Just as the story of Roustan Sports Ltd. cannot be told without exploring the history of one of its predecessor companies, Hespeler St. Marys Wood Specialties, the story of Hespeler St. Marys Wood Specialties likewise cannot be told without some important background information about Hespeler, where hockey sticks were proudly Canadian-made under various banners for a full century.
This background is important because while the community of Hespeler plays a monumentally important role in Roustan Sports’ story, so too does the Hespeler family and its descendants.
The hometown of NHL players like Tim Brent, Don ‘Red’ Laurence, Steve McKenna, Paul Woods and four-time Stanley Cup champion Kirk Maltby, the community was named after Jacob Hespeler, an early settler who was born in 1811 in Wurttemberg, now part of Germany.
He immigrated to the United States as a young man and worked in the fur trade with John Jacob Astor before taking a job with the Hudson’s Bay Company that brought him to Canada.
In 1835, he arrived in the settlement of Preston, where the Speed and Grand rivers meet and continue their journey to Lake Erie. Hespeler built a flour mill and a distillery along the Grand and opened a general store. He also served as Preston’s postmaster, firmly establishing himself as an important community member. When Preston was incorporated as a village in 1852, Hespeler became its first reeve. (1)
But his success and that of Preston came with challenges.
The village developed so rapidly that Hespeler was soon boxed in. The Erb family that had founded Preston declined to sell him any additional property, perhaps seeing him as a threat to their own prosperity, so Hespeler was unable to expand his operations there.
He resorted to moving a few miles up the Speed River, where he bought land and water rights in and around a nearby hamlet called New Hope. Hespeler built a huge dam, a flour mill, and a sawmill, later adding a cooperage and a distillery. (2) The mills were originally intended to supply his store in Preston, where by this time he was also the village’s magistrate, but New Hope started to also grow through his power and influence. (3)
Hockey’s Oldest Business – Since 1847: Introduction Geoff Seagram turned 88 years old in January 2025, but he still remembers the joy of getting a new Canadian-made wooden hockey stick for Christmas when he was a kid.
A railway was proposed to connect the larger towns of Galt and Guelph in 1852, and Hespeler maneuvered to take control of its board of directors and arrange for the railway to go through both Preston and New Hope, along rights-of-way that necessitated the purchase of his lands. (4) This proved especially consequential in New Hope, which had not yet been built up to the extent that Preston had. The railway went right through Hespeler’s lands as he intended, and he then subdivided those properties for future development. He received an extra $1,000 for the land on which New Hope’s railway station was built, very close to the road to Guelph. (5)
The activity surrounding railway construction inspired Hespeler to take steps that would put New Hope on the fast track to independence. Although he was still the reeve and postmaster in Preston, he organized a census of New Hope to encourage the provincial authorities to incorporate that community. When New Hope officially became a village in 1858, Hespeler’s importance was recognized when the village was renamed in his honor. Fittingly, he became the first reeve there as well. (6)
Other members of Hespeler’s family emigrated from Wurttemberg and joined him in Waterloo County.
Jacob’s younger brother, William Hespeler, worked with him in Preston and later co-founded Granite Mills on Beaver Creek (now Laurel Creek) in the village of Waterloo in 1857. His partners were George Randall and, later, William Roos, and they operated a general store and a distillery along with the flour mill. By 1861, the mill was reportedly producing 12,000 barrels of flour every year, along with 3,000 barrels of whisky. (7)
When William Hespeler temporarily returned to Wurttemberg, he brought a young man named Joseph Emm Seagram into Granite Mills to look after his interests.
Seagram, who had been working at a mill in Stratford in nearby Perth County, soon bought Hespeler out. He cemented his connection with the Hespeler family by marrying Stephanie Erbs, the niece of Jacob and William; their sister Marie was Stephanie’s mother.
What this means is that every descendant of Joseph Seagram is also a descendant of the Hespeler family. (Another Hespeler sister, Charlotte, became the mother of Sir Adam Beck, the founder of Ontario Hydro.)
By 1883, Seagram had also bought out Randall and Roos to become the sole owner of Granite Mills. He renamed the operation after himself, and we’ll learn more about him in a later chapter because he’s yet another of the forefathers at Roustan Sports Ltd.
Back in the village of Hespeler, Jacob Hespeler and George Randall had become involved in another venture that, after many twists and turns, will also impact our story.
