How Quebec Farmers Took On Vermont’s Maple Syrup King—and Won |
The first person to get rich from the sweet products of maple trees was an American. George Clinton Cary was born in 1864 on a farm in Fort Fairfield, in eastern Maine, on the border of New Brunswick. As a boy of ten, Cary was already a budding farmer and had his own pair of steers. By age twenty-two, Cary was looking beyond the farming industry and became a travelling grocery salesman, moving goods by horse and buggy throughout Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire.
The legend of Cary’s start in the maple business began in the spring of 1886. Cary’s wagon, pulled by a team of horses, got stuck in the mud on a road in Craftsbury, northern Vermont. The overnight low would refreeze the roads, so the young salesman had to stop for the night. This unscheduled lull gave Cary lots of time to try to convince a local storekeeper to buy his wares. The grocer had no money but offered to place an order if Cary would take payment in maple sugar at 4.5 cents per pound. Cary agreed, and found himself with 1,500 pounds of maple sugar. On a train later that spring, Cary met a tobacco salesman and learned that tobacco companies bought Barbados cane sugar to flavour plug chewing tobacco and paid five cents per pound. Cary smelled an opportunity and finessed a deal to ship the maple sugar to a Virginia tobacco company. Then he went looking for more maple sugar. This lucrative partnership for tobacco flavoured with maple sugar from both the United States and Canada would endure for decades, and it underpinned Cary’s rise to omnipotence in the world of maple products.
Cary packed the maple sugar in wooden crates and loaded it onto trains for shipment to tobacco companies. Cary was a fairly tall man, about six feet, and of solid build. A Boston newspaper compared him to the oxen that pulled the sap-gathering tanks on sleds through his sugar bush, and he demonstrated a similar determination. His business grew, and in 1898, he built a warehouse in Saint Johnsbury, Vermont, near the meeting of the Boston and Maine Railroad and the Saint Johnsbury and Lake Champlain Railroad. This turned into a chain of warehouses along Vermont railway lines. Cary hired hundreds of local sugar buyers.
Like a gluttonous dinner guest, Cary developed a voracious appetite. He wanted more sugar, and the best place to find it was across the border in Canada. The Cary Maple Sugar Company spread its sales force into Quebec. To corner the market, Cary made his buyers sign a contract to buy maple sugar and syrup for his company at prices named by Cary and “to buy no maple sugar or syrup for any other party.” Cary paid his US and Quebec buyers a commission of one-quarter of one cent per pound of maple sugar, and three cents per gallon for maple syrup. By 1901, Cary reported that he had sold close to 1 million pounds of maple sugar. The St. Johnsbury Caledonian newspaper crowned Cary “Maple Sugar King.” By 1904, The Cary Maple Sugar Company was the biggest maple sweetener company in North America.
By the 1920s, Cary controlled up to 80 percent of the world’s bulk maple sugar and syrup market. Up to two-thirds of the Beauce region’s sugar in the first decades of the twentieth century went to Cary in Vermont. Cary set the price he paid for the maple sugar. In each Quebec village, Cary’s buyer would meet the local farmers on the steps of their Catholic church after Mass in spring and offer a price; the farmers would discuss it and consult their priest. With Cary’s clout, they usually said yes.
Cary’s power grew. He bought a string of farms in North Danville, Vermont, and renamed them Highland Farms, becoming one of the largest landowners in the county. As packaging and taste evolved, Cary moved from buying sugar to buying maple syrup. Continuing to innovate, Cary pioneered the use of steel barrels as a more efficient way to move bulk syrup. Supplying the barrels to syrup makers became a kind of informal contract to ensure some loyalty the next spring when the producers had more syrup to sell.
Sugaring had been a bucolic springtime activity, replete with priests sprinkling the sugar bush with holy water to help the run of sap, horse-drawn sleds to gather sap from the maple trees, and eager families gathered in the sugar shack around the billowing steam from the evaporator, happy to taste the sweet elixir of spring. But as the maple syrup industry evolved, it crashed into the industrial realities of the twentieth century, and here our story veers pell-mell into the world of big business, market capitalism, razor-thin margins, predatory monopolistic enterprises, technical innovation and industrial expansion, arson, rebellion, and theft—all set against the backdrop of unpredictable weather. This is the story of the fall of Cary, and the rise in power of Quebec, Inc., to global dominance of the maple syrup business.
Maple syrup producers are farmers, not salespeople. Both US and Canadian farmers initially welcomed George Cary: he bought all their product and took away the hassle of haggling with consumers, grocery stores, or dealers. But his power also rattled them. Cary called the shots: he paid Quebec farmers four cents per pound for maple sugar in the 1910s, but in 1923, he........