It’s Wayback Wednesday, sponsored by Jamie Lockwood, broker/owner of Sutton Group Muskoka Realty!
The Anglo Canadian Leather Company had a long and storied history in Huntsville.
In 1890, David Alexander and William Sutherland Shaw were granted a tax exemption for 10 years to establish a tannery in the village. They purchased a site bounded by Centre and Susan streets. Shaw also ran a tannery in Bracebridge, built at the same time. His father, Brackley Shaw, became one of Canada’s great industrialists of the time. The Shaw family produced half of the sole leather tanned in Canada and were the largest sole leather manufacturers in the British Empire. The company had offices in Montreal, Toronto and Quebec City.
Production at the tannery began in 1891. It produced between 12-16 tons of Spanish sole leather per week using imported leather and local tanbark (hemlock bark).
W. Shaw called in his cousin, Charles Orlando (C.O.) Shaw from Michigan to take charge of both of the company’s tanneries in Muskoka. C.O. pushed the workers harder than they were used to, leading to the first strike in Huntsville’s history by the worn-out men. But when C.O. Shaw refused to budge, and threatened to hire new workers if the others didn’t return to work, they came back the following week without a pay raise.
By 1906, the tannery employed 200 hands, not including the men who collected hemlock bark from the bush.
Many of its workers were Italian. Peter Boley was the first Italian worker at the tannery, joined by his friend Luigi Allemano in 1906. Tannery owner C.O. Shaw was so impressed by their work ethic that he asked them to return to their hometown to recruit more men, which they did in 1913.
It was a harsh way to make a living. The smell of the plant was so overwhelming that new recruits often vomited when they entered the buildings for the first time.
In 1937, workers walked out over a pay dispute – they wanted an increase of five cents per hour and a 54-hour work week. They made $10 to $11.50 per week at a time when a statutory minimum wage of $17 for 44-hour week was being debated. They also demanded better sanitary conditions: there were no towels, no soap, and no men’s room in the plant.
The tannery shut down for a period in 1938 due to sluggish markets, but was revived during the war effort.
In 1952 the company moved its head office to Huntsville from Montreal, and in 1953 the plant was sold to Canada Packers.
The bottom dropped out of the leather market later that decade, and soon after Canada Packers chose to close the plant.
It burned in a spectacular fire in June 1962.
Photo from the 1967 Old Home Week program, courtesy of Glen Duffield. Details from Huntsville: With Spirit and Resolve.
See more Wayback Wednesday photos here.
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I sat on my motorcycle, up by where, it may have been the power transmission house was. It smelled a bit like a barbecue gone wrong.
They had been removing metals from the old vats and the cutting torches had penetrated to wood somewhere.
You could watch the heat climb inside as the old siding would melt like wax and expose the beams which were buckling.
Somebody came up and told me not to stay there in case the wires came down. He thought they might still be live.
I rode down a side street to watch some more. There were men in the lumberyard hosing down the stacks of lumber, in case the heat carried sparks or chunks of flaming ‘whatever’ into the yard.
It was a pretty eventful evening.
I remember the fire and a friend and I helped carry some of the files from the office part of the building.