the direction the industry was going in, which was to repatriate some manufacturing from overseas, and saw opportunities for a rebound and a return to growth. In 2022, corporate leviathan Canadian Tire Corporation, which shares Roustan’s vision for Made-in-Canada hockey sticks and for the preservation of Canadian manufacturing jobs, repatriated all of the Sherwood sticks that Roustan can make from overseas manufacturers.

From 1847, when Canada wasn’t even a country yet, to 2022, hockey-stick manufacturing has been in continuous business operations for 175 years. With over one hundred million sticks manufactured and sales of over $1 billion, this is hockey’s oldest business success story.

– with files from Brian Logie

Full Version of Hockey's Oldest Business

When you’re talking about the beginnings of the hockey stick industry, you have to start in Ayr, Ontario. Situated on the Nith River, south and west respectively of the larger cities of Kitchener and Cambridge, the southwestern Ontario town originated in 1824 as a tiny city with an initial population of 230 people.

The territory in the area, eventually known as the North Dumfries township, consisted of 94,305 acres. It was initially sold in 1798 by Six Nations Mohawk military and political leader Joseph Brant to Philip Stedman for the price of £8,841. Steadman died in 1801, and his sister, Mrs. John Sparksman, sold the land to Thomas William Clarke. In 1816, Clarke sold the property to wealthy Scottish immigrant William Dickson. The price of the land was now £24,000.

Ayr originally was a group of three settlements – Jedburgh to the east, Nithvale to the west and Mudge’s Mills in the center – that eventually was amalgamated into one town. Ayr’s first settler was the namesake of Mudge’s Mills, Abel Mudge, who built a dam, grist mill and sawmill. Virtually all settlers who followed Mudge were Scottish tradesmen, farmers and artisans.

The entire area began to flourish. Jedburgh was founded in 1832 by another Scotsman, John Hall, who built a distillery and a flour mill that same year. Nithvale, meanwhile, had a flour mill and two sawmills. Mudge’s Mill was founded in 1839 by initial settlers James Jackson, J.R. Andrews and Robert Wylie. The name “Ayr’ first appeared in 1840, when it was assigned to the local post office; it was given that name by Wylie, who was inspired by the name of his hometown of Ayr in Scotland.

Interestingly enough, the grandfather of W. Graeme Roustan, the current owner of Roustan Hockey Ltd. – now the last hockey stick manufacturer in Canada – was born in Ayr, Scotland, in 1899.

Business in Ayr quickly began to grow across a number of industries. Smith’s Canadian Gazetteer’s 1846 edition describes Ayr as the home of a post office receiving mail once a week, a fulling mill and carding machine, a tannery, a blacksmith, two shoemakers, a pair of tailors, a grist mill, two carpenters and one cooper, a repairer of barrels and casks and two churches. But the biggest business in Ayr, for many decades, was a foundry that casted metal.

One year later, in 1847, the foundation for what would become the last surviving Canadian hockey stick-making company was laid down in Ayr.

By 1848, that Roustan Hockey predecessor company, which began as the Ayr Machinery Works, was renamed the John Watson Manufacturing Company by John Watson (1820–1903). Located at the intersection of Piper Street and Church Street in Ayr, it made farm implements, including mowing, threshing and reaping tools, as well as plow handles, straw cutters, reapers and stoves.

And the city grew around it. As of 1850, Ayr had a town hall and a fire department, at which point the population had grown to 700, with its own library, newspaper and a large furniture factory. Increased demand helped create a whopping five flour mills, as well as a woolen mill.

Fifteen years after it opened, Watson’s company was shipping agricultural implements across Canada. Infrastructure in and around Ayr also evolved and improved. A road to the relatively close town of Galt, Ontario, had been built, as had a railway. Exportable goods were delivered by ox cart to the train station in Paris, Ontario. In 1879, Ayr got its own rail line from the Credit Valley Railway.

In 1884, Jedburgh, Mudge’s Mills and Nithvale were absorbed into Ayr when the village was incorporated; Watson was the town’s first Reeve. In 1881, construction began on a new factory, and in 1882 the John Watson Manufacturing Company moved into its new building at 45 Stanley Street. Approximately six years later, William Hilborn (1848–1909) bought the Ayr Agricultural Works from John Watson, which was located at the intersection of Piper and Church Street in Ayr.

In 1889, Hilborn renamed it the Ayr (American) Plow Works Co., and it employed 40 men. It was later renamed the Hilborn Company and became one of the first manufacturers of hockey sticks in Canada. And as fate would have it, new owner William Hilborn – born in Waterloo, Ontario, on December 1, 1849 – was a fan of the flourishing sport of hockey.

Only one year earlier, Ayr’s streets were lit with coal oil lamps. By 1901, Ayr had concrete sidewalks. And soon after the turn of the century, the Hilborn Company, and Ayr itself, were at a crossroads.

Ayr’s population suffered a decline by 1910, with some people relocating to the nearby towns of Preston and Berlin, Ontario. In the same era, hockey began to blossom as Canada’s pastime. Prior to the Hilborn Company’s venture into stick making, hockey participants had to make their own sticks. People would cut down a hickory or alder piece of wood, carve three-foot sections and file the piece into the shape of a hockey stick. Initial sticks looked more like field-hockey sticks. Eventually, stick blades became longer and squarer, then the shaft of the stick extended longer, allowing players to play the game in a more upright body position. But Hilborn would soon change the landscape.

Hilborn’s interest in hockey came in no small part from a family perspective – his sons, William Jr. and Albert Hilborn, would go on, in 1894-95, to play in and win a Toronto Bank League and City championship, which was the forerunner of the NHL. In fact, William and Albert Hilborn played for the The Canadian Bank of Commerce senior team in the Ontario Hockey Association senior series that began in 1890-91. Albert played point and William was a forward. In 1894-95, the Hilborn brothers’ Bank of Commerce team won the league champinship, then travelled to Montreal to contest the “bank championship of Canada” against the Bank of Montreal’s team. Montreal won that game 12-2, although two of Montreal’s players also were members of the Stanley Cup champion Montreal Victorias.

For a number of years, Albert Hilborn worked with the Canadian Bank of Commerce in New York and New Orleans, but he eventually resigned from the bank to take over the management of the Ayr plant. Meanwhile, William Hilborn Jr. was a well-known banker with the Bank of Commerce in Guelph, and he was head of the Hilborn Motor Company before he retired in 1934.

However, Hilborn Sr.’s interest in hockey wasn’t just personal because of his son’s skill at the game – it also came out of a business necessity. Indeed, when the Hilborn Company’s farm business lagged, William Hilborn Sr. turned his attention to the fledgling sport. Hilborn came to realize his machine that shaped and molded plow handles also could create hockey sticks. In fact, just one piece of rock elm wood could generate eight sticks for sale.

Hilborn and the Hilborn Company weren’t the first hockey stick manufacturer. Hilborn began making sticks after eventual rival company E.B. Salyerds &; Sons Ltd first put a stick – they called it the Salyerds Special Hockey Stick – on the market in 1887. By 1910, however, the Hilborn Company had established a robust market of its own, with sales of thousands of dozens of sticks, and a business that was now employing hockey stick salesmen. As of 1912, a dozen Hilborn hockey sticks would cost $1. Hilborn also was one of the first stick manufacturers to make special, exclusive orders for NHL players.

Ten years later, the Hilborn Company had grown to the point it was supplying sticks – and baseball bats – to elite sports manufacturers and sellers across the country,

including Spalding, C.C.M., and the Eaton’s Canadian department store chain. Yet there was still a functional flaw in the sticks themselves: each was still made from one piece of lumber, which increased the weight of the stick and made the thin blades easy to split.

In 1928, Hilborn produced the first spliced skater’s stick, which allowed it to use other hardwoods, as rock elm had become a scarce commodity by that time. The revolutionary stick also had separate pieces for the blade and shaft, and the general public responded very positively to the changes. As a result, the factory in Ayr was thriving, moving as many as 300 sticks through each employee’s hands every day. Factory workers at the Hilborn plant had a six-day-a-week, 10-hours-a-day schedule and were paid 30 cents an hour.

Unfortunately, the Great Depression hit the Hilborn Company hard, and it was sold to Waterloo Wood Products, on February 13, 1931, for $25,000 – just $1,000 more than Ayr itself was sold for more than a century earlier – in an ownership process that would eventually lead to Roustan’s purchase of the stick-making business in 2019. The sale was part of a bigger conglomeration movement that eventually would merge five hockey stick-making companies, but the Hilborn Company was one of the very first, and very best at what it did. 

As the hockey stick industry flourished in Southwestern Ontario, one of the final big stick-making companies came to be: the St. Marys Wood Specialty Company, which was incorporated on March 30, 1908. It was located in St. Marys, Ontario, on the banks of the Thames River, some 22 miles from London, Ontario. St. Marys was initially settled in 1839 by Thomas Ingersoll – the brother of famous Canadian War of 1812 heroine Laura Secord – who built a mill at Little Falls, Ontario, for the Canada Company, a British land development business.

Two years after Ingersoll’s first building in St. Marys, he built a grist mill and sawmill in return for 337 acres of land in the area. Before long, other businesses, including a carriage maker, a flax mill, a cheese maker and a blacksmith popped up, and the building of Grand Trunk railways from 1857 to 1860 spurred development in the lumber and limestone quarry industries. In the riverbed and the banks of the Thames River, limestone was at or near the surface and could be quarried for building materials. The first library in the city opened in 1857, and in 1904 a grant from the Andrew Carnegie Foundation paved the way for a freestanding library building.

The village of St. Marys was incorporated in 1864, and by 1913 the library was home to some 4,000 books. But the region’s connection to limestone gave St. Marys its nickname of 'Stonetown.' By 1866, the mercantile industry in St. Marys flourished, with Beattie’s General Store leading the pack. Another local retailer, Timothy Eaton, picked up his business and relocated it to Toronto, where it would come to be known as one of Canada’s all-time most successful retailers.

As of 1905, 51-year-old businessman Solon Lewis Doolittle, a native of Aylmer, Ontario, set up shop in St. Marys. By 1907, his intent was to create a hockey stick and handle factory, and he asked the town council to provide him with a $6,000 loan. As a result, the St. Marys Wood Specialty Company was incorporated on April 25, 1908. The business quickly moved forward, and on June 25, 1908, the St. Marys Wood Specialty Company was opened at a site on James Street, just north of the local flax mill.

One year after that, the company’s plant was moving at breakneck speed, producing a full line of hockey sticks and baseball bats. There were 27 models of baseball bats and 16 different types of hockey sticks, and a price listing in 1909 displayed sticks for defensemen, forwards and goalies, in boys, junior and miniature styles. Prices ranged from 45 cents per dozen sticks to $4.05 per dozen for goalie sticks. By 1910, the St. Marys Wood Specialty Company was selling sticks as far away as Regina, Saskatchewan, and was also manufacturing axe, pick and hammer handles. In 1910, the company received an order for six carloads of sticks for Winnipeg sellers. And in 1912, Doolittle received a patent for a new hockey stick, while a new CPR spur line was key to the company’s success.

Unfortunately, a major fire destroyed the St. Marys stick factory on January 20, 1912. That put a halt to production and cost the company approximately $20,000, but Doolittle didn’t waste time getting his business back on track. By August that same year, they’d shifted operations to the flax mill, and by early 1913 they were up and running again. The baseball bats were made of straight-grained, air-seasoned, second-growth white ash, and they were sold through a network of businesses in Ottawa, Winnipeg, Montreal and St. John’s, New Brunswick.

Business for Doolittle in St. Marys continued to prosper. By 1917, St. Marys Wood Specialty was the largest stick-making factory in all of Canada. The company developed the first pinned-blade hockey stick, and in 1922, it patented the first three-piece stick with a tapered blade. On the baseball front, St. Marys Wood Specialty sold bats in crates of 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 and 12. The best-selling models were sold at $10 per dozen. The exhaust of the stick-and-bat-making factory came via a 250-horsepower engine with a 10-ton flywheel that powered most of the plant’s machinery. Steam for the engine came from a boiler that burned scrap wood and sawdust, and the boiler produced sufficient steam to keep the factory warm in winter and heat its wood-drying kilns.

After Doolittle died at age 65 from pneumonia on Oct. 25, 1919, there was change at the top of St. Marys Wood Specialty. However, the plant continued operating, even through the Great Depression. In 1922, the company secured a patent on a three-piece goalie stick invented by managing director Neil M. Currie.

The company employed dozens of people over the years, often through generations of the same families. One employee, Russell 'Buster' Seaton, worked there for 55 years, and two of his sons, as well as two of his grandsons, also went on to be employees of the company. St. Marys Wood Specialty also hired Grace Crozier as a young girl, and she worked there for more than 25 years before retiring as head of the baseball bats line in 1972. This was prior to the gender equality movement, and Crozier stood out as a symbol of progress for the region and the business in particular.

On November 30, 1930, St. Marys Wood Specialty was sold to Waterloo Wood Products for $28,000. The powerhouse Seagrams distillery company, through its Canada Barrels and Kegs subsidiary, purchased Waterloo Wood Products less than three years later, on July 12, 1933. All Waterloo Wood Products employees, machinery and operations were transferred to Hespeler, Ontario, to the Hespeler Wood Products plant. On August 11 of that year, the company hired extra employees to work on 24-hour shifts to meet the demand for axe handles.

And the new, bigger company would quickly endear itself to Hespeler citizens. One resident, who played in the Hespeler Minor Hockey League, remembers the plant having a separate rack with hockey stick seconds that Hespeler children could buy at a discounted price. Another area resident, Dave Cressman, described the unique experience that came when his father took him to the plant to buy a Hespeler Mic Mac brand stick for 50 cents.

“Strange but true,” Cressman recalled, “is the fact that they put a nail through the toe of the blade (of the stick) to keep it together if the blade cracked. I used to play road hockey with sticks that were no longer good for use on the ice, and the nail would cause a spark on the pavement when taking a slapshot.”

On January 7, 1935, the Waterloo Wood Products company officially changed its name to Hespeler-St. Marys Wood Specialties Ltd., and merged with the Hespeler Wood Specialty Co. Ltd. as part of a larger conglomerate business move that also included the former Hilborn Company, E.B. Salyerds & Sons Ltd., and McNiece & Orchard, Ltd., which was located at 1629 St. Catherine Street West in Montreal.

Each of the five hockey stick-making plants was closed, except for the Hespeler plant. In short order, all competition for stick-makers was gone, and, at the same time, the sport of hockey eventually began churning out elite players in the St. Marys area. In 1956, the Ontario Hockey Association’s Junior ‘B’ League team, the St. Marys Lincolns, was founded, and the team went on to produce NHL talents such as J.P. Parise, Bob Boughner, Terry Crisp, Mark Bell, Steve Shields and Don Luce. Meanwhile, St. Marys eventually became the home of the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in 1994.

As for the hockey stick business, three years after the name change of the business and the merger of the companies – and after increasing the price of sticks by about 30 percent – Hespeler-St. Marys Wood Specialties Ltd. was regarded as the world’s largest hockey stick manufacturer. And for the next 34 years, Hespeler-St. Marys Wood Specialties Ltd. dominated the industry before it was sold to Cooper Canada Ltd. on July 5, 1972. 

The town of Hespeler, which is now a neighborhood in the northeastern part of the city of Cambridge, didn’t start as the center of the hockey-stick-making business in North America it eventually became. Rather, Hespeler, located in the Grand River Valley along the Speed River, was in its early days the territory of an Iroquois people regarded by their neighbors as “Attawandaron,” which is translated to mean “people who speak differently.”

In the early 1600s, French explorers of the area called the Attawandaron “Neutrals,” because they maintained peace with their Huron and Iroquois neighbors. Halfway through the 17th century, the “Neutral” territory was conquered by the invading Iroquois during the Beaver Wars. In 1784, the Grand River Valley was officially granted by the British Crown to the Loyalist Iroquois group led by the famous Mohawk and military leader “Theyendanegea,” also known as Joseph Brant.

The region that became known as Hespeler was purchased in 1798 by a group of Pennsylvania Mennonites from the Six Nations Indians, with the help of developer and pioneer western merchant Richard Beasley. The area had its first settler in 1809 – Abraham Clemens, who purchased 515 acres of land from Beasley. One year later, 40- year-old Cornelius Pannabecker, a blacksmith from Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, and the son of a Mennonite minister, moved to the town and soon set up shop. In 1830, 43-year-old Joseph Olberholtzer, also the son of a Pennsylvania Mennonite preacher, purchased a far larger area of land that would first be known as Bergeytown – named after resident Michael Bergey – before it changed its name to New Hope in 1835.

In 1845, German fur trader Jacob Hespeler arrived in the region, buying a 145-acre tract on the Speed River. He initially built an industrial complex that was the genesis of Hespeler’s eventual industrialization, which soon would consist of textile and woolen mills. As of 1846, its population was only 100 people, but there was a grist and saw mill, a tavern, a pail factory, two tailors and two blacksmiths, a tannery and a pair of shoemakers. When the railway arrived in 1859, business got boosted, and the population had grown to the point Hespeler was incorporated as a village.

In 1869, Hespeler’s population had grown to 1,200, and major manufacturers settled into the community, including a knitting mill and woolen factory. By 1901, there were enough people and businesses within Hespeler to qualify it as an incorporated town. Continued growth allowed Hespeler to gain a reputation as a business enclave. It got another boost in 1911 when the electric railway system between nearby Galt and Preston reached Hespeler and what would later be known as Kitchener. However, a massive part of Hespeler’s legacy began in 1905, when the Hespeler Wood Specialty Company was founded. After years of initial development, the company made a name for itself as being on the vanguard of stick development.

Founded by Zachariah Adam Hall, a teacher who lived in Wellesley Township, Waterloo County, the Hespeler Wood Specialty Company manufactured stoves and hockey sticks, and in 1928, the business continued as the Hall Foundry Company. A related Hall-owned business, the Standard Castings and Manufacturing Company, adjoined the foundry.

In 1951, a fire on September 15 destroyed both of Hall’s factories – the Hall Foundry and Standard Castings and Manufacturing. Reportedly, when it became clear both factories would be lost, firefighters turned their focus to saving the nearby hockey stick factory, which they did. The foundry was rebuilt, and the business continued long after Z.A. Hall died on May 5, 1952, in Guelph. It closed in the 1980s.

In 1922, at which time the Hespeler plant – located on Sheffield Street in the business center of Hespeler and employing approximately 25 people – patented the “Supreme” three-piece goaltender stick. In 1925, it registered two patents for two-piece player sticks. In 1926, it produced four patents for heel joints, one of which turned out to be the forerunner of the modern heel-jointed stick.

In August 1930, the Hespeler Wood Specialty Company was bought by Waterloo Wood Products, a subsidiary of Canada Barrel and Keg, owned by the famous Seagram’s distillery company. It was the first purchase of a hockey stick company, and it paid the highest price – $85,000 – of any of the five companies Canada Barrel and Keg wound up buying. And its inventiveness continued.

Canada Barrel and Keg was founded in 1872 by Karl Mueller in Waterloo as Mueller Cooperage. Later in 1914, it was incorporated after his son John Charles inherited the business and renamed it Charles Mueller Cooperage. In 1920, it was sold to the Seagram family, who then changed its name to Canada Barrels and Kegs.

First, the plant made the “tie buster” heel-jointed stick in 1932. One year later, they produced the “Mic Mac” stick, the “Red Flash” stick, and many others. Hespeler also produced spliced sticks in 1926, 1927 and 1933. Although the Great Depression hurt, the Hespeler Wood Specialty pushed through, and in 1935 it changed the name to Hespeler-St. Mary’s Wood Specialty Ltd. By that point, the company was producing 20 different hockey sticks, 10 high-grade hickory, axe and sledge handles, as well as 29 ball bat models. The bats cost $3 apiece, and they were distributed all across Canada, as far as Vancouver.

But make no mistake – Hespeler was not only on the map of the hockey-stick-making industry, it was the center of the business. All of the amalgamated companies were closed by new ownership, except for the Hespeler plant. It would continue on to be successful for decades. Sticks were made in Hespeler until 2022, when the parent company, now Roustan Hockey, relocated to Brantford, Ontario, but long before that sale and transfer to a bigger city, the community of Hespeler was forever associated with the stick-making business. 

Canada was not the only nation that had a flourishing hockey-stick-making industry operating in the late 19th century. The United States also had a stick-making business – or, at least, the arm of one – that served a growing hockey community. That business was E.B. Salyerds & Sons Ltd.

The company was named for founder Edward Burgess Salyerds, who was born in 1862 in Preston, Ontario, now known as Cambridge, Ontario. When he was just 14 years old, Salyerds began making brushes, and in 1887 he took advantage of the skyrocketing interest in hockey by putting out the Salyerds Special Hockey Stick – the first of its kind in the marketplace. Its popularity laid the foundation for the E.B. Salyerds & Sons Ltd. business, and Salyerds’ Canadian factory – which at that point was making brushes and sticks – in Preston was thriving.

Salyerds' decision to expand to the U.S. directly benefited Avoca, N.Y., a village southeast of Buffalo, when a stick-making plant was constructed there. Avoca was first settled in 1794, prior to which, it was occupied by Seneca Indians. The town itself was founded – and comprised of four smaller towns (Bath, Cohocton, Howard and Wheeler) – in 1843. Avoca is approximately 36.3 square miles in size, and the Cohocton River runs through it. In 2010, the U.S. census pegged its population at 2,264.

Back in 1901, Salyerds posted an advertisement in The Galt (Ontario) Reporter. The ad read, “E.B. Salyerds Preston, Ontario. Manufacturers of The Salyerds Hockey Sticks. They are made of rock elm and are the best on the market.” By 1908, Salyerds’ factory in Preston – two stories high, made of brick and located on the corners of Water and Hamilton streets – and Avoca were cranking out very popular stick brands, including Midget and “Kiddo” sticks, and at least 17 employees were working in the Preston plant. E.B. Salyerds died in 1935 and was buried in his hometown of Preston. But one year earlier, on July 9, 1934, E.B. Salyerds & Sons Ltd. was sold to conglomerate business Waterloo Wood Products Ltd. for $40,000. At that price, it was the second-most lucrative hockey stick maker on the planet, and the sole hockey-stick-maker to have operations in both Canada and America.

Waterloo Wood Products, which purchased five hockey-stick-making businesses in a four-year period, folded up the two E.B. Salyerds plants and consolidated operations in Hespeler, Ontario. Salyerds’ employees, and its plant manager, relocated to Hespeler to work at the sole remaining plant.

The Salyerds stick-making company wasn’t the biggest of its kind, but its transnational growth was crucial to the development of the sport in northern New York and the U.S. in general. Like the stick-makers that had come before it, Salyerds didn’t start out as a stick-making business, but ultimately it became at least as famous for its sticks than anything else it ever made. And hockey fans in America and Canada paid considerable money to purchase its products. 

The last major hockey stick manufacturer in the earliest days of the industry was Montreal-based McNiece and Orchard. Founder Ozias 'Ossie' McNiece, born in Pembroke, Ontario, in 1870, moved to Montreal after his father died in November of 1884, and while McNiece did play for the mighty Montreal Crystals in the 1890s, his job was as a clerk, and he was listed in the 1901 Census as a machinist. He established a bicycle repairing business in the late 1890s, but the McNiece and Orchard company started in 1890 when McNiece made the sticks for his Crystals teammates when they won the 1887 ACHA championship.

Situated at 774 St. Catherine Street West in Montreal, McNiece and Orchard was an athletic outfitter that also had a location in Rouses Point – a small city in the northernmost part of New York State, and a city named for a famous French-Canadian soldier who fought on the same side as Americans in their war of independence. On the American side, Rouses Point was an incorporated village as of 1877, and the population of the area came in at approximately 2,000 as of 1892. Being on the frontlines of a cross-border operation gave McNiece and Orchard great opportunity, but it wasn’t only a retail, mud-and-brick-stores brand, also selling its wares via a catalog component of the business.

In 1915, for example, the McNiece and Orchard annual catalog sold “Extra Special” hockey sticks, and had in it a picture of the 1912-13 Quebec Bulldogs – a team that would twice win the Stanley Cup in the National Hockey Association, the precursor league to the NHL – with the straightforward advertising caption, “This club uses our goods.” But that wasn’t the only championship team McNiece and Orchard made sticks for. The 1898 Montreal Victorias, the 1900 Montreal Shamrocks and the 1906 Montreal Wanderers used them as well. Stars of the day who used McNiece & Orchard sticks included legendary goalie George Vezina, “Newsy” Lalonde, Sprague Cleghorn, Lester Patrick and Frank McGee.

In a December 6, 1909, Montreal Gazette article titled “Particular about sticks,” McNiece discussed his process of making custom sticks. “Players today are not satisfied with a stock stick,” McNiece said. “It must be made to suit their own particular wiles. In fact, turning out sticks for senior hockey men today follows more the line of the custom tailor. That is the best illustration I can give of the matter. They come in here and they pick out their own wood in the rough, explain their requirements, and I fashion the stick to meet their demands. After they have used it they leave it with me as a pattern. Thus it is you see so many old sticks laying around the shop.”

“So far as my experience goes, and it has been rather extensive, I have arrived at the conclusion that second-growth rock elm is the proper thing,” McNiece continued. “It is strong, tough and durable, and combines the necessary element of lightness, besides lending itself to a beautiful finish. I have tried ash, maple, birch, and several other varieties, and while all of them have certain redeeming qualities, none of them furnish the combination found in rock elm, which when cut at the proper time and properly dried makes the ideal hockey stick. There is not a plentiful supply of this wood on the market, but the best players demand superior quality, and are willing to pay high prices for high class goods.”

McNiece and Orchard continued to thrive in the early turn of the 20th century, to the point the company became a supplier of sticks for the Montreal Canadiens for decades. The company had ingenuity as well. For instance, in 1914, it was the creator of the modern, paddle-style goaltender’s stick. And iconic early NHL star Eddie Shore also used its sticks. The company made a name for itself by selling sticks, usually for $1 apiece, but was especially proud of its NHL connection and would often make customized sticks if you were willing to pay enough for it. Thousands of eastern-region Canadians, as well as New Yorkers, saw McNiece and Orchard as a sports status symbol.

That said, the company also suffered through the Great Depression, so when Waterloo Wood Products Ltd. – owned by a company whose chief investors included the Seagram family – came calling to purchase McNiece and Orchard on September 15, 1932, there was no fight among the company’s longtime owners to hang onto it. McNiece and Orchard sold for $13,000, the smallest amount of any of the five stick-making companies purchased by Waterloo Wood Products, but it gave the company a competitive advantage in the Quebec and New York marketplaces. Like three of the other four locations, its factory ceased operations, and its skilled labor relocated to Hespeler, where the business remained until 2022, when it moved to Brantford.

McNiece died on April 14, 1917, in Montreal. Management of the McNiece and Orchard store was carried on by his brothers, John McNiece (1872-1921) and James McNiece (1875-1950). 

Once the five major hockey stick-making companies were acquired by what was known at the time as Waterloo Wood Products – a division of new company Canada Barrels and Keg, which was owned by the Seagrams family – by 1934, focus on the growth of the business zeroed in on a centralized production plant in Hespeler, Ontario.

Joseph Emm 'Joe' Seagram, the son of English immigrants, was born at Fisher Mills, Waterloo County, near what became the village (and later, the town) of Hespeler in 1841. He came to know and work for the pioneer Jacob Hespeler, for whom the community was named. Working as a miller, Seagram was invited to move to Waterloo in the mid-1860s to manage the interests of William Hespeler (Jacob’s brother) in Granite Mills, a mill and distillery William owned in partnership – first with George Randall, and later, with Randall and William Roos.

Seagram married Stephanie Erb, a niece of Jacob and William Hespeler, and over time bought out the partners, beginning with William Hespeler in 1870 and ending with Roos in 1883, after which Seagram had created full control and started a family. (A family of Seagrams but also of Hespeler descendants, incidentally.) Joe Seagram, aged 78, died on August 18, 1919, in Waterloo after a long illness.

Edward Frowde Seagram (1873-1937) was the oldest of Joseph’s four sons. He took over the firm after Joseph’s death in 1919, but he’s been credited with having introduced hockey to Berlin, Ontario (now Kitchener) and Waterloo in the early 1890s. He began working for his father’s business in 1894 and was named the captain of Berlin’s organized hockey team in 1895-96.

In the May 25, 1951 edition of the Victoria Daily Times, writer Jim Coleman reported about the local origins of the sport, crediting Ed Seagram as the man who introduced hockey to Kitchener. Seagram learned the game at college and taught it to his Kitchener friends on a neighboring pond.”

Montreal Star sports columnist Andy O’Brien wrote in the newspaper’s January 13, 1956 edition that “hockey came to Kitchener – then Berlin but renamed during World War I – when Ed Seagram…brought some sticks home with him from college. By 1893 hockey was organized. Soon local fans were filling special trains on jaunts to Toronto and Kingston.”

In 1897, Berlin, Ontario, won the first Ontario Hockey Association intermediate championship, defeating Kingston 3-0 in the final. Ed Seagram played left wing, assisted on the game’s second goal, and scored the third. “Ed Seagram played the game of his life,” according to a report in the Feb. 18, 1897 edition of The Globe. Berlin went on to play a Montreal team for the Canadian championship but lost 6-1.

Ed took something away from the loss to Montreal. In December of 1897, the Berlin News-Record reported that he spent time in that city, “trying to induce hockeyists to go to Waterloo, work in papa’s distillery and play the game when called upon.” This served him well in later years when he owned and operated Waterloo’s first and only pro hockey team and had to hire players from outside his home base.

In 1898, the Seagram’s team, now based in Waterloo and clad in yellow and black sweaters – the distillery’s colors, which they also used on their racehorses – repeated as OHA champions, defeating Listowel 10-4 in the final. However, the team was disqualified after it emerged that a team member participated in a skating race for money.

Two years later, Norman Seagram joined his older brothers on the Waterloo team. And in 1906-07, Ed Seagram was elected to two terms as Waterloo’s mayor. His father, a one-time city councillor, was the Member of Parliament for Waterloo North from 1896-1908. But by 1909-10, Ed owned a share of Waterloo’s team in the Ontario Professional Hockey League – a.k.a. the Trolley League, due to the proximity of its clubs to one another – and managed the team The Trolley league’s inception came in 1907, and Waterloo entered the league in 1909-10. Future Hockey Hall of Famer Joe Malone made his pro debut with Waterloo that season.

In 1911, the Waterloo team and the OPHL folded. Before the league and team shut down, the OPHL’s champions made four unsuccessful challenges for the Stanley Cup; – the last one, in March of 1911, came from Galt, Ontario after defeating Waterloo in a single-game playoff.

After Joe Seagram died, three of his four sons were the executors and main beneficiaries of his $4-million Estate as of 1920. Edward Seagram received 5,100 shares in the distillery and became president, while Norman received 2,948 shares and Thomas received 1,948 shares. Joseph Seagram Jr., the second oldest son, appears to have been disinherited, as he wasn’t mentioned in newspaper reports of the terms of the estate.

In 1921, the Daily Record chronicled the terms of Seagram’s recent takeover and reorganization of the Charles Mueller Company, a.k.a. the Mueller Cooperage. It was renamed and incorporated as Canada Barrel and Keg Ltd. Leo Henhoeffer, who was managing the cooperage on behalf of the Mueller family since the death of J. Charles Mueller in 1916, remained with the new company as general manager and secretary-treasurer. Edward Seagram became the company’s president; Thomas Seagram became first vice-president, and Norman Seagram became second VP. The company remained under Seagram management even after the takeover by Bronfman, right up until it was sold in 1974.

As of 1928, Campbell Seagram, son of Edward Seagram, became a hockey player of some renown. He led the Kitchener Greenshirts team to the OHA senior championship this year. The team advanced to the final of the Eastern Canadian playdowns for the Allan Cup, reaffirming the family’s connection to the sport. The same year, control of Joseph E. Seagram & Sons Ltd. was acquired in a merger with Distillers Corporation, with the new entity (named Distillers Corporation-Seagram) and Ed Seagram remaining president of Joseph E. Seagram & Sons.

On February 1, 1937, Edward Seagram died in Toronto from complications of a stomach ulcer. He was succeeded as president of Joseph E. Seagram & Sons by his eldest son, Joseph Edward Frowde Seagram. Following Ed Seagram’s death, his youngest brother, Thomas William (Tom) Seagram, took over running Canada Barrels & Keg Ltd. Tom Seagram was born on October 25, 1887, in Waterloo, and served in the Canadian army during World War I after assuming an active role in the family businesses; he listed his occupation as “distiller” when he got married in 1913 and again when he joined the army in 1916.

Tom Seagram played hockey – cover point with Waterloo intermediates (1911-12), left defense and secretary of 118th Battalion (1916-17). And Frowde Seagram was a town councillor in Waterloo in 1929, 1930 and 1931. As a councillor, he played for a Waterloo team that took on a Kitchener council team in a November 1931 benefit game for the Twin City Relief Fund.

In 1942, a promotional booklet was published by Canada Barrels & Keg to mark seven decades since the founding of the Mueller Cooperage. At the time, Tom Seagram was listed as company president and director, while Leo Henhoeffer, who managed the firm for the Mueller family after 1916 and stayed after Seagrams bought it, served as secretary and managing director. Other officers included Norman Seagram (first vice-president), J.E. Frowde Seagram (second vice-president and treasurer), and Campbell Seagram (director). This is noteworthy because although Sam Bronfman was the head of the parent company, Distillers Corporation-Seagrams Ltd., he left the Seagrams alone to run this operation (and, ostensibly, also Hespeler St. Marys Wood Specialties, which was a subsidiary of Canada Barrels).

Tom Seagram died October 1, 1965, with his obituary published the October 4 edition of the Montreal Gazette. Tom’s son, Thomas Blair Seagram, was a vice-president of Hespeler St. Marys Wood Specialties as early as 1962; control of that company and Canada Barrel passed not to him but to his cousin, Tom Sr.’s nephew Joseph Edward Frowde Seagram, better known as J.E. Frowde Seagram. Frowde was born August 11, 1903, in Waterloo, the eldest of Ed Seagram’s four sons who survived to adulthood. He’d worked with Canada Barrels & Kegs since 1924 when he began working as a purchasing agent. He was appointed the company’s treasurer in 1928. Beginning in 1937, Frowde’s main role was the presidency of Joseph E. Seagram & Sons, although he was also named a director of Distillers Corp.-Seagrams in 1945. It is presumed he took over running Canada Barrels and Hespeler-St. Marys in 1965.

Edward Pollard Seagram – the 93-year-old last surviving son of Edward Frowde Seagram and the last surviving grandchild of Joseph Emm Seagram – never met his grandfather, but he retains vivid memories of his father.

Although there were reports to the contrary, businessman Sam Bronfman did not leave the Seagrams family to run Canada Barrels and Kegs. He did not also take over CB&K, and the Seagrams continued to own and operate it until selling it in 1974. They did sell the Hespeler St. Marys Wood Specialties subsidiary in 1972. But this clearly lays out the ownership structure – Hespeler St-Marys wasn’t a third-or-fourth-level subsidiary of Distillers Corp.-Seagrams, and the Bronfman clan played no role in its operation or management at any time.)

“What happened was, we refused to sell to the Bronfmans, pure and simple,” said Dr. Geoff Seagram in 2023. “When he came into the office, he went out just about as fast as he came in…because he was a bootlegger. (The Distillery) was sold to Distillers Corporation in England, and the Bronfmans then bought controlling interest in Distillers Corporation.”

Dr. Geoff Seagram, 86, is the grandchild of E.F. Seagram and the son of J.E. Frowde Seagram, E.F.’s oldest son, and is Edward P’s nephew.

“The only thing I can think of is that my grandfather and most of us Seagrams were very athletic and competitive, and it doesn’t surprise me that he would like to manufacture athletic equipment,” Geoff Seagram said. “Perhaps he had some ideas regarding the manufacturing of hockey sticks which would give the players some competitive advantage and hence make his sticks the ones to buy.

“We all liked to compete and had a good play-to-work ratio, something which I think a lot of individuals never achieve. At the age of 86 I still volunteer to coach tennis. My Uncle Ed still golfs at 94 and shoots his age.”

After E.F. died in 1937, Frowde became the head (figurehead, really) of the distillery and his brother Tom took over Canada Barrels and Kegs/Hespeler St. Marys. Tom was the head of those interests until he died in 1965. His son Tom Jr. was heavily involved in that operation and was being groomed to take over, but multiple health issues – multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, and a series of strokes – prevented that from happening. Frowde then took over CB&K/HSM after Tom Sr. died.

Geoff Seagram confirmed the family was not interested in retaining the distillery during Prohibition because of the criminal aspects. E.F. “got threatening letters from a lot of people. Al Capone wanted him to join up with him . . . he used to travel with Pinkerton detectives, two guys with guns, because of the threatening letters he had.”

Karen VandenBrink, manager of the City of Waterloo Museum, is keenly aware of the Seagrams family legacy on both the city itself and the sport.

“The legacy that the family did leave here in Waterloo, philanthropy was first and foremost here,” VandenBrink said in 2023. “It wasn’t just about being successful industrialists, but it was also to make a better community and leave behind a better community here in Waterloo Region – Waterloo specifically.”

Vandenbrink noted that Joseph E. Seagram donated the land at the border of Kitchener-Waterloo where the Kitchener-Waterloo Hospital (now called Grand River Hospital – KW Campus) still stands. Also, after he passed away, his family home became an orphanage.

“The Seagram legacy is well beyond producing whisky here and sadly is often overshadowed by the fact that when the Bronfmans did take over the company, they did keep the Seagram name and they did keep Frowde Seagram as part of their board,” VandenBrink said. “But so much of it is always told through the lens of what the Bronfmans did for the industry. But the family here was far more than just a whisky distillery here in Uptown Waterloo.”

Vandenbrink speculated as to why E.F. Seagram wanted to consolidate the local hockey stick manufacturing business:

“It was that time period when they started to get out of horse racing. The sons weren’t as invested in the horse racing as their dad was. And then they were like, okay, let’s diversify the family corporate portfolio and how do we build it? How do we do it? They were all big sports fans. There was an enjoyment of that competition that they all grew up with.”

During Frowde’s time as president, Hespeler-St. Marys was sold to Cooper in 1972. He oversaw the eventual sale of Canbar in 1974 before his death in 1979. Frowde is alleged to have been responsible for the burning of Canbar company documents following his passing, having decreed it beforehand, but no Seagrams family member could confirm that rumor.

Situated on Sheffield Street, the Hespeler stick-making plant took advantage of the city’s growing population, which was pegged at 1,200 ten years after its inception as a village in 1589. It also would go on to produce world-class baseball bats that would be used by major league baseball stars Tony Fernandez, Paul Molitor, Joe Carter, and Tim Raines.

The village/town of Hespeler was named for Jacob, an early settler, meaning he is also the primary namesake of our long-time factory and of the hockey sticks made there. William co-founded the mill that eventually became Joseph E. Seagram & Sons Ltd. Joseph knew and worked with both Hespelers. Jacob was born in 1811 in Germany, and he first made his mark in Canada when he settled in Preston, Ontario, where he built a grist mill, a distillery, and mercantile store. He was the captain of the community’s fire brigade and its postmaster.

Preston’s development forced Jacob to relocate, as he sought to expand his mill but Could not do so. He began buying land in and around a nearby hamlet called New Hope. The hamlet grew and developed, with Jacob proving so influential that when the community incorporated as a village in 1858, the name New Hope gave way to Hespeler. Fittingly, Jacob served as its first reeve as he had earlier done in Preston. He died in 1881 and is buried in Hespeler.

Jacob’s younger brother William Hespeler, also a native of Germany, was born in around 1830 and came to Canada to work with Jacob in Preston. It was he who co-founded Granite Mills in Waterloo in 1857 with George Randall, an associate of Jacob. William brought Joseph Seagram into that business to look after his interests while he temporarily returned to Germany, and Seagram eventually entered the partnership by buying out William’s share of the company. By 1883, he owned the entire operation. William emigrated to the Canadian West and enjoyed a long, successful career there.

The Hespeler plant came to be regarded as what the city was regarded for: well-made hockey sticks and baseball bats. And it did sufficient business to please the Waterloo Wood Products owners – largely, the Seagram family famous for its success in the distillery and horse racing industries. Once they arrived in their new workplace, the former St. Marys Wood Specialties/new Hespeler employees were impressed by the production capabilities they’d seen at the Hespeler factory.

A huge exhaust plume was located on the top of the factory, a sign that massive amounts of energy were being used. Wayne Fischer, president of the Ontario Steam Heritage Museum, told the Waterloo Region Record in 2020 the plant had to generate power for itself to run the machines, and the exhaust was the result of a 250-horsepower steam engine with a 10-ton flywheel. Steam was necessary to drive the engine, and it came from a boiler that worked on burned scrap wood and sawdust. Right now, it sits in the Ontario Steam Heritage Museum, in nearby Puslinch, Ontario, where it is in the process of being restored to its original working condition.

Not long after Waterloo Wood Products took over the five Ontario stick-making companies, it changed its name again. The date of the change was January 7, 1935, and the new name of the business was Hespeler-St. Marys Wood Specialties Ltd. Immediately, the newly named company continued to churn out elite-quality sticks and bats.

One of those sticks was used by iconic Montreal Canadiens superstar center Howie Morenz. It lasted throughout the decades – and although it did not have any knob on the upper end when a hockey fanatic put it up for sale in 2017, it still had its original tape blade. And it generated much interest. Vintage sticks have been known to sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. For instance, a handmade stick carved out of one piece of sugar maple wood between 1835 and 1838 was purchased for $300,000 in 2015.

For the 36 1/2 years that followed the company’s name change, Hespeler-St. Marys would lead the stick-making industry. It also offered job opportunities for women: office manager Doris Krueger worked in her position at Hespeler-St. Marys from 1944 to 1974. Other employees of the company served for decades – some, for nearly a half-century – in their roles. Working there was a family affair for multiple generations. On occasion, sticks were produced under other names for major manufacturers such as Spalding and for the Canada-wide-famous Eaton’s catalog. And as the years passed, the strength of the Hespeler-St. Marys brand only grew. The different sticks – branded as “Green Flash,” “Blue Flash” and “Mic-Mac” – were huge commercial successes for Hespeler-St. Marys.

The evolution of the hockey sticks also continued during the Hespeler-St. Marys era.

Where original models of sticks were one-piece models, with blades carved from the roots of trees, NHL players who used them wanted more flexibility. Two-piece and three-piece models soon arrived, and a mortise joint held the stick blade in place. In addition, industrial glues were used to bond the heel of the stick.

The Hespeler-St. Marys brand was a best-seller up until the 1960s when it was challenged by Quebec stick-makers Sher-Wood and Victoriaville. Hespeler-St. Marys advertised itself as “The World’s Oldest Hockey Stick Manufacturers,” but competition cut into its financial bottom line. After the death of Samuel Bronfman in 1971, his son Edgar took over the business for Cemp Investments, which was set up by Samuel and named after his three children, Charles, Edgar, Aileen 'Minda,' and Phyllis. And on July 5, 1972, Hespeler-St. Marys Wood Specialties Ltd. was sold to Cooper Canada.

Prior to its foray into the stick-making business, the Cooper company, under the name Cooper Weeks – an amalgamation of its founders’ names, Jack Cooper and Cecil Weeks – had earned its chops in the marketplace making ski and snowshoe harness sets, as well as hockey shin guards and gloves. In 1969, the company introduced the plastic hockey stick replacement blade to the market, mainly for use in road hockey games. After Jack Cooper bought out his partner, he renamed the company Cooper Canada on June 15, 1971.

But Cooper Canada (renamed as such on June 15, 1971) had much bigger aspirations for its line of hockey products – aspirations that would carry it at the top of the industry for nearly 15 years as both it and the rest of the business were branching out across the planet. 

In its heyday – the two decades between 1960 and 1980 – Cooper Canada was Canada’s leading manufacturer of hockey and lacrosse equipment, as well as baseball gloves. In the approximate middle of that span, it took over as the main maker of hockey sticks. But before we get to that point, let’s take time to detail Cooper’s evolution as a company.

The genesis of the eventual Cooper brand began in 1905 when Scottish-Canadian businessman R.H. Cameron founded General Leather Goods. His nephew, Cecil John Weeks, began working with him, and in 1949 Weeks and another key figure, Jack Cooper – who joined the General Leather Goods company of 15 people in 1932 – partnered up to purchase the company from Cameron.

Prior to that change in ownership, the company made its name building ski and snowshoe harnesses, and during the Great Depression it began making hockey shin guards in 1933 and hockey gloves in 1935. After the sale, the business was rebranded “Cooper Weeks,” and it expanded dramatically while building its credibility through a working relationship with members of the professional hockey community. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Cooper Weeks joined forces with Frank Selke, then the manager of the Montreal Canadiens, to lighten the weight and improve the safety and durability of hockey equipment, and in 1969 Cooper Weeks introduced the first plastic hockey stick replacement blade used primarily in road hockey.

As it grew, Cooper Weeks continued to branch out into new areas of the hockey industry. Cooper worked with its customers to lead the way in areas such as goaltenders’ throat protection and pro lacrosse equipment. It was a pioneer of sorts in the 1970s when it worked with athletes, including former NHL goalie Dave Dryden – brother of goalie icon Ken Dryden – to make the best possible protective equipment for players.

As a widely supported business, Cooper Weeks attracted significant corporate attention, and in the early 1970s, a massive change took place when Cecil Weeks sold his share of the business to John Cooper. On June 17, 1971, Cooper Weeks was renamed Cooper of Canada. And a little more than one year later, Cooper purchased hockey stick and baseball bat maker Hespeler-St. Marys Wood Specialties Ltd. from the famous Seagram company.

For the following 15 years, Cooper, based in Toronto, flourished as the primary hockey stick-making company in North America. And although many of its products were the gold standard for the stick-making business, Cooper’s willingness to try new things blew up in its face on one particular product: they were called “Cooperalls,” and they were a streamlined hockey pant and girdle that became trendy, in some areas, at least, before a backlash came about.

The flashy Cooperalls were first used in the OHL in the late 1970s and then were tested by a handful of NHL teams, including the Winnipeg Jets and Quebec Nordiques, in their training camp workouts. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, CCM, the hockey rival of Cooper, paid tribute by putting out its own style of long pants and girdle, one that was used in two NHL seasons by the Philadelphia Flyers (1981-82 and 1982-83) and in one season by the Hartford Whalers (1982-83). The Cooperalls design did not have any lasting power in hockey, but it did gain traction in Canadian ringette and broomball, and those sports continue to use that brand and design today.

While the hockey stick arm of the company continued to thrive, Cooper Canada got a huge boost on March 27, 1986, when MLB approved Cooper bats for use in their game, making them the first Canadian manufacturer of bats to get that green light. Eventually, Cooper bats made in Hespeler, Ontario, were used by many baseball stars, including Tim Raines, Paul Molitor, Joe Carter, Hubie Brooks, Tony Fernandez, Kelly Gruber,

Cecil Fielder and Jesse Barfield. Cooper’s Hespeler factory pushed its production capabilities to give them a 30 percent market share of baseball bat sales by 1988, second only to the Louisville Slugger brand.

On May 13, 1987, however, Cooper Canada was purchased by Montreal-based Charan Industries for approximately $36 million. One year earlier, Cooper claimed a profit of $1.4 million based on sales of $80.5 million. Charan, which also made toys and stationery prior to acquiring Cooper, claimed $6 million in profit that same year on sales of $75 million. Although Jack Cooper’s time running the stick-and-equipment leviathan was at an end decades after it began, his impact on the business was huge, and in 1989 he was honored with admission into the Canadian Business Hall of Fame.

Charan Industries survived for two decades before dissolving on March 1, 2000. But well before that, back in February 1990, Charan sold its Cooper brand to Canstar Inc., the parent company of Bauer Hockey.

At that point, Canstar’s stable of brands included Bauer, Lange, Mega, Daoust and Micron skates, as well as Cooper and Flak equipment and Bauer inline skates. Canstar bragged that about 70 percent of NHLers wore one brand of Canstar skates or another. And within five years of purchasing the company from Cooper, Canstar sold all hockey assets of Cooper Canada to global sporting goods giant Nike Inc. for approximately $395 million.

The founder of Bauer, Roy Charles Bauer, was born November 4, 1895, in Elmwood, Bentinck Township, Grey County. He died May 13, 1989, in St. Jacobs, Woolwich Township, Waterloo Region. Bauer bought the Western Shoe Company from George Killer (yes, that’s his real name – his 1928 obituary in the Kitchener paper was entitled, “George Killer Is Called By Death”) in 1925 and operated it with his own Bauer Shoe Company. Western Shoe had started in 1906.

Roy Bauer had the idea to permanently affix skate blades to boots starting in 1930. His future son-in-law Bobby Bauer, who married Roy’s daughter, Marguerite, helped to popularize Bauer Skates in the NHL when he was promoted to the Boston Bruins in 1937. He, his sons Gerald and Donald, and his son-in-law successfully operated their enterprises (the Western Shoe Company, the Canada Skate Manufacturing Company, Bauer Shoe Company, and Bauer Canadian Skate Inc.) until selling out to Greb in November 1965. Several years prior to that, Bauer had expanded to the US by contracting with boot manufacturers there.

Gerry and Don Bauer remained with the company for the long term, with Don in charge of marketing and Gerry in charge of skate manufacturing until 1969. Don was responsible for Bauer sales until his retirement in 2016. It was under Don’s direction that Bauer became the official skate of the NHL in 1970. He would have been part of the company braintrust that established the relationship between Bauer skates and the revolutionary Tuuk blades in 1977-1978.

Don’s hockey potential was recognized by an invitation to attend the Toronto Maple Leafs Training Camp at the young age of 16 years. This was followed by several years with the Allen Cup Champion KW Dutchmen, Canada’s representative in the 1956 Olympics. In his late teens, Don Bauer joined the family business, Bauer Skates. 

During a 32-year career at Bauer Skates, he was the driving force in transforming the company into the Global Leader in Hockey Skates. Don was instrumental in Bauer’s entry into the United States market and, later, its expansion into European and Asian markets. He spearheaded a variety of product innovations that transformed Bauer into a technology leader. His signing of endorsement contracts with marquee hockey players further contributed to elevating the Bauer brand to the market leadership position it enjoys today.

Bauer’s companies made a wide range of sportswear, including roller skates, football, soccer, baseball and bowling shoes. He remained president of all four Bauer Companies until he sold them to Greb Shoes in 1965. Greb sold the business to Warrington Inc. in 1974. The company continues to make skates as well as hockey shoulder and pant protection.

In addition to his two sons, R.C. Bauer is survived by his three daughters, Ruth Sidney of Kalamazoo, Michigan; Joan Brennan of Ventura, California; and Dorothey Hannah of Santa Barbara, California. 

When it bought the company, Nike paid Canstar $19.875 for each share in the business – some 60 percent higher than the market price. In 1994, the year of its sale, Canstar projected its hockey- business sales to be in the area of $205 million, a 41 percent boost from 1993. That said, Nike was already doing mammoth business across the planet, earning some $43.9 billion in a single year prior to the sale. The hockey side of the business was important, but it wasn’t what Nike was banking on to keep it at the forefront of the industry.

Indeed, less than a decade after it was sold by Canstar, the hockey arm of Nike would undergo two name changes, and in 2004, they would sell off what was Waterloo Wood Products to a group of employees (who in 2019 sold it to W. Graeme Roustan) and then sell off the remaining Bauer and Cooper assets to W. Roustan and his partner in 2008 at a tumultuous time for the sport and the hockey equipment-making industry in general.

As the hockey stick-making business moved into the modern age, arguably the planet’s biggest sports apparel and equipment maker, Nike Inc., decided to buy into the market in a massive way. In December of 1994, Nike purchased the hockey assets of Cooper Canada (via parent company Canstar) for approximately $395 million. That may sound like a huge sum of money, but considering Nike had made approximately $43.9 billion in the year before the purchase of Cooper, it was a relatively small investment. Cooper had projected its 1994 hockey sales to be $205 million, so the investment wasn’t going to be repaid right away, but Nike believed it was acquiring a brand in Bauer that would only improve its global footprint.

When Nike announced the purchase, the Beaverton, Oregon-based company revealed Canstar would become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Nike, but it would keep its separate identities. And Canstar was an attractive investment in part because of its wide array of products. At the time of Nike’s acquisition, Canstar had more than 1,700 hockey items for sale. In addition to sticks, it sold hockey skates under the Bauer, Daoust, Lange, Mega and Micron brand names; it made hockey protective equipment under the Cooper and Flak brands. It sold skate blades under the ICM, John Wilson and Tuuk brands and it made in-line roller skates and protective gear under the Bauer brand. At the time of the sale to Nike, more than 70 percent of NHL players were wearing Canstar-branded skates. In four years of operating the hockey businesses, Canstar had developed a strong distribution system in North America, but Nike’s reach aimed to extend it through Europe and bolster the brands across the planet.

That said, once it did take over the Canstar/Cooper businesses, Nike quickly learned the hockey stick-and-equipment industry was like all businesses, in that it was not guaranteed a profit.

Still, at the time Nike purchased Canstar/Cooper, Nike C.E.O. Phil Knight was quoted as saying he believed hockey was North America’s fourth-most culturally-significant sport, and he wanted Nike to capitalize, in part, on the growth of inline hockey. However, the financial waters for Nike in the hockey business became choppy enough for them that it triggered their exit from it one decade after it purchased Canstar.

Two years after that purchase, in June of 1996, the name of Nike’s hockey division was changed to Bauer Inc. Two years subsequent to that name change, in December of 1998, a new business was formed: Bauer Nike Hockey Inc. was the new name of the company that took the place of Canstar’s hockey properties. The famous stick-making plant in Hespeler continued churning out sticks, but the flatlining of growth in the rollerblade business hurt Nike’s bottom line, and the hockey business did not approach the $1 billion plateau some industry analysts had forecasted it would. A change in strategy would be necessary in a relatively short period of time.

Indeed, prices were relatively high for many products, a strategy that some hockey equipment executives accurately projected would limit the overall hockey market and keep it as a niche sport. To wit, in April of 1997, Nike ice skates appeared on the market at prices ranging from $220-425. (Some 10 years later, Nike’s premium skates were selling for $750 per pair.) In the same era, a pair of padded nylon hockey pants went for $170. Synthetic gloves retailed for $120-170. And hockey sticks, now composed of materials ranging from aircraft aluminum to graphite and bullet-proof Kevlar, sold for between $40-100. It was not at all cheap for families to fund their hockey dreams.

Meanwhile, the popularity of in-line skating dropped from 32 million participants in 1998 to 17 million six years later. Competition on the hockey side was fierce and varied, and cost-cutting and contraction became part of Nike’s business plan with the hockey division. The firm's skate and helmet plant in St. Jerome, Quebec, just north of Montreal, was downsized in three phases, and they moved production to Asia. And in 2003, Nike Bauer announced it would be shuttering its stick-making factory in Hespeler the following year. However, it proved to be a brief closure.

In a matter of weeks, in June of 2004, a new era began for the old Hespeler-St. Marys Wood Specialties Limited Hespeler plant. It was the first time that a group of the plant’s longtime employees stepped up, formed a new business named Heritage Wood Specialties Inc., and bought out the hockey stick-making plant.

With the businesses that remained under Nike’s umbrella, Nike Bauer would outsource roughly 90 percent of its production to other makers in Asia. From 2002 to 2008, its chief competitor, Reebok-CCM, closed five plants in Quebec and Ontario, outsourcing manufacturing to other countries, eliminating some 600 jobs. The Easton and Warrior hockey companies outsourced part of their manufacturing to Asia and retained their factories in Mexico. The retraction in the business was only growing. And in the post-Nike-ownership era, the stick-making employees had to put up their own money as well as borrow funds from Canadian investor Mark Fackoury to keep the business in Hespeler afloat.

Meanwhile, in 2008, four years after Heritage Wood Specialties Inc. was formed, Montreal native and fervent hockey fan W. Graeme Roustan along with a partner purchased the remainder of Nike’s hockey division for approximately $200 million and he became its new Chairman. That was less than half of what Nike paid for it. But there was already a sense the overall stick-making market was pushing toward a “last-man standing” scenario in Canada and the USA, with one company eventually taking over more or less the entire hockey stick manufacturing business, and Roustan recognized that direction and saw an opportunity for a rebound and a return to growth for the industry.

And Nike, which wanted to get out of the manufacturing elements of the business in order to focus on growth industries with the highest financial returns, no longer had the willingness to continue taking on the challenges. It eventually found in Roustan, the best person who would shepherd Bauer in 2008 and beyond just as a handful of the Hespeler factory’s longtime employees eventually did in 2009 with Roustan.

In 2004, as it fought to persevere in the hockey stick-making industry, the Hespeler hockey stick plant – now owned by five former Nike employees backed by Canadian investor (and Hespeler-area local) Mark Fackoury – took the new name of Hespeler Wood Specialties Inc. (HWSI) in June of 2004. And the new company quickly looked to take a bigger stake in the hockey business overall. Fackoury loaned large sums of money into purchasing extremely expensive equipment from as far away as Finland, and they did purchase a plant in Finland and another in Quebec.

In 2009, the HWSI employee-ownership group were seeking out a chief financial officer with a track record of great success, and they found one in Curtis Clairmont, a veteran businessman who had thrived in high-level management as an executive at well-known convenience store chain 7-11 and former video rental goliath Blockbuster Video. Clairmont initially was hired as a consultant for HWSI in 2009 after one of the former Nike employees had sold his shares to Fackoury, but he quickly became the man entrusted with the business side of things, so that Fackoury, a very hands-off owner, and the four remaining former Nike employees could go back to what they did best.

Clairmont knew the challenges facing HWSI were serious and potentially dire. One person told him the wooden hockey stick was “going the way of the wooden tennis racket,” in other words, it was going to be extinct but he was still focused on finding a way to make the business work. And after a couple of weeks, the Kitchener-Waterloo native, a Cornell University goalie who idolized Ken Dryden in his younger days, told HWSI ownership there was indeed a business opportunity for them, but it had to be as a “last man standing” type scenario.

In that regard, the idea was for them to put their collective nose to the grindstone, and outlast their competitors. But Clairmont did not like the decision to buy the plants in Finland and Quebec. The fact that there wasn’t a guarantee of sale of sticks from Bauer, or anyone else, to purchase products from those plants was a major sticking point for Clairmont, and both the Quebec and Finnish companies were bleeding money.

As Clairmont saw it, the hockey-stick making companies dictated demand by limiting supply, an odd situation, as normally it’s consumers who dictate demand. And, in short order, he bristled at what he saw, which was that Bauer and CCM were pushing consumer demand toward their outsourced composite stick businesses. That wasn’t to HWSI’s benefit, and that was a problem that could’ve killed the Hespeler plant. So, one of Clairmont’s first moves was to sell off and close the Quebec plant, and sell off the Finland plant. They lost money on those transactions, but from Clairmont’s position, they were starting HWSI anew again, with no major debts to address. It was a fresh start.

Next up was modernizing their technologies. For example, Clairmont had to have designed and built a wraparound graphics machine, so an employee went to China, and HWSI got sufficient financial support to have the machine custom made. Another thing they were lacking in was modern graphics; they were still living in the old school world of screen art. And most, if not all HWSI employees had a dearth of experience in corporate management. Thus, many changes took place in the eight years Clairmont was steering the ship financially.

Under Clairmont’s stewardship, HWSI forged new partnerships, including one with famous brand Easton. More importantly, Clairmont had developed a customized cost process to the stick-making business, and transparency was brought to an industry that, prior to then, had very little of it. They persuaded Easton they were a better partner than Quebec-based rival Industries ACM, and they got Easton’s business.

Early on in Clairmont’s tenure with HWSI, he was dealing with financial losses, but with the Easton business acquisition, HWSI was profitable but not terribly so, but making money was a crucial turn-the-corner moment for Fackoury and the four employee-owners.

However, Clairmont noticed a disturbing trend. The influence that Bauer and CCM had on the costs and availability of most hockey-related equipment, including hockey sticks. In the early days of composite stick-making, you could pay upwards of $200 for a single stick and the big hockey equipment producers were rapidly taking lower margin wood and fiberglass sticks off the market altogether. Mark-ups on hockey sticks, for instance, were obscene. If you made a $50 hockey stick, you sold it for five times that amount. In the short-term, that was great for the manufacturer’s bottom line. But if you were looking at the macro picture, the long-term picture, you could see you were making hockey into an elitist game, and that there was going to be no long-term growth for the sport.

This was not a good harbinger of what could’ve been to come for HWSI.

On the other hand, HWSI’s competitors, slowly-but-surely, were falling by the wayside. Easton was one of the biggest names to go under, but they hardly were alone. Quebec-based Industries ACM also would go bankrupt in 2016, and Clairmont persuaded Fackoury to purchase ACM’s assets. That “last man standing” approach Clairmont had envisioned was becoming more and more of a reality for HWSI.

There were also not going to be any start-up companies to rival HWSI. When you have to pay $300,000 for a molder that did nothing other than adding a corner radius to a hockey stick, you know you’re dealing with an industry that requires massive amounts of capital for any given business to outlast its competitors, and thus, we see fewer competitors.

In 2017, Clairmont told Fackoury that HWSI had arrived at a crossroads of sorts. The company needed to invest large amounts of capital to either modernize the Hespeler plant that was built in the early 1900s or build a new factory altogether. The Hespeler factory had become a decrepit building with holes so big in its roof that it had sunshine on sunny days, rain on rainy days and snow on snowy days coming through the roof of the plant. When the facility’s elevator broke down, production ground to a complete halt, as the finishing process for sticks would be done on the second floor of the building. It was time to either move, sell or close the stick-making business.

Nobody questioned it was high time for a new stick-making plant and at that point, Claremont presented the options. Fackoury and the four former Nike employees decided it was time to sell HWSI. And the name that came up prominently was venture capitalist, past Chairman and part owner of Bauer from 2008 to 2012 and devoted hockey fan W. Graeme Roustan.

The Montreal Canadiens fan and finalist in the 2009 bidding process for the Montreal Canadiens and devotee of the sport had purchased The Hockey News in 2018, the Christian and Northland brands of hockey sticks two years sooner. By buying The Hockey News, Christian, Northland and now, HWSI, Roustan was positioning himself to have a media brand and an advertising platform as well as a hockey stick manufacturing base for his owned hockey brands. It was a fully-integrated vertical strategy, and all it needed to make Roustan’s vision for the business complete was a new factory in Canada.

Soon enough, HWSI, with one more name change to Roustan Hockey in 2019, would get its new factory in 2022 located in Brantford Ontario. And the best for the business was yet to come.

Through its history of more than 175 years dating back to 1847, the company’s heritage dates back to twenty years before Canada became a country in 1867. The business has made hockey sticks in Ontario, Quebec, the USA and Finland. It has experienced many highs and lows, and survived the Great Depression, a massive fire, and two World Wars.

From the time where five separate companies flourished in the mid-19th-century, right up until today, the resilience of the Hespeler plant has been its most defining feature. There have been many ownership and name changes to the company, but the goal remained the same: generating high-quality hockey sticks, for use both at the professional and amateur levels of the sport.

The owner who would shepherd the company into the next century, W. Graeme Roustan, had a very good idea of where he could take the business when he acquired it in 2019.

Roustan made his initial mark in the business world with successes in the finance, aviation, manufacturing, consumer products and sports and entertainment industries. The Montreal native is a noted philanthropist and avowed hockey fan, and he has experience with the hockey business dating back to his time in 2008 as chairman of the board and purchaser of Nike/Bauer. Roustan left Bauer in 2012, after he took the company public on the Toronto Stock Exchange as its Chairman. Since then he has continued to acquire hockey companies. He’s been a prominent supporter of the Canadian Women’s Hockey League throughout its existence and is a key mover and shaker behind the scenes of the hockey world as well as a member of the Canadian Olympic Committee.

Few hockey figures have worked in more elements of the sport than Roustan and whenever he saw an opportunity arise that would allow him to get more invested in the sport as a whole, Roustan never hesitated to step up and acquire more hockey businesses.

Indeed, when the Christian and Northland hockey equipment company came up for sale in 2016, Roustan moved quickly to purchase it. Two years later, The Hockey News came up for sale, and Roustan again swooped in and bought the famous magazine and brand. Then, in 2019, when the Hespeler-based Hespeler Wood Specialties Inc. (HWSI) business went on sale, Roustan again put his money where his mouth was, and added it to his growing number of hockey businesses. By buying The Hockey News, Christian, Northland and HWSI, Roustan was positioning himself to have a media brand and an advertising platform as well as a manufacturing base for hockey sticks. It was a fully-integrated vertical strategy, and all it needed to make Roustan’s vision for the business complete was a brand new factory in Canada.

The first order of business was to change its name to better reflect the hockey businesses that will become a part of its future story. Heritage Wood Specialties became Roustan Hockey.

The Hespeler plant was world-famous for its storied history, but the reality was the plant itself was no longer safe and usable. Now known as “Roustan Hockey,” HWSI needed a new home, and Roustan found it in a location in Brantford, Ontario, the birthplace of all-time hockey icon Wayne Gretzky – and Gretzky’s late father, Walter, who was a frequent visitor to the old plant – and a city that wasn’t all that far from Hespeler and just down the street from Ayr where it all started in 1847, 175 years earlier.

In 2020, Roustan invested millions of dollars in the brand-new factory, which was 65,000 square feet – twice the size of the Hespeler factory that the business had been housed in since 1921. Then, in 2022, Roustan Hockey Ltd. purchased Scarborough, Ontario’s McKenney Custom Sports, a custom hockey and lacrosse equipment manufacturer that mostly made goaltender equipment. Once again, Roustan cornered the market on an element of the game that needed the corporate support and holistic view of the hockey industry that he provided where nobody else could.

From 1921 through 2021, the Hespeler plant, along with the other plants that were part of Hespeler-St. Marys Wood Specialties Ltd. factories manufactured more than 100 million hockey sticks for hockey players. But there was no question it was time for a different direction, and keeping jobs in Canada was crucial for Roustan. He achieved that goal by moving operations to Brantford. He’d realized the company’s goal of being the “last man standing” in the marketplace, and as a result, a new era for the stick-making industry had begun.

Most of the Hespeler plant’s longtime employees – including many of the experienced employees who had helped purchase the plant to keep stick-making jobs in Canada in the early 2000s – followed their job movement to Brantford, and local politicians heartily welcomed the company and its employees to their new community.

There remain challenges for the stick-making business in Canada, but everyone involved with Roustan Hockey felt the new energy and renewed purpose Roustan brought to the table. And by the end of 2021, the move to Brantford was complete. A new era had arrived for Roustan Hockey, and although the plant had to be relocated to continue on, the alternative of shutting down the company was never a proper solution for Roustan. He believed in Canada’s love affair with the sport, and put his funds behind any available business that touched Canadians the way hockey does.

Ultimately, Roustan accurately recognized the direction the hockey industry must head towards, which is to repatriate some manufacturing from overseas, and he saw numerous opportunities for a financial rebound and a return to growth. In 2022, Canadian Tire Corporation, who shares Roustan’s vision for “Made in Canada”' hockey sticks and for the preservation of Canadian manufacturing jobs repatriated all of the Sherwood brand sticks that Roustan can make from overseas manufacturers.

From 1847, when Canada was just a colony of the United Kingdom, to the present day, hockey stick manufacturing has been in continuous business operations for more than 175 years. From Ayr Agricultural Works in 1847 to today, more than 100 million sticks have been manufactured with sales of more than $1 billion during this 175-year span which makes Roustan Hockey, hockey’s oldest business and success story.

– with files from Brian Logie