Evaporator Company Histories: George H. Soule

George H. Soule in the 1890s.

The George H. Soule company was one of the most important evaporator companies in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. The Soule company has its beginnings in Fairfield and then Burlington, Vermont before moving to its long-time home of St. Albans, Vermont.

George Henry Soule, the founder of the company, was born into a maple sugaring and farming family in the Fairfield area of Franklin County, Vermont in 1865.  After graduating from Goddard Seminary in 1887 in Barre, Vermont, George returned to assist his widower father with their extensive farm holdings. The Soule farm, located on South Road about three miles south of Fairfield town center, was established by George’s grandfather, Joseph A. Soule in the 1840s or 1850s. The farm included a two and a half story Greek Revival style farm house and a collection of mid-19th century barns, tin shop, and wood shed. Away from the farm center in the adjoining sugarbush were a handful of sugarhouses.

Modern view of Soule family farm on South Rd. Fairfield County, Vermont.

George especially took to the maple sugaring operations and in no time grew their sugarbush to become one of the largest in the state. As early as 1893 he had 4,500 taps feeding two sugar houses. By 1905 he had grown to around 7,000-8,000 taps with room for many more. In fact, as one of the single largest producers in New England at the time, he was widely referred to as the “Maple Sugar King,” a title he would share with the famous sugar buyer George C. Cary of St. Johnsbury.

Soule’s prominence as a maple sugar maker in the 1890s and early 1900s was illustrated by the use of his name in advertisements by two of the most important evaporator and sugaring equipment companies. The Vermont Farm Machine Company in 1897 featured a testimonial for their evaporator by Soule, including a note that his syrup had won the first-place prize that January at the Vermont Maple Sugar Makers Convention. In a 1906 advertisement, The G. H. Grimm Company noted that George H. Soule, who has the largest sugarbush in Vermont with 8,000 taps, uses the Grimm sap spout.

As a notable sugarmaker in Vermont, George Soule was active from the beginning years of the Vermont Maple Sugarmakers Association, but it was in 1910 when he was elected President of the Association that his leadership began to emerge. He was re-elected to the post for a second year in 1911.

George H. Soule’s 1913 evaporator patent design drawing (US1049935).

Soule did not only spend his time tapping trees and raising dairy cattle on his 1,100-acre farm. He also put his own ideas to work on designing and improving sugaring evaporators and other equipment. In fact, as early as 1897 he applied for an evaporator patent design (US635876) that was later assigned (sold) to the Vermont Farm Machine Company. In 1911, working from the tin shop on his farm, George improved upon his earlier design with the additions of a series of deep drop flues, a rear sap preheater, and external sap regulators. Patented in 1913 (US1049935), these design elements became the basic features of the evaporators that later formed the backbone of Soule’s evaporator company.

1916 patent design drawing for George H. Soule’s famous sap spout (US1207444).

In the next few years Soule patented a few more items, including a “sap-gathering apparatus” which was a sap collection pail and cover with a hook fixed to the cover that allowed the cover and pail to pivot or rotate on the tap while still attached to the tree, permitting the emptying of the pail by pouring from the side without having to detach it from the spout. It does not appear that this invention was put into production. However, Soule’s sap spout design (US1207444) was mass produced and the Soule spout became one of the most widely-used cast metal spouts in the history of the maple industry.

Examples of the hooked and hookless Soule Sap Spout.

By June 1915, George H. Soule was ready to enter the maple evaporator business and formed the Burlington Evaporator Company on Battery Street in Burlington, Vermont, occupying a three-story building with 7,000 square feet of space with a side alongside the railroad tracks.

1920 Sanborn Fire Insurance map showing Aldis Street location of Soule Company factory in St. Albans, Vermont.

In forming the company Soule partnered with J.M. Ruiter and A.A. Hunter, two men that for years had worked for the Leader Evaporator Company, also in Burlington. The story of Ruiter and Hunter will be covered in greater detail in the post on history of the Leader Evaporator Company in this series, but suffice it to say, the Leader Company was not happy with their shift in allegiance. In July 1915 Leader posted ads in several Vermont newspapers stating in no uncertain terms that Ruiter and Hunter no longer represented the Leader Company in any way. Of course, George Soule loved the free advertising and even said so in an ad of his own!

Leader Evaporator Company newspaper notice from 1915 announcing that Mister Hunter and Mister Ruiter were no longer representing the Leader Company.
George H. Soule’s Burlington Evaporator Company advertisement from 1915 in response to the Leader Company notice.

From the very beginning Soule named his evaporator the Maple King, but he also had the Maple Queen evaporator in 1915. The origins of use of the brand name of King for his evaporator most likely comes from Soule himself being referred to as the “Maple Sugar King”; however, there is another version of the story. According to the descendants of Albert James King, the King Evaporator was named after Albert J. King. Albert was Soule’s friend and neighbor from early Buck Hollow and had worked for Soule at one time. Soule reportedly chose King as the brand name for the evaporator as a thank you for Albert J. King’s assistance with the regulator design of what became Soule’s patented evaporator. Use of the Maple Queen name for an evaporator by Soule lasted roughly from 1915 to 1916. Letterhead for the Burlington Evaporator Company lists them as the “Manufacturers of the King and Queen Evaporators.”  By 1918, the Maple Queen name had disappeared and the Maple King Evaporator became just the King Evaporator.

Example of the King Evaporator with its famous dollar signs on the cast iron arch front.

Incidentally, there was another evaporator with the King name around this time that was entirely unrelated to the design and manufacture of George H. Soule. Harlow Henry Mower, a hardware store and tin shop owner from nearby Sheldon, Vermont manufactured and sold his own King Evaporator in the late 19-teens and early 1920s. Little is known of his design, how many he made or how he chose the name King. One wonders how the Soule Company felt about H.H. Mower’s use of the King name for his evaporator. In the end, the Mower version of the King Evaporator was fairly short-lived.

The Burlington Evaporator Company partnership that started in 1915 ended when Ruiter and Hunter relinquished their interests to George H. Soule a year later, giving George complete control of the Burlington Evaporator Company in July 1916. George H. Soule continued to operate into 1918 as the Burlington Evaporator Company out of the building near the corner of Battery and Maple Streets.

A few years later in September 1918, Soule formed a new partnership with Frederick T. Bradish, now operating under the name George H. Soule & Co. Bradish had been in the butter tub and creamery supplies business in Medford, Massachusetts for many years before going to work as the advertising manager for the Vermont Farm Machine Company of Bellows Falls, so he had a knowledge and familiarity with maple sugaring equipment and sales. Bradish was with the firm 10 years before he died in 1928 at the age of 63, again leaving Soule with sole control of his evaporator and maple sugaring supplies company.

Sanborn Fire Insurance map from 1946 of George H Soule Company and Fairfield Farms Maple Company building on Stowell Street in St. Albans, Vermont.

To house the new Geo. H. Soule & Co. firm, Soule and Bradish erected a large factory building on Aldis Street, adjacent to the Central Vermont Railroad in St. Albans, Vermont. Instead of building from the ground up, they moved an existing three-story building onto the site and added a two-story factory and office space with the entire building covering 9,000 square feet.

Modern image the renovated George H. Soule Company and Fairfield Farms Maple Products Company building, also known as the Willard Building in St. Albans, Vermont.

In the 1920s the Soule Company served as a buying agent for the George C. Cary Maple Sugar Company, bringing in barrels and cans of maple sugar and maple syrup to their Aldis Street factory and shipping them to Cary in St. Johnsbury. Soule got into the buying agent business as a result of accepting maple sugar and syrup in exchange for cash when selling his evaporators and equipment to producers. The Soule company in turn would sell it to the Cary company. The Soule Company than added the responsibility of operating as a buying agent for Cary. However, when Cary filed for bankruptcy and the Cary Company was taken into receivership in 1931, the Soule Company was left with many pounds of sugar and syrup on their hands. In response, George H. Soule decided to go into the maple products business and formed Fairfield Farms Maple Company in September 1931 with the doors opening for business in April 1932.