Jacob purchased some additional land and a sawmill on the south side of the Speed River and flipped them to a partnership consisting of Randall and two other men, one of whom was Hespeler’s son-in-law, Herbert Farr. These men started a textile mill called Randall Farr and Company. Within a few years, they sold out to yet another partnership between Jonathan Schofield and Robert Forbes. (8)
Forbes, born in 1814, was a Scottish immigrant who came to Canada in the late 1830s and settled first in Hamilton, later moving to Galt and then to Hespeler. He worked at and owned several businesses before joining forces with Schofield.
After Forbes bought full control of the firm in November 1880, he changed its name to R. Forbes and Company. This development coincided with the death of Jacob Hespeler only a few months later, in March 1881; Robert Forbes soon took his place as the village’s most prominent industrialist.
He brought his sons, James and George, into the operation and prepared them to take over. James passed away unexpectedly in 1891, and Robert died in 1895 at age 81. George Duthie Forbes, born in 1860 in nearby Puslinch Township in Wellington County, was now in full control of R. Forbes and Company.
Like his father, and like Jacob Hespeler, George used his mill to build a base of power and influence. The mill was the village’s largest employer, and Forbes became known locally as ‘The Chief.’ He was acclaimed the first mayor of Hespeler when it was officially elevated from village to town status in 1901, and he held that position for 13 years, during which time he went beyond normal mayoral responsibilities and took personal control of Hespeler’s business and industrial sector. (9)
One business Forbes took a specific interest in was the Clark and Demill Company, originally of Galt. W.C. Clark and W.E. Demill were mechanics who began building machinery to manufacture wood products.
Their idea was a good one, but perhaps they were simply not the right men to run such a business. In 1905, shortly after moving the operation to Hespeler, they gave up control, and the Clark and Demill Company was reorganized as Clark-Demill under the direction of six new investors, including Forbes. (10) The new factory was located in a growing industrial area on Sheffield Street, on the north side of the Speed. Forbes appears to have owned the land that became this industrial area, as local bylaws note that the land had been surveyed on his behalf – notably, not on the town’s behalf – in 1905. (11)
One of the other directors was an educator and hopeful entrepreneur named Zachariah Adam Hall, who was Forbes’ future brother-in-law.
Better known as Z.A. Hall, he was born in 1865 in Millbank in Perth County and worked for many years as an educator, teaching first in Wallenstein, a hamlet in Wellesley Township in Waterloo County, and then in Preston. While in Preston, he became the principal of the public school and a member of the county board of examiners, a role that led to him helping to establish a school in Galt that was responsible for the training of new teachers. (12)
It is not readily apparent how Hall entered George Forbes’ orbit, but he left the Preston school in 1901 and took a job managing the business of the Forbes estate in Hespeler. (13) His financial acumen and his budding relationship with Forbes served him well when he joined Clark-Demill as a director.
Hall also followed Forbes’ examples by getting into municipal politics, being elected to Preston council in 1906 and becoming the town’s reeve in 1907, and by diversifying his business interests.
Hall formed a partnership with another local man named Oscar Zryd, and together, they bought a factory in Grimsby that manufactured stoves, ranges and furnaces. The Walker Steel Range Company had moved to Grimsby from its original home in Windsor in 1905. (14) But it would not remain in Grimsby very long – the new owners renamed it the Hall Zryd Foundry Company and moved it to Hespeler soon after, occupying four buildings on adjoining lots on Sheffield Street. All four buildings had been constructed in 1907 in the industrial area formerly owned by Forbes, and were originally occupied by two separate industries.
These two industries, although separate, were linked in many ways. Their origins are murky, they were both granted matching $15,000 loans by the town of Hespeler, they both began operation in 1907, and they both folded in 1910, defaulting on their loans.
The mystery originates in three bylaws passed by the town and circulated by newspaper articles and advertisements of the time; the first bylaw, passed at the end of 1906, granted a loan to an enterprise to be called the Hespeler Machine and Tool Company, with its buildings to be erected on Lots 3 and 4 on Sheffield Street. The second bylaw, passed in early 1907, facilitated the establishment of the Hespeler Hoisting Machinery Company on Lots 5 and 6. (15) News reports referred to both pending businesses by those names. (16)
Instead, they operated under different names – Hespeler Machine and Tool became the Dominion Heating and Ventilating Company, and Hespeler Hoisting Machinery, a passenger and freight elevator manufacturer that had moved to town from Hamilton, became the Parkin Elevator Company. This is borne out by the town’s actions when the companies folded and the properties were seized and resold. It was noted in another bylaw governing the sale that the loan for the business on Lots 3 and 4 had been granted to the Dominion Heating and Ventilation Company, and the loan for the entity on Lots 5 and 6 had been issued to the Parkin Elevator Company. (17) It proves that the original companies both changed their names, but no evidence has been found to determine when this happened or why, so the mystery remains unsolved.
