How Quebec Farmers Took On Vermont’s Maple Syrup King—and Won

By Peter Kuitenbrouwer – The Walrus

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.