Example of the cover of a George H. Soule Company King Sugar Tools catalog from the 1930s.

To house his new concern, George H. Soule purchased the two-story, wood framed Willard Manufacturing Company building on Stowell Street in St. Albans, a short distance away from his Aldis Street factory. By 1935 Fairfield Farms was purchasing over 2 million pounds of maple syrup that they bottled, canned, and turned into maple sugar and other maple-based products.

In the spring of 1937, there was more activity in the Soule sugarbush in Fairfield than the usual men gathering sap. That April a Universal Newsreel film crew from Boston was in Vermont for four days to catch scenes of maple sugaring and boiling on film.  At the time George Soule was operating 15,000 taps in his sugarbush spread across four farms including some acres that were equipped with the Gooseneck metal pipeline to move sap from the trees to collection tanks near the sugarhouse. George himself spent some time outdoor in the sugarbush with the film crew in mid-April which must make one wonder if soon after it led to his demise. Following a week of illness, George H. Soule died of pneumonia on May 8, 1937 of age 71.

Image of George H. Soule from the mid-1930s.

Having never married with no children of his own, George Soule’s nephews Everett I. Soule and Raymond L. Soule soon took over ownership and running the George H. Soule Company and Fairfield Farms Maple Products. Although the Soule family in general has a long and wide history as maple syrup producers, it is unclear to what degree Everett and Raymond Soule had been involved with sugaring in their earlier years. Regardless, both were experienced with running a business having both been a part of running their father Chilo Lee Soule’s tobacco company in Burlington for many years.

Exploded perspective of Soule’s King Evaporator from 1950s era.
Soule’s King Brand sap gathering tank.

Everett would take the helm as president of the companies with Raymond going in a different direction, becoming the city assessor and building inspector for the city of Burlington. Everett’s son Richard C. Soule came on board in 1939, rising to the post of vice-president before shifting to the insurance business in 1952. Richard C. Soule would go on to be a Vermont state senator for Franklin County from 1968 to 1985.

Patent design drawing from 1962 of R.L. Soule and E.I. Soule’s portable poser tree tapper (US2563195).

Under the leadership of Everett Soule, the company introduced a few new inventions that were right in line with new post-war technologies and innovations common in industry and agriculture. Most notable was the King Power Tapper, a portable, backpack mounted gasoline powered drill and the plastic sap bag. The “King Portable Power Tree Tapper”, patented by Raymond L. Soule and Everett I. Soule in 1951 (US2563195) was not the first portable tree tapper to be invented but it was the first to be produced for widespread commercial sale. The speed and ease with which it allowed sugarmakers to tap many times more trees than with the traditional drill or brace and bit was a game changer in the sugarbush at the time.

Advertising brochure for the King Portable Power Tree Tapper.

The other important Soule Company invention in the 1940s and 1950s was a flexible plastic sap collection bag that would replace the use of the wood or metal pail or bucket. The King Sap Bag was developed by the Soule brothers in the 1940s when plastics were the new inexpensive and magical material that would change the world. After years of tweaking, it became available for purchase and use in the 1951 sugaring season.  Designed to be washed and reusable for few seasons, it was made from a heavy-duty clear plastic called vinylite.  The bags hung on a traditional hookless sap spout and would hold up to 15 quarts of sap. Everett Soule obtained a Canadian patent (CA598853) on the bags in 1960, but for some reason the bags were never patented in the United States. You can read more about the history of plastic sap bags at this earlier post on this website.

Advertising brochure for the Soule Company’s King Maple Sap Bag.

As someone with a fair amount of experience applying plastics to sap collection, Everett I. Soule was an early proponent and designer to hop on the bandwagon for flexible plastic tubing and himself obtained one of the earliest patents for a system of tubing, spouts, and fittings. Everett Soule’s patent (US2944369/CA652474 and CA673374) for a flexible plastic tubing system was applied for in 1958 and awarded in 1960, but it seems to never have been put into use. Through my other research efforts, I discovered that the 3M company, who manufactured the Mapleflo tubing system, was known for purchasing patent rights and issuing patent interference claims. So, it is possible that the Soule tubing system was a contested patent. My research on this topic continues.

Advertisement for the King Sap Bag from a French language agricultural magazine from Quebec, showing the wide distribution of the Soule Company products.

Sometime in the 1940s, possibly in 1942, the George H. Soule Company left its Aldis Street factory and moved into the Willard Manufacturing Building to be under the same roof as the Fairfield Farms Maple Company. In 1948, Everett I. Soule announced the closing of the candy making operations at Fairfield Farms due to a shrinking interest in maple sugar candy. By 1950, Fairfield Farms no longer appears in the St. Albans city directory and in 1952, the same year Richard Soule left to pursue a career in insurance, Fairfield Farms Maple Products announced it would no longer be buying maple syrup.

Raymond Soule continued as city assessor through 1951 before becoming vice-president of the clothing manufacturer, O.L. Hinds. Raymond Soule passed away in 1956 at the age of 69. Everett I. Soule himself was listed as both retired and company president in 1958, but clearly his involvement with the company had lessened.

Photo from the 1970s of the former Soule Co. building (aka Willard Building) following the purchase of the company by the Leader Evaporator Company. Notice the Leader name on the building.

In June 1964 Leader Evaporator Company purchased George H. Soule Company and moved a portion of its manufacturing team from Rutland to its St. Albans facilities. A few months later, following a short illness, Everett I. Soule died in Florida on August 18, 1964 at age 72.

Sometime after the George H. Soule Company ended their operation of Fairfield Farms Maple Products, a different Soule family rekindled the Fairfield Farms name.  S. Allen Soule of Fairfield, a cousin of Everett I. Soule, was a syrup packer and sold one of the earliest lithographed syrup cans, and he began to use the Fairfield Farms name to do business in the mid-1950s. Despite having the same name of Soule (and being related) and both using the Fairfield Farms brand, the S. Allen Soule and George H. Soule companies were entirely separate entities.

Special thanks to Nancy J. King and David A. King for information on the history and connection of their great grandfather, Albert J. King, to George H. Soule and the source for the name of the King Evaporator.

 

New Article About The Making of George Cary’s 1927 Silent Film

I am happy to announce and share the publication of my latest maple syrup history article titled, Cary Maple: Silent Film from the Sugarbush. This article recently appeared in the March 2019 edition (no. 12, issue 204) of Vermont’s Northland Journal.  Published by Scott Wheeler out of Newport, Vermont, Vermont’s Northland Journal is a great regional magazine that features stories on the history and culture of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. With maple sugaring having a prominent place in the identity and memories of many Vermonters at this time of year, the Northland Journal regularly reserves the month of March to feature stories and local profiles of maple sugaring. As a nice little bonus, the article was honored with the cover image as well. You can read a PDF version of the article at this link or by clicking on the cover image at left.

 

A Maple Sugaring Legend: The Story of Henry Fairfax Ayres

1949 portrait of Henry Fairfax Ayres painted by Norman Rockwell, from the Northern Woodlands article “The Colonel: A Sort of Remembrance.” VMI Archives.

An excellent and fascinating story by Dave Mance III was recently published that tells the history of Vermont maple sugaring legend, Colonel Henry Fairfax Ayres. From Mance’s story, one gets the impression that Ayers was a larger-than-life figure, and the sort of person you only read about and almost never meet in real life. From his military pedigree and exploits, to his friendship with Norman Rockwell, Ayres, who died in 1979, was a man you noticed and remembered. Mance himself has his own connection to Ayres, as he now taps the same Shaftsbury, Vermont sugarbush worked by Ayres for over 4o years.

Patent drawing of Henry Fairfax Ayres check-valve sap spout (US2825182).

The Colonel was an inventive man as well, both in and out of the sugarbush. He installed a pipeline of one-inch steel with stand pipes for moving sap in his sugarbush years before today’s plastic tubing became the norm. He patented an early version of a check-valve style maple sugaring spile, and perhaps most well-known was his invention of a combination thermometer and hydrometer for sugarmakers, called a hydrotherm. Rather than my recounting any more of the interesting bits and pieces of his life, or his role and influence on the maple sugar industry, I’ll let you read and enjoy the article yourself.

Cover of the spring 2019 edition of Northern Woodlands magazine.

The article appeared in the spring 2019 edition of Northern Woodlands, the magazine of the Center for Northern Woodlands Education.  Northern Woodlands is a great magazine published four times a year and covers a wide range of forest related topics, with Dave Mance, himself a sugarmaker, at the helm as editor. As a fan of maple syrup history, Dave Mance was kind enough to share a copy of the article which can be found at this link or by clicking on the the above image Ayres. I strongly encourage you to check out Northern Woodlands magazine.

Correction – An earlier version of this blog post rather embarrassingly misspelled Colonel Ayres’ last name as Ayers. A special thank you to Henry Ayres, Colonel Ayres grandson, for alerting me of my mistake.

 

 

Evaporator Company Histories: Dominion & Grimm

The Dominion & Grimm Company is one of the longest continually operating maple syrup evaporator and equipment companies in Canada.  The company began when in October of 1892 it was announced that G.H. Grimm Manufacturing Company, incorporated out of Ohio, had opened a branch in Montreal Canada located at 63 to 67 King Street with W.A. Morrison as the initial factory manager. A year before the company also expanded into Vermont, opening a factory in Rutland.

Advertisement from 1892 for G.H. Grimm Mfg. Co. selling the Champion Evaporator from Montreal, Quebec.

As a branch of the American based Grimm company, the Montreal based Grimm facility manufactured the same Champion Evaporators as were being made in the original Grimm factory in Hudson, Ohio and in the new factory in Rutland. With the expansion to Vermont and Quebec, company founder Gustav H. Grimm focused their operations in Rutland and Montreal and sold the Ohio portion of the company in 1895.

Portrait of John H. Grimm, president of the Grimm Manufacturing Company, LTD.

In 1900, another company split was made and G.H. Grimm’s cousin, John H. Grimm bought the controlling interest in the G.H. Grimm Manufacturing Co. branch in Montreal. John H. Grimm then personally relocated to Montreal from Rutland to lead his new venture. Earlier in the year, John H. Grimm was listed in the 1900 census as a foreman in Grimm’s Rutland factory. Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, John H. Grimm brought his two younger brothers Charles E. Grimm and Henry E. Grimm on board to help run the company in Montreal.

1909 advertisement for the Grimm Manufacturing Co. listing their Wellington Street address in Montreal.

There were now two Grimm companies on either side of the border, more or less selling the same maple sugaring equipment and supplies designed by Gustav H. Grimm. However, the Rutland Company now referred to itself as simply G. H. Grimm Co. with no use of the word manufacturing; whereas the Montreal company was known as Grimm Manufacturing Co., LTD., having dropped the G.H. initials.

Directories for Montreal show G.H. Grimm at 63 to 67 King Street in the 1890s. By 1901 the company had moved to 84 Wellington St and by 1908 was at 58 Wellington. It remained at that address on the corner of Wellington St and Queen Street until it was purchased and consolidated with the Dominion Evaporator Company.

In October of 1910, the Grimm brothers formally incorporated the Grimm Manufacturing Company, Limited under the laws of Canada with an initial capital stock of $150,000. The stockholders included J. H. Grimm, Charles E. Grimm, Henry E. Grimm, Wendell E. Grimm, and Charles E. Moore, all from Montreal at that time.

Color advertising postcard for Grimm Mfg. Co. illustrating their Wellington Street building. The appearance of the corner has changed little and looks much the same today.

John H. Grimm became a tireless advocate for better labelling laws and fighting against unscrupulous adulteration of maple syrup. His efforts were instrumental in the Province of Quebec passing a strict purity in labelling law that went into effect in 1915. As a prominent leader in the industry in Quebec as one of the largest manufacturing firms, he also strongly promoted cleanliness as a key to producing a better quality maple sugar and syrup. Grimm also was instrumental in forming an early co-op and producer’s association out of Waterloo, known as the Maple Tree Producers Association, LTD. This association and co-op formed to collectively market their maple syrup and work together to improve their quality and promote a label with assured purity. In time, Grimm bought out all of the members of this association and installed his own canning and bottling works at their Wellington Street facility.

To encourage maple producers and promote his ideals of improvement in the methods of manufacturing syrup and sugar, Grimm put up $500 in prize money for a syrup and sugar contest in 1913. Over 500 samples of Canadian syrup and over 200 samples of sugar competed for the prizes. A recent article that covers some of the history of Canada’s early maple co-ops provides additional detail on this aspect of John H. Grimm’s role in moving the Canadian maple industry forward.

John H. Grimm died in August 1941 at Grimmaple Lodge, his summer home near Mount Loyal, Quebec at the age of 77, a few months after the death of his wife. With his death, his brother Charles E. Grimm assumed the role of company president. Charles E. Grimm died only a few years later June 1943 in Montreal.

Ten years later, the Grimm family heirs and remaining shareholders of the Grimm Manufacturing Company sold the company to Sylva LeBrun of Montreal in 1952. LeBrun had started the Dominion Evaporator Company in Montreal in 1940 after selling off his interests in his earlier company, LeBrun – Lussier out of Waterloo, Quebec. The story of the LeBrun – Lussier company is covered in an earlier post in this series. In December 1953 it was announced that LeBrun had formed a new company called Dominion & Grimm, Inc. headquartered on Delorimier Street in Montreal.

Dominion Evaporator Company advertisement from 1944.

In combining the Grimm Manufacturing Company with the Dominion Evaporator Company, LeBrun brought together many years of experience and customer satisfaction. Together as one, Dominion & Grimm was able to offer a wide selection of maple sugaring supplies ranging from his own evaporator and arch designs, to those of the Champion evaporators and well-known Grimm cans, covers, spiles, and tanks.

Advertisement from December 1952 for Dominion Evaporators alerting sugarmakers to request their 1953 catalog.

Sylva LeBrun patented his own sap spout design in 1955 (CA510618), which became a mainstay in Canadian sugarbushes. Dominion & Grimm was known for carrying a wide array of spout styles. Hale Mattoon’s excellent book from 2017 titled Maple Spouts Spiles Taps & Tools contains a nice series of illustrations of the assortment of LeBrun designs and D & G inventory.

At some point, possibly after the formation of Dominion & Grimm, the company added home and commercial canning and sterilizing equipment as well as animal feed troughs and other assorted farm supplies to the products they sold.

Patent drawing for Sylva LeBrun’s 1955 sap spout design (CA510618).

Deteriorating health forced Sylva LeBrun into a kind of semi-retirement in the mid-1950s before he passed away in July 1958. In 1962, Dominion & Grimm, Inc. was sold to the Boileau family. A few years later, in 1966, the company relocated from Delorimier Street to a more modern and larger factory location in an industrial park in the Montreal neighborhood of Ville d’Anjou, where it remains to this day.

 

Dominion & Grimm , Inc. advertisement from 1955 promoting their sale of one gallon lithographed cans in four colors.

With the passing of Mr. Boileau in 1984, his daughter sold the company to long time manager Marcel Pepin and the company has remained in his hands to this day. Additional manufacturing sites have been established in Victoriaville and Thetford Mines, Quebec as well as warehouse and sales facilities in St. Albans, Vermont. In recent years the company has diversified beyond only equipment for the maple syrup industry to begin manufacturing biogas production equipment and the company now employs as many as 130 people.

Dominion & Grimm, Inc. catalog cover from 1961 with an image of their Delorimier Street facility.

 

 

 

Evaporator Company Histories: Cook’s Patent Evaporator

Cook’s Patent Evaporator is often described as one of the earliest, if not “the” earliest evaporators to replace the simple flat pan in making maple sugar. Designed by Daniel McFarland Cook, most often identified as D.M. Cook, his sugar evaporator was put to use in evaporating both cane sugar juice and maple sap. Cook began experimenting with his design in the mid-1850s with his first patent (US20631) received in June 1858.

As early as 1859, newspaper accounts began to spread the word of the improved speed and quality of maple sugar Cook’s Patent Evaporator could produce and by the 1860s manufacturers were placing advertisements for its purchase.

First version of Cook’s Portable Patent Evaporator

Born in 1820 in Mansfield, Ohio, the farm of Cook’s youth included a 1,000 tree sugarbush. With this exposure to the process and methods of making maple sugar in the early part of the 1800s, Cook felt there was a better way. At heart, Cook was a thinker and a tinkerer and it was no surprise that he put his mind to improving and speeding up the oftentimes slow process of boiling maple sap to syrup and sugar. Where Cook improved on the flat pan was in his introduction of a series of continuously winding channels that would push or pull the higher density and warmer sap along through the maze to a point where it could be drawn off as syrup. Cook’s evaporator was faster and used less wood and through the natural process of sap moving through the maze-like channels, the syrup could be drawn off at a density that made it immediately ready for “stirring off” or “sugaring off” into granulated sugar.

Drawing of Cook’s 1858 patent for an evaporating pan (US20361).

His earliest design sat on a portable arch that featured rockers on each side that facilitated making subtle shifts in the flow and level of sap and syrup in the pan. His later improved design that earned him a patent in 1863 saw the evaporator resting  on a more permanent brick arch.

As an engineer and inventor, Cook personally never manufactured the Cook’s Evaporator for sale himself, but rather sold the manufacturing and sales rights to a variety of individuals around the country. Cooks Sugar Evaporator was first available only through a number of Ohio firms like Hedges, Free & Co. of Cincinnati; Blymeyer, Bates & Day Co. of Mansfield; and H.W. Wetmore from Akron. Ohio. A few years later, firms all across the maple, sorghum, and cane processing states were making and selling Cook’s evaporator.

Advertisement from 1860 for Cook’s Improved Portable Sugar Evaporator for sorghum and maple sugar.

In 1863, he improved on his earlier patent design by adding a series of drop flues to the bottom of the back pan. Interestingly, these flues ran transverse to the length of the arch, rather than parallel to the arch and in alignment with the flow of heat and gases from the fire box to the back of the arch and up the stack at the rear. The idea was an excellent design improvement although the execution was not as well refined.

 

Patent drawing for Cook’s 1863 evaporating pan design with drop flues (US37736).

By November 1863, one advertisement from C.C. Post, the first Cook’s Evaporator salesman in Vermont, said there were already 6000 of Cook’s evaporators in use and by 1868 over 20,000 sold. Cook’s innovations in evaporator design set the ball in motion for many more improvements by other inventors and maple producers in the coming years and by the 1880s the Cook’s Sugar Evaporator was already becoming obsolete.

 

1868 advertisement for Cook’s sugar evaporator sold by C.C. Post out of Hinesburgh, Vermont.

Soon after, other evaporator designs came on the market, such as Cory’s Evaporator discussed in the history of the Vermont Farm Machine Company history. It is especially interesting to note that the engraving image used to illustrate advertisements for Cory’s Evaporator and Cook’s Evaporator by different newspapers in the early 1860s are exactly the same image. Recall however, that the Cory’s Evaporator was not patented until 1861, whereas Cook’s was patented in 1858. Compare the drawing below to the drawing for Cory’s in the Vermont Farm Machine Company history.

Close up of the drawing illustrating Cook’s evaporator in advertisements from the 1860s.

It is probably true that Cook’s Evaporator was his most successful invention as far as the impact it made, but it was by no means his most interesting. “Crazy Cook” as he was sometimes called around his home of Mansfield also worked to invent a “flying machine” and a “perpetual electrical generator and engine.” As he told a reporter from Cincinnati in 1886, this machine could run off its own current and power any machine in the world at no cost to run it.

Image of Daniel McFarland Cook.

As for the flying machine, Cook built a prototype in 1859 that looked something like a 10-foot tall metal bullet or diving bell with portholes, but that invention never really “got off the ground” so to speak. Miraculously that original model was found to still exist and has been preserved in Mansfield, Ohio.

Unfortunately for Cook, he was never able to turn his genius into long term success and later lost his farm and died a relatively poor man in 1897 at the age of 74.

Evaporator Company Histories: G.H. Grimm Manufacturing Co.

The G.H. Grimm Company was one of the largest and most influential maple sugar evaporator companies of the late 19th and  all of the 20th centuries. The company began with Gustav Henry Grimm who was born in Baden, Germany in 1850. He came to new world in 1864 with his parents, settling in Cleveland, Ohio. A few years later as a young man, around 1870 Grimm moved to Hudson, Ohio with his new wife.  Grimm came from a family of tin workers, with the 1870 and 1880 census for the Cleveland area showing a number of other Grimms who immigrated from Germany to Ohio also listed as tin workers.

Image of Gustav Henry Grimm from 1987 Rutland Historical Society Quarterly article by Robert F. Moore.

The business of G.H. Grimm & Co. was established for manufacturing the Champion Evaporator in Hudson, Ohio in 1881 with the Champion marketed from the beginning as an evaporator for the making of maple sugar, sorghum, cider, and fruit jellies.  In the first year the company produced less than a dozen evaporators. Gustav H. Grimm applied for his first patent in November of 1881 (US254476) for a raised flue evaporator with Horace M. Clark, with the patent formally registered in March of 1882.

Patent drawing from Grimm and Clark’s 1882 evaporator design (US254476).

Over the next few years Grimm continued to make design changes and improvements to his evaporator and as Grimm Company history tells it, the first “real Champion evaporator” was tested in 1883. As the company expanded, in 1883 G.H. Grimm took on W. C. Parsons of Akron, Ohio as a partner. Over the next few years Grimm continued to tweak his 1882 patent with patented (US296743) improvements to various features and accessories to the evaporator as well as a patent (US316893) for the process of folding the sheet metal to form the distinctive raised flues.

1885 Patent drawing from Grimm’s method of folding metal to form raised flues (US316893).

Through the 1880s the company continued to expand its sales and distribution reaching into New England, Pennsylvania, and New York. In October 1888 the company was formally incorporated in Ohio as the G. H. Grimm Manufacturing Co. with an authorized capital stock of $50,000. The first president was W.C. Parsons with G.H. Grimm listed as superintendent.

 

 

 

Advertisement from 1885 for the Champion Evaporator from G.H. Grimm and Co. out of Hudson, Ohio.

Interestingly, there was another, completely unrelated, Champion Evaporator Company that operated in Berkshire, Vermont and later Richford, Vermont about this same time in the 1880s. This company was relatively short lived with evaporators in production from 1882 to about 1887. The history of the Richford, Vermont Champion Evaporator Company will be covered in greater detail in a separate post in this series on evaporator company histories.

Recognizing the need to be more centrally located in the heart of the maple sugar producing territory, in June of 1890, G.H. Grimm secured a lease for land alongside the railroad in Rutland, Vermont and over that summer erected a 120 by 40-foot one-story building. Manufacturing of new evaporators began in the fall and by December 1890 advertising for the company prominently displayed their locations as Rutland, VT and Hudson, OH. By April 1891 the company reported that it had put out 500 evaporators in the state of Vermont.

Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from 1895 for Rutland, VT showing first location of G.H. Grimm building on northwest side of Pine Street.

With the construction of the Rutland factory, G.H Grimm also moved his family from Ohio to Vermont and built a large, elegant new house at 201 Grove Street in Rutland.  This historic home is now listed on the Vermont State Register of Historic Places.

1891 advertisement for Grimm’s Champion Evaporator showing Rutland, VT and Hudson, OH as the locations of their plants.

 

In the fall of 1892 the Grimm Company further expanded into Canada. On October 28, 1892 Le Prix Courant, a business newspaper in Montreal, Quebec, under the heading of “new companies”, announced the arrival of the “G.H. Grimme Manufacturing Company (Limited)” incorporated under the laws of the state of Ohio with Gustave H. Grimm of Montreal as general manager. Gustave H. Grimm’s younger cousin John H. Grimm, relocated to Montreal from Rutland, Vermont to run the Quebec branch of the company.

 

1893 advertisement listing Hudson, OH and Montreal, Quebec with an excellent engraving of the Champion Evaporator.

With facilities in Hudson, Ohio; Rutland, Vermont; and Montreal, Quebec the company had solidified their presence in the heart of the maple syrup producing world. The company was producing over 1,000 evaporators a year. In a 1894 tariff inquiry report to congress under the category of metal manufacturing companies, Grimm reported that in 1893 they produced 900 evaporators in the United States and 200 in Canada with an average price for a unit being $100 to $125.

Grimm’s move to Rutland signified a shift in his company focus towards New England and away from Ohio. A few years later the G.H. Grimm Manufacturing Co. formally separated itself from its Hudson, Ohio facilities. In addition, advertisements and publications for G.H. Grimm Manufacturing Co. no longer list Hudson, Ohio as one of its locations after 1893.

1904 advert for the Champion Evaporator Company of Hudson, Ohio.

Charles Bouton purchased the Hudson portion of the company in 1895, after which the Ohio manufacturing company under his ownership was called the Champion Evaporator Company or sometimes the Champion Evaporator Works. Presumably the Hudson “Works” were manufacturing the Grimm-style Champion Evaporator under license or contract for the G.H. Grimm Co., although that is not exactly clear.

The new Champion Evaporator Company in Hudson took a little time to get on its feet when in late 1895 and again in spring 1896 there were reports of the factory in Hudson closing. In August of 1896 it was formally announced that the Champion Evaporator Works in Hudson had been purchased by Bouton & Son. Bouton (sometimes misspelled as Bonton) was a hotel and livery owner in Hudson and had earlier acquired financial interest in the G.H. Grimm Company in 1886. Prior to his ownership of the Hudson Works, Charles Bouton’s association with G.H. Grimm was more than investor. In early 1895 he invented and patented (US546648) a sap pail and cover with the patent assigned to the G.H. Grimm Co. As owner of the independent Champion Evaporator Company, in 1900 Bouton patented his own evaporator design (US647798) in partnership with Clayton S. Bediant.

Bouton continued operation of the Champion Evaporator Company in Hudson until his death in October 1910. It is presumed the company continued under the leadership of his son Clarence Bouton, until his death in 1920. Following a stint in the Navy, Albert H. Schow acquired the company in the early 1920s and managed it until it closed in the early 1940s. As late as 1941, Schow was advertising to hire metal workers for the Hudson evaporator works. In 1942, Schow and the company were listed for unpaid taxes and later accounts in Hudson, OH newspapers suggest the company was forced to close operations in 1943 when supplies of sheet metal became difficult to obtain due to the war effort. In 1979, the city of Hudson rehabilitated the old Champion Evaporator Company factory space and opened it as a series of retail and studio shops, appropriately named “The Evaporator Works.”

Sanborn Map from 1900 showing later location of G.H. Grimm building across Pine Street from the earlier building.

Back to the G.H. Grimm story – business continued to stream in for the company in Rutland and in the summer of 1898 they began construction on a new three-story, 50 by 150-foot building with a spacious basement on Pine Street. Machinery was moved from the old location in the fall and the company was ready for business at its new location by the start of 1899.

Early 1900s Illustration of G.H. Grimm factory on Pine Street. Notice the building dimensions of 50 x 150 included on the drawing.

In 1900, the Grimm Company went through another reorganization when the Grimm cousins decided to split the Rutland and Montreal branches of the company into two independent companies. The Rutland operation became known as G.H. Grimm Company, sometimes just G.H. Grimm, with the word “manufacturing” dropped from the name. While the Montreal firm under John H. Grimm became Grimm Manufacturing Co., LTD., dropping the initials G.H. at the beginning of its name.

Catalog cover for The Grimm Mfg. Co. LTD out of Montreal.

John H. Grimm and his brothers Charles E. Grimm, Henry E. Grimm, and Wendell Grimm formally incorporated in Quebec in 1910. John H. Grimm and Charles E. Grimm continued to run the Montreal company for the next three decades until their deaths with John in 1941 and Charles in 1943. After their deaths, Grimm Manufacturing Co. LTD of Montreal was sold to Sylvan LeBrun and his Dominion Evaporator Company in 1953 to become Dominion and Grimm. A part of the LeBrun story was covered in the earlier posted history of the Waterloo Evaporator history and a later post will cover the history of the Dominion Evaporator Company and Dominion and Grimm, Inc. in this series on evaporator company histories.

Advertisement flyer from around 1901 for the improved Grimm Spout and Cover.

Although the first two decades of the G.H. Grimm Company witnessed many changes in organization and location, by the beginning of the new century things were largely settled from the standpoint of facilities and infrastructure. Gustave H. Grimm had found a permanent home for his family and company in Rutland with the plant on Pine Street and had narrowed his focus to just managing and leading the G.H. Grimm Company in Rutland. While still selling maple sugaring evaporators and equipment designed and patented by G.H. Grimm, the Montreal Grimm’s and the Hudson Champion Evaporator Company were no longer under Gustave H. Grimm’s control or his responsibility.

Reverse side of advertisement flyer from around 1901 showing Grimm Spout No. 1 and the special production Horseshoe Cover, patented by Abbot Augustus Low (US668313).

As G.H. Grimm worked to grow the Rutland company he was fortunate to be chosen by Abbot Augustus Low to be the evaporator and equipment supplier for Low’s massive Horse Shoe Forestry Company maple sugaring operation in the Adirondacks of New York. Low purchased at least 19 large sized evaporators and taps and pails to gather sap from as many as 50,000 trees. Grimm took advantage of the notoriety of Low’s sugarbush as the largest in the world and emphasized in their advertising that Low was using Grimm sap spouts. As noted in an earlier blog post, Grimm and Low also partnered even more directly when the Grimm company put A.A. Low’s patent (US668313) design for a sap pail cover into production. The Horseshoe Cover as it was known, was primarily produced for use by Low in his Adirondacks sugarbush, but Grimm also advertised its availability for purchase by any interested customers.

Examples of Pure Vermont Maple Syrup packed by the G.H. Grimm Company out of Rutland, VT.

It should be noted that in addition to manufacturing and selling maple sugaring equipment, for a period of time in the 1890s and early 20th century, the Grimm company in Rutland also bought maple sugar and maple syrup from producers in New England and New York and packaged it under the Grimm label. For example, in 1898 the Grimm company reported that by June it had shipped 10 tons of maple sugar and 6000 gallons of syrup which was about one third of the volume they had moved at the same time the year before.

 

 

One of the sheets of the patent drawing from July 19, 1904 showing Grimm’s sap spout no. 1 and his design for a sap pail cover (US765478). December 1904 patent drawing for Grimm sap spout designs for spouts no. 2, 3, 4, and 5 and sap pail cover (US778031).

The early 1900s saw G.H. Grimm expand his portfolio of sugaring equipment designs and patents (US729330, US765478, US778031) with a series of sap pail covers and sap spouts that were assigned numbers 1 through 5. The company continued to make improvements on their evaporators as well with three additional patents awarded for improvements to designs for sap preheaters and sap regulators (US884272, US962830, US1159213), with the final patent being awarded in 1915, posthumously following Grimm’s death in 1914.

Gustav H. Grimm died in Rutland on December 24, 1914 at the age of 64 from general paralysis. For a number of years following the death of G.H. Grimm, the company operated under the name of the G.H. Grimm Estate with his daughter Nella Grimm taking over management of company at age 36. After Grimm’s death the company continued to provide evaporators and equipment to the maple industry although at times it was forced to protect their interests in G.H. Grimm’s patent designs that made the company’s products popular. For example, see the 1918 case challenging the use of Grimm designs by three former Grimm employees that left the company to form the Vermont Evaporator Company.

Grimm’s evaporator patent drawing from 1908 with updated features (US884272).

Nella Grimm married John Crary Fox in 1923 in New York City. At time of her marriage Nella was described as executive head of the company but was living in Philadelphia and New York. Following his marriage to Nella Grimm, John C. Fox joined her in managing the company until his unexpected death from a heart attack in 1932.

The next 20 years are largely unremarkable for the company as it continued to maintain its market share as one of the five main evaporator manufacturers in the US and Canada. In 1951 Nella Grimm Fox decided to retire from management of the company and sold G.H. Grimm to Robert F. Moore of Rutland and Louis Veale of Montpelier. A few years later, Veale became ill and died in 1958, leaving the company in the hands of Robert F. Moore and his family with each of Moore’s sons working for the company before following separate career paths outside of the company.

Drawing for Grimm’s 1910 patent for a sap preheater (US962830).

Many of the details of the story of the Grimm Company after the sale of the company in 1951 have been told in a nice article by Robert F. Moore that appeared in 1987 in the Rutland Historical Society Quarterly. Here are some highlights of the next 40 or so years.

In 1964 The G.H. Grimm Company buys the Lightning Evaporator Company. (See the history of the Lightning Company in another post in this series.) In 1984, the Moore family sells G.H. Grimm to a group of Rutland businessmen known as the Grimm group. In 1985 the Lamb Naturalflow maple sap tubing company out of St. Bernhards Bay, New York became a subsidiary partner of the G.H. Grimm Company. And finally, in 1989 the Leader Evaporator Company of St. Albans, Vermont, purchased the G.H. Grimm Company and Lamb Naturalflow to become the largest maple equipment company in the world. Leader continued to manufacture the Grimm evaporators for a number of years before new designs and changing technology and health and safety requirements related to the use of lead solder led to their discontinuation. Leader operated the G.H. Grimm plant in Rutland for another 15 years before deciding to moving the majority of their operations to St. Albans in 2005; however, they still use the Pine Street facility in Rutland for a portion of their manufacturing.

Evaporator Company Histories: Granite State Evaporator Co.

The Granite State Evaporator Company was one of the only evaporator companies to come out of New Hampshire in the late 19th century. The company has its origins when Perley E. Fox purchased a tin and stove works in Marlow, NH in 1869. Fox was born in Marlow in 1833, but as a young man headed west to Illinois in 1857 where he worked as a school teacher and professor. He returned to Marlow in the early 1860s working again as a teacher and president of the Marlow Academy and as a daguerreotype artist according to the 1860 census.

Portrait of Perley E. Fox from 1890s.

He entered the tin, stove, and hardware business when he bought out the business of J.H. Fisher in Marlow.; however, it is not clear when he first began manufacturing evaporators for maple sugaring. Perley obtained a patent in 1875 (US165223) for an evaporating pan that was a series of individual pans that were linked sequentially through tubular connectors placed in an alternating formation, effectively forming a sort of baffle or zig-zag pattern of flow of sap and syrup through the pans.

Drawing of evaporating pan patent (US165223) awarded to Perley E. Fox in 1875.

Advertisements from as early as 1879 referred to Perley’s evaporator as the Granite State Evaporator. By the 1890s the illustrations for the Granite State Evaporator Company show it as large flat pan with divided compartments resting on a portable steel arch. Perley also patented his own sap spout (US283593) in 1883 that was a hookless style formed from rolled sheet metal in a tubular design.

 

 

Drawing for Perley E. Fox’s patent (US283593) from 1883 for a rolled sheet metal sap spout.

 

Perley reportedly retired from the hardware and tin business in 1892 to devote his time to farming, but it wasn’t the end of his evaporator company. In fact, the Granite State Evaporator Company continued to operate and manufacture evaporators well after that time. Perley was noted as an exhibitor of his evaporator at a number of fairs and agricultural expos in the region after 1892 and his name continued to be associated as the owner of the company in the next couple of decades.

Illustration of the Granite State Evaporator and portable steel arch, ca. 1898.

The company reached out beyond the range of New England maple sugar producers to the midwestern farm states to sell devices similar to small evaporators or finishing rigs that they called “feed cookers” and “water heaters”.  These large deep flat pans sat on metal arches and were marketed as a universal tool for all your boiling needs on the farm, be they heating water and food to feed animals, or preserving foods or making jellies. The Granite State Evaporator Company employed a special salesman based out of New York City to help promote their feed cookers. By the late 1890s, Frank E. Morrison was listed as the company president and advertising agent and maintained a sales office in Temple Court on Beekman Street in New York City.

Advertisement from 1895 for the Granite State Evaporator Company.
1897 advertisement for the Granite State Feed Cooker and Water Heater, a piece of equipment handy on the farm that was similar in design and manufacture as a maple sap evaporator.

Morrison moved on to another company by the early 1900s, but the Granite State Evaporator Company continued to manufacture evaporators and advertise to maple sugar makers in New England newspapers for a few more years. When the company stopped production is not exactly clear.

In his later years, Perley represented Marlow as a member of the New Hampshire legislature in 1903 and 1904. In August 1916, a fire in Marlow destroyed a number of buildings including the evaporator factory. Newspaper accounts of the fire described the building for the Granite State Evaporator Company as owned by Perley Fox; however, it was not clear if the company was in active production. Following the fire and the destruction of the company factory, Perley Fox was listed as a locksmith at the age of 86 in the 1920 census. He died of pneumonia in 1929 in a nursing home in Westmoreland, NH.

Evaporator Company Histories: Sproul Manufacturing Co. – Keystone and Cyclone Evaporators

The lesser known Keystone Evaporator was a product of Sproul Hardware and Manufacturing Company out of Delevan, New York. James B Sproul & Sons opened a hardware store in Delevan, New York around 1902 and along with hardware goods they began manufacturing maple sugar equipment including evaporators of various sizes and syrup finishing rigs.

Portrait of James B. Sproul, founder of the Sproul Hardware and Manufacturing Company in Delevan, NY.

Prior to settling in the Delevan area, Sproul and his family tried their hand at farming for a few years in Ashtabula, Ohio and before than he was in the dry goods business in Springs, Pennsylvania. Both of J.B. Sproul’s two sons, Clyde Robert Sproul and James Fay Sproul, were a part of the hardware and manufacturing business from its very beginning and carried the manufacturing portion of the business forwards after the death of their father J. B. Sproul in 1917.

 

Portion of a Sproul Manufacturing Company sales brochure featuring the Keystone Evaporator, circa 1910-1915.

In 1909 Sproul & Sons expanded their production operations, constructing a new building in Delevan specifically dedicated to manufacturing maple sugaring evaporators. At that time, they also posted advertisements in the Buffalo, NY area looking for experienced “tinners”.

The primary product of their maple sugaring manufacturing efforts was called the Keystone Evaporator, which was a flat-bottomed set up with multiple pans on an iron arch. A particularly unique feature of the Keystone Evaporators was a series of horizontal tubes built into the back pan to serve as a kind of sap pre-heater. The smaller model called the Keystone Junior featured vertical tubes in the rear pan that were referred to as a cupped heater.

Image of the horizontal tubes in the deeper sap heater pan at the rear of the Keystone Evaporator cropped from Sproul Manufacturing Company sales brochure.

In the 1930s, the Sproul Manufacturing Company added another evaporator to their line up which they called the Cyclone Evaporator that featured a back pan with deep flues, a middle pan with shallower flues, and a flat-bottomed front or syrup pan.

1934 advertisement for Sproul Hardware and Manufacturing Company’s Cyclone Evaporator.

Sproul Manufacturing offered a full-complement of maple sugaring supplies and equipment including the Vermont sap spout made by the Vermont Evaporator Company and patented by Willis. They produced their own sap gathering and storage tanks and their special Keystone sap pail. The sap pail cover they offered was made in the design patented by Augustus H. Todd of Griffin’s Corners, New York.

 

Patent drawing for A.H. Todd’s 1884 design for a sap bucket cover (US302604) sold by Sproul Manufacturing Company.

 

By 1915, J.B. Sproul appears to have retired from the business and left it in the hands of his sons. In 1916, they sold the brick and mortar hardware store and the two sons instead focused their attention on manufacturing sugaring equipment. This continued through the 1920s, 1930s, and into the 1940s.

It is not clear when exactly the Sproul Manufacturing Company stopped manufacturing and selling evaporators, but it was probably sometime in the mid-1940s. The older of the two sons, Clyde R. Sproul, passed away in 1946 and it appears that the company was transferred to bank ownership in 1950. The younger son Fay Sproul himself passed away in 1957.

Image of reverse side of Sproul Manufacturing Company sale brochure featuring sugar making supplies.

Evaporator Company Histories: Vermont Farm Machine Company – Williams Improved Evaporator

June 1866 advertisement from the Hartford Courant promoting sale of Cory’s Sugar Evaporators by the Hartford Sorghum Machine Co.

The Vermont Farm Machine Company began life in Hartford, Connecticut as the Hartford Sorghum Machine Company where under license they manufactured the Cory’s Sugar Evaporator, sometimes spelled Corey.

Patented by Christopher Cory (US33238) in September 1861, this metal pan featured a bottom formed into crimped ridges, an early version of shallow flues, that increases the surface and heating area of the sap, leading to more rapid boiling. These evaporator pans came in lengths ranging from 6 feet to 15 feet and were placed on a permanent brick arch.

The Hartford Sorghum Machine Company was formally incorporated in May 1866 under the leadership of James B. Williams of Glastonbury, CT. As President, Williams came to the company not as a metal worker or sugar maker but as a successful businessman and maker of soaps. Williams was also an active investor in a variety of manufacturing businesses in the Glastonbury area.

Portrait of James B. Williams, one the founders and first president of the Hartford Sorghum Machine Co.

Initially marketed as an evaporator for making sugar from sorghum, by the end of 1868 the Hartford Sorghum Machine Company was also advertising the Cory Patent Evaporator for boiling maple sap and making maple sugar. In 1868, they also were promoting the use and sale of the Guild Sap Regulator, patented by J.H. Guild in 1867.

Patent drawing of J.H. Guild’s water cut-off, sold as a regulator for sap levels in evaporators by the Hartford Sorghum Machine Co.

In July 1868, it was announced that the Hartford Sorghum Machine Company was setting up a Branch Office and Manufactory in Bellows Falls, Vermont. With J.B. Williams as president and F.G. Butler of Bellows Falls as secretary, the company would begin building a manufacturing plant for production of evaporators for maple sugar makers. The company hoped to have produced and sold 1000 of the evaporators by November of that year. The Cory’s evaporator was proved to be popular and maple sugarmakers that adopted the Cory’s Evaporator reported doubling their production over traditional flat pans.

James B. Williams and the company were not afraid to adopt the ideas of other evaporators and continued to work to improve their design. In early 1869, the company reported that its evaporator combined the features of Corey’s, Cook’s, and Harris’ patent evaporators, all of which they had licenses to manufacture. By June 1869, James B. Williams had obtained a patent on his own evaporator design (US 91890) along with a patent on a machine (US91889) specifically designed for forming the crimped metal corrugations featured in his evaporator design.

In 1871, a group of men led by James B. Williams and Francis G. Butler of Bellows Falls, purchased the Bellows Falls interests of the Hartford Sorghum Machine Company and began doing business as the Vermont Farm Machine Company. Also in March 1871, F.G. Butler obtained a patent on his own evaporator design (US112539) that featured a series of dampers in the fire box of the arch that permitted greater control of heat on the finishing pan, in this case, located at the rear of the evaporator. Although Butler was the patentee, this patent was assigned to himself and to James B. Williams. Butler had another patent associated with evaporator design in 1871 (US116803) but it does not appear to have been assigned to the company or put into use in their evaporators.

Later that same year, 1871, they began referring to their evaporator for boiling map sap as simply the “Improved Evaporator.” On February 15, 1873 the Vermont Farm Machine Co. of Bellows Falls was formally incorporated in the state of Vermont for the manufacture of mowing machines, horse rakes, maple sugar evaporators and other agricultural implements with a capital stock of $25,000 with F.G. Butler as president and J.B. Williams as a member of the board of directors. J.B. Williams continued his successful soap business in Connecticut which lasted into the 1950s.

Early 1870s advertisement for the “Improved Sugar Evaporator” offered by The Vermont Farm Machine Co. of Bellows Falls.

As the “farm machine company” name implies, the company was beginning to diversify its manufacturing line beyond evaporators to include cream separators and other farm implements and in 1877 brought on Nathan G. Williams to take over and re-organize the Bellows Falls operations. There is no known relation between Nathan G Williams and J.B. Williams. Prior to joining the firm in Bellows Falls, Nathan G. William, who was originally from Pomfret, Connecticut, had been in the mercantile business in Missouri, Iowa, and Chicago, Illinois since 1873. Through the 1880s, the company continued to expand its sales to the maple industry and began to offer a portable iron arch to go under the regularly featured Improved Evaporator.

Portrait of Nathan G. Williams.

In November 1890, Lorin R. Tabor of Westford, Vermont applied for two patents for improvements to sap evaporators. Tabor was awarded patents in 1891 (US457097) and 1892 (US471229) which were both assigned to the Vermont Farm Machine Co. Most notable of his patents was a design where one could reverse the sap flow in the evaporator pan to combat the build-up of niter or what was at that time called malic acid or malate of lime.

1891 patent drawing for L.R. Tabor’s idea for a process of evaporating syrup that offers alternating draw off valves to permit the reversal of the flow of sap through the evaporator partitions.

It was in the fall of 1890 that the Vermont Farm Machine Co. began marketing their new Williams Bellows Falls Evaporator, combining features of the Tabor patents along with the earlier Williams, Cory, Cook, and Butler patents.  This evaporator was a single contiguous pan, so there was no need for siphons to connect separately. It is interesting to note that drawings of the Williams Bellows Falls Evaporator, from as early as 1890, display a covered evaporator pan and the use of a steam hood, an innovation that would not become popular or widely adopted in the industry for another 50 years.

 

Advertisement from the Vermont Watchman in 1891 showing the newly introduced Williams Bellows Falls Evaporator with a full length steam hood.

The Vermont Farm Machine Co. became fully engaged with the maple industry in the 1890s offering a full lineup of maple sugaring equipment ranging from evaporators and pans to sap spouts, pails, gathering and storage tanks, to sugar molds and syrup cans catalogs with an eye-catching pink cover. The Vermont Farm Machine Co. advertisements were also memorable for having high quality detailed drawings with cut-away profiles showing the interior and exterior of their evaporators and sugar houses.

Early 1900s example of the distinctive pink cover common to many of the Vermont Farm Machine Co. catalogs for evaporators and sugaring supplies at this time.

Famous sugarmaker, George H. Soule even lent his name and endorsement to the Williams Evaporator in print in July 1897, when as a prominent farmer and sugarmaker in Franklin County, his use of the evaporator earned him the award of first premium for syrup at the Vermont Sugarmakers meeting earlier that year. Soule further aided the Vermont Farm Machine Co. in improving their evaporator design when his first evaporator patent (US635876) was assigned to the company in 1899. A few years later, Soule would be patenting another evaporator and himself becoming a successful businessman and manufacturer of evaporators and sugaring equipment. A history of the Soule company will appear in a later blog post.

1897 advertisement from the St. Johnsbury Caledonia featuring a testimonial from future evaporator inventor and manufacturer George H. Soule or Fairfield, Vermont.

While evaporators were an important component of their business, the overwhelming focus of production for the company in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was making dairy equipment, most notably the Cooley Creamers. With his arrival in 1877, Nathan G. Williams initially served as the company treasurer, but moved into greater leadership roles as manager and then president. Williams was popular and well-respected in Windham County and throughout Vermont, so much so that he was elected to serve two terms as the Judge Advocate General for the state of Vermont, first in 1904 and again in 1906.

Early 1900s real photo postcard of the extensive facilities of the Vermont Farm Machine Co.

Continued success through the 1890s and early 20th century resulted in expansion of their production facilities in Bellows Falls. By 1907 it was reported that the company had over 720 employees compared to the twelve workers in 1877, and by 1910 operations covered over three and a half acres with multiple four and five-story brick buildings alongside the railroad on “the island” in the Connecticut River.

With the onset of the first World War, the federal government redirected supplies of steel and manufacturing parts to support the war effort. With that, manufacturing and sales of maple sugaring equipment and other farm machinery slowed in 1916 and 1917.  Also during World War I, the Vermont Farm Machine Company was contracted to manufacture shrapnel and high explosive shells for the Russian and United States governments. Complications from cancellations and delays in getting paid by the government for these contracts severely hurt the company and it never really recovered financially.

Catalog cover for 1920-1921 indicating the recent inclusion of the Monarch Evaporator with the Williams Bellows Falls Evaporator in the maple sugaring offerings of the Vermont Farm Machine Company. Note that the word Company has been replaced with Corporation, which was indicative of the restructuring that the company was going through during its period in receivership.

In 1919 the Vermont Farm Machine Co. purchased the Monarch line of evaporators and maple sugaring tools from True and Blanchard in Newport, Vermont. The Monarch production facilities were moved from their home in Newport to Bellows Falls and the additional designs and brands expanded the Vermont Farm Machine Co. catalog of offerings to maple producers. For more information on the True & Blanchard story, see an earlier blog post.

Following the end of the war, the company found it much more difficult to obtain materials and skilled labor than before. Creditors became concerned with the company’s request for additional loans and the ability of the company to pay its existing debts. As a result, in May of 1920 a group of creditors took the company into receivership and took control of its affairs. In July 1920, Nathan G. Williams resigned his position as president, treasurer and manager of the Vermont Farm Machine Co. after leading the company for 40 years, although for a short time he was still engaged as one of two court appointed receivers.  Disagreements and questionable management decisions by the appointed receivers left what remained of the company in shambles. Production slowed, sales agents left in droves, and by the beginning of 1921 production at the factory had ceased. In 1925, Williams moved from Bellows Falls to Hartford, CT where he resided until his death at age 87 in 1931.

1952 photo of fire in Bellows Falls that destroyed the former Vermont Farm Machine Co. factory buildings.

The closing of the factory was the end to the Vermont Farm Machine Company’s manufacturing of maple sugaring evaporators and equipment and there is no indication that their designs, patents, and brands for maple sugaring equipment were sold or passed on to any other maple equipment companies. The company was never reorganized, and the company’s property and factory were sold to a series of different owners over the following years.  A massive fire on November 14, 1952 destroyed the former Vermont Farm Machine Company buildings which at the time were being used by a plastics company, a milk company and a poultry company.

Note: special thanks to Hale Mattoon for sharing his knowledge and research collections related to patent history and the Vermont Farm Machine Co.

Evaporator Company Histories: LeBrun & Lussier / Waterloo

1929 advertisement for LeBrun Evaporator.

The Waterloo Evaporator Company began under the leadership of Sylva LeBrun in Waterloo, Quebec. Born in nearby Shefford, Quebec in 1891, LeBrun opened a hardware store and sheet metal works on Main Street in Waterloo in the 19-teens. By 1919, he was manufacturing his own evaporator and other maple sugaring equipment.

In 1924 LeBrun obtained a Canadian patent for his evaporator and arch featuring a series of widely spaced drop flues. His patent is most notable for the addition of two designs of floats for controlling sap and syrup levels in the evaporator.

Drawing of evaporator and arch from Sylva LeBrun’s 1924 patent (CA240383) application.
Drawing of first float regulator from Sylva LeBrun’s 1924 patent (CA240383) application.
Drawing of second float regulator from Sylva LeBrun’s 1924 patent (CA240383) application.

LeBrun expanded his hardware and manufacturing business in the early 1930s bringing on Claude Lussier, a younger partner.  Claude Lussier was born in 1916 to a mother with a maiden name of LeBrun, suggesting that the men were related in some way. Sylva LeBrun and Claude Lussier were described as next door neighbors and Lussier took on the role of god-parent to one of LeBrun’s children, further demonstrating the closeness of their business and family relationships.

1940 Sherbrooke Daily Record advertisement from for LeBrun-Lussier Sugar Evaporator.

The 1930s were tumultuous times for LeBrun. In 1934 a fire destroyed a large historic barn at his farm south of Waterloo. In 1935 he ran for a seat in the national assembly as a conservative; however, he lost that election. Still wishing to get into politics, in 1937 he was elected mayor of the village of Waterloo, a seat he held until 1941.

In January 1940, Sylva LeBrun broke away from the hardware and manufacturing business in Waterloo and opened a new business called the Dominion Evaporator Company in Montreal. He established the company on Le Devoir Avenue and soon after relocated with his family to Montreal. Following the death of Charles E. Grimm in 1943, LeBrun purchased the Grimm Manufacturing Company of Montreal in 1953, forming Dominion & Grimm, Incorporated. The history of Dominion & Grimm will be covered in another blog post.

Advertisement from 1945 for Lussier & Sons featuring the LeBrun & Lussier Evaporator.

With LeBrun leaving for Montreal, Claude Lussier took control of the Waterloo hardware and manufacturing company and by 1945, it was called Lussier & Sons, or Lussier et Fils in French.  Although the differences int the designs are not clear, the company continued to sell a “LeBrun” model and a “Lussier & Sons” model of evaporators.

1964 advertisement from the Sherbrooke Daily Record for Societe Ares Ltee, formerly Lussier & Sons.

 

Lussier & Sons continued in business until 1952 when they sold the hardware store and evaporator company to Raymond Ares and his son Andre Ares.  For a few years, the Ares family continued to operate under the name of Lussier & Sons selling the Lussier & Sons and the LeBrun evaporators.

By 1964 Raymond and Andre Ares had changed their company name to Societe Ares Ltee but continued selling the Lussier & Sons model of evaporator. In time, Andre Ares took over management of the company following the death of Raymond in 1975  and until it was sold to Ernest Bieri in 1982. Bieri had begun working for Ares and the company as manager in 1979. It appears that following the death of Raymond the company dropped the name of Societe Ares Ltee and began to refer to itself as l’évaporateur Waterloo by early 1976, with a note that it was previously Ares.

Waterloo Evaporators catalog cover, circa 1982.

In 1996 Waterloo Evaporators, Inc. combined forces with Small Brothers to form one company Waterloo/Small Incorporated which continued to be run by Bieri. (see Small Brothers company history post). Then in 2001 Waterloo/Small Inc. was sold to Lapierre Equipment, Inc. to form the largest Canadian manufacturer of maple syrup equipment and supplies.