Dominion Heating and Ventilating Company had occupied two buildings on Lots 3 and 4, and Parkin Elevator Company was in the other two buildings on Lots 5 and 6.
Hall and Zryd purchased them together, taking out new mortgages, and re-established their foundry. (18) Hespeler’s fire insurance plan produced in March 1917 shows that the old elevator plant was being used as a machine shop and a moulding shop, and the other buildings served as another machine shop and a pattern building. (19) Hall and Zryd also set up a network of distributors for the products they manufactured, which were soon being sold across Canada.
Things were busy on Sheffield Street, a short dead-end road that became Hespeler’s industrial heart, fronting onto an important branch line of what was then the Grand Trunk Railway.
The Clark-Demill Company was reorganized again in 1909 as the Hespeler Machinery Company, with George Forbes as president. (20) A year later, Forbes spearheaded the amalgamation of that business with others in Galt, Preston, and Sussex, New Brunswick, that specialized in building woodworking machinery and tools. The result was the Canada Machinery Corporation Ltd., and Forbes became its first president. (21) The company was based in Galt and gradually shut down the other locations; the Preston site was taken over in 1921 by E.B. Salyerds as the new home of his hockey stick factory. (22) The Hespeler site closed in 1923. (23)
Hockey’s Oldest Business – Since 1847: Chapter 2 – Preston The Hilborn Company of
Ayr had many competitors in the early days of the made-in-Canada hockey stick business.
Although he considered himself a stove manufacturer first and foremost, according to the Canadian censuses of 1911, 1921 and 1931, the ambitious Hall was still interested in politics and served one term as a Conservative MPP in the Ontario Legislature, representing the riding of Waterloo South. After his political career ended in 1919, he devoted his energies to his growing family – he had married Margaret Forbes, George’s sister, in 1909 – and to his thriving business career, which was destined to go through significant changes in the 1920s.
The exact details appear to be lost to time, but by 1921, Hall and Zryd had assumed managerial control of the hockey stick factory in Hespeler that had been started the previous year by E.C. Salyerds.
We established in a previous chapter that the new factory was situated in the “Hall-Zyrd (sic) annex,” indicating that Hall and Zryd owned the property if not also the stick operation. (24) Although a 1920 newspaper article had indicated the business would have a different name, it was incorporated that year as the Hespeler Wood Specialty Company Ltd., with a capitalization of $100,000. (25)
Buildings on Sheffield Street have come and gone over the past century, but fire insurance plans of Hespeler produced in 1917 and 1947 prove that the two buildings, which were constructed in 1907 for Dominion Heating and Ventilating, became the beginnings of Hespeler Wood Specialty. (26) An undated blueprint of the survey of the property, subdivided for George Forbes in 1905, places this factory on Lot 3, with Lots 4, 5 and 6 being used by the foundry. (27)
What this means is that although Roustan Sports Ltd. traces its beginnings back to 1847 in Ayr, Ontario, and hockey stick manufacturing in its history dates to the early 1890s in Ayr and in nearby Preston, its predecessors did not start making sticks in Hespeler until 1920.
It’s not known what hockey background Hall had, if any, before he embarked on this venture, but he took to it right away, and in his capacity as president and manager of the operation, he immediately began creating new designs for sticks.
Starting in 1921, he successfully filed numerous patents in Canada and the United States for two-piece hockey sticks and three-piece goalie sticks.
It was clear the business would be successful when the company started filling orders from as far away as Brooklyn, New York. (28) In 1923, a two-storey brick addition to the plant was constructed at a cost of $28,000, with the hope of doubling the factory’s output; a newspaper article noted that the company already had enough orders “to keep the plant going nine hours a day the year around.” This brick addition brought the operation right to the edge of Sheffield Street, provided significant office and warehouse space, and was the basis for many historic photos of the factory’s exterior.
A 1926 newspaper advertisement specifically identified two of the brands that the company made and sold. One was “the world-famous Supreme” and the other was called “The Canada,” which the ad described as having met with “the highest approval of expert hockey players. It is laminated, tongue and grooved and taped to insure (sic) strength where most needed and to prevent warping. Also the back of the handle goes clear through to the ‘heel’ of the stick, so that the end-grain takes all the wear, prolonging the usefulness of the stick. Patented in Canada and the United States.” (30)
Hall’s motivation for his various patents, according to his descriptions that can be found online, was to make use of wood that under normal circumstances would have been considered scrap.
He progressed from spline joints to interlocking joints to hold the pieces of the sticks together. Bill Marshall, