The Leader Evaporator Company is arguably the largest maple syrup equipment manufacturing and supply company in the world. Like many of the evaporator companies in the past, its beginning was small and humble. William E. Burt started the company as a tin shop under the name of W.E. Burt & Co. in 1888 in partnership with Alfred Simkins in Enosburg Falls, Vermont. Their original location was in the old Woodworth Feed Store on Railroad Street in Enosburg Falls, Vermont before moving their business to Main Street, and finally to a building on Bismark Street. They moved the company from Enosburg Falls to Burlington, Vermont in 1904.
The evaporator that W.E. Burt & Co. sold as the Improved Leader Evaporator was based on a design developed and patented by William Henry Wright and Clark Hall out of the East Farnham/Cowansville area of Quebec. Hall and Wright’s evaporator design was patented in Canada in 1888 (CA28644/CA32481) and the US in 1889 (US415653) and featured drop flues, alternating draw offs to reverse sap flows, a sap preheater, and a maze of baffles and compartments to facilitate the flow of sap to finished syrup.
In 1889, a short while after opening their doors, John A. Potter joined W.E. Burt & Co. in the hardware business, which became colloquially known as Burt & Potter. In January of 1890, a fire in downtown Enosburg Falls destroyed the W.E. Burt & Co. hardware store, as well as the home and barn of W.E. Burt. The fire appeared to have started when a stove exploded in the nearby millinery store of W.E. Burt’s wife, also located on Main Street. Numerous downtown buildings were destroyed and for a time it was thought the entire village may be lost if not for the aid of a heavy rain.
W.E. Burt and J.A. Potter may have had a difficult time recovering from the fire, since in September 1891, W.E. Burt & Co. was in court for insolvency. Sometime in 1891, the name W.E. Burt & Co. was dropped in favor of doing business as the Leader Evaporator Co., possibly related to or a result of settling the insolvency.
As the new name implies, in the 1890s, Burt focused his energies and tin works on manufacturing evaporators. In an 1894 government report of metal implement manufacturers related to the effects of tariffs on their businesses, the Leader Evaporator Company noted that its value of production was $8000 for the year of 1893. They employed two skilled men at a rate of two dollars a day, two common laborers at one dollar a day, all at sixty hours a week, and also had the assistance and time of W.E. Burt’s son. They had a number of sales agents that worked on commission. Their evaporators were manufactured from tin plate, and their sugaring off pans from Russian iron, galvanized iron, and tin plate. Leader Company arches were made of iron and their sugaring tools of tin plate.
In 1894, Burt sold the tin ware and stove portion of his business to N.A. Gilbert in Enosburg Falls and focused his energies on manufacturing maple sugaring evaporators and selling maple sugaring tools and supplies. Later that year it was reported that the Leader Evaporator Co. had outgrown its old space and W.E. Burt was building a new building fronting on Bismarck Street in Enosburg Falls.
Although the design for the main evaporator made by the Leader Evaporator Company came from the patent of two Canadian inventors, W.E. Burt and the company designed and manufactured other notable maple sugaring implements. In particular, in 1894, Burt patented his design for a sap gathering tank (US559358/CA54042) which the Leader Company manufactured and sold as the popular Monitor Gathering Tank.
It is not clear when Alfred Simkins and W.E. Burt parted ways as partners and Simkins left the company, it may have been only a year or two after they started the company together in 1888. However; by late 1896, Burt was on his own and Simkins was in court for bankruptcy. Also in 1896, W.E. Burt announced that the Leader Company was starting to sell evaporators in Canada with Julius M. Ruiter of Brome, Quebec handling sales across the border.
In the spring of 1904, the Leader Company decided it was going to relocate its factory to either Essex Junction, Vermont or Burlington, Vermont, putting the two communities in competition with one another to see which might offer the Leader Company an exemption from city taxes for ten years. A gathering of Burlington citizens was called for by the mayor and the citizens agreed to grant the exemption.
Property was purchase and on May 25, ground was broken on Battery Street, near the corner of College Street, for the construction of a 36 x 72-foot, three-story, wood-framed building, with a tin roof and brick and iron siding. Initially the company employed around twelve men but expected to increase its workforce in the coming years. Burt’s brother in law J. M. Ruiter was a key figure in the company by this time and was instrumental in ensuring a smooth process for the relocation of their facilities from Enosburg Falls to Burlington in 1904.
In April 1910, the Leader Evaporator Company was formally incorporated in the State of Vermont, with a capital stock of $100,000. Shareholders were nearly all family members, consisting of William E. Burt, his wife Tillie J. Burt, his brother in law J.M. Ruiter, his nephew A.A. Hunter, and prominent Burlington businessman and investor F.O. Sinclair.
Interestingly, five years later, Ruiter, along with shareholder, Leader employee, and fellow family member, A.A. Hunter, broke with Burt and partnered with George H. Soule in 1915 to form the Burlington Evaporator Company. The relationship with Ruiter, Hunter, and Soule was short-lived and the Burlington Evaporator Company partnership was dissolved a year later. Two years later Soule reorganized the Burlington Evaporator Company to form the George H. Soule Company.
It would appear that Hunter and Ruiter’s split from the Leader Company was probably less than amicable since the Leader Company took out ads in newspapers all over Vermont announcing to sugarmakers that Hunter and Ruiter no longer represented the Leader Company. However, in the 1920s local gossip in the newspapers indicated that the Burt, Ruiter, and Hunter families were vacationing together, so any internal family misgivings appeared to be relatively short-lived.
Leadership of the company during the period it was owned by W.E. Burt was very much a family organization. In the 1930s, letterhead for the company lists W.E. Burt as president, his son in law George E. Partridge as vice-president, his wife T.J. Burt (Matilda “Tillie” J. Burt) treasurer, and his daughter B.B. Partridge (Beth Burt Partridge) as assistant-treasurer.
Tillie Burt passed away in 1941 and W.E. Burt remarried to Lucille Roy in 1945. In September of 1955, W.E. Burt himself passed away in the hospital in Burlington, Chittenden County, Vermont at age 94. Following the death of W.E. Burt, Lucille Roy Burt continued to run the company with the assistance of longtime employee and manager Alton E. Lynde. Lynde died a few years later in 1961. Lester C. Brown followed behind Lynde as the manager of the company.
Changes in the technology of the maple industry was relatively slow and almost stagnant between the 1920s to the 1960s. Notable new inventions were portable power tappers, plastic sap collection bags, metal lithographed cans, gas burners, and eventually flexible plastic tubing for sap collection. The Leader Company of course got on board with sales of most of these products. Most notably among these was the Leader Company securing an exclusive dealership in the United States with the 3M company for the sale of their new plastic tubing called Mapleflo for the 1958 season. In time, other vendors carried the 3M tubing, but the Leader Company was out of the gate at the same time in a side-by-side race with the Lamb Plastic Tubing Company and their Naturalfow tubing.
In May of 1963 the Burlington Free Press announced that the Leader Evaporator Company was being sold and Lucille Roy Burt was stepping down from her post as president and treasurer. The purchase was led by a local group of men including Leader Company manager Lester C. Brown, who assumed the role of president, as well as Robert C. Coombs of Jacksonville, Charles E. Branon of Fairfield, and Fortis H. Abbott of Essex Junction, three well-known men in the maple industry; and Leonard O. Bombard of Burlington. Other new stockholders included Harold W. Cook of DeRuyter, NY; and W.W. Manes of East Orwell, Ohio.
The new Leader Evaporator Company stockholders wasted no time in breathing new life into the company and the following spring announced that they had purchased the George H. Soule Company and were moving the majority of their operations from their space on Battery Street in Burlington to the factory space of their newly acquired Soule Company in the Willard Building in St. Albans, Vermont.
In 1978 the Leader Company made the controversial decision to enter the can manufacturing business when it purchased the maple syrup can production arm from the Empire Can Company of Brooklyn, New York. Despite building a nearly 10,000 square foot production facility and moving equipment from New York to St. Albans, by June 1980, Leader’s can manufacturing venture was short-lived. Two years later the can making equipment was sold to Rollie Devost and the New England Can Company in Swanton, Vermont.
Over the next few decades the Leader Company continued to grow, largely through the purchase and absorption of other maple syrup equipment manufacturers. In 1972 the Leader Company purchased the Vermont Evaporator Company of Ogdensburg, New York and in October 1989 it was announced that Leader had purchased the G.H. Grimm Company of Rutland, VT. The purchase of Grimm brought Grimm’s previous purchases of Lightning Evaporator Company and its partnership with the Lamb Naturalflow Tubing Company into the Leader Company. Now the Leader Company was the undisputedly the largest maple sugaring equipment company in the world.
As a privately held company with a 120-year history, the Leader Company has had surprisingly few presidents. Beginning with William E. Burt, followed by his second wife Lucille Roy Burt, Lester C. Brown served as president from 1961 to the mid 1960s, and later Robert Bordeau served from the 1960s to 1980. For 25 years, from 1980 to 2015, Gary Gaudette led the company and in 2015 Bradley Gillilan took over the reins as president.
In 2005 the Leader Company relocated operations to an industrial park in Swanton, Vermont. In doing so, the Leader Company vacated the Willard Building in St. Albans, and the G.H. Grimm building they continued to use in Rutland, Vermont, consolidating the companies under one roof in a more expansive and modern 85,000 square-foot manufacturing and sales facility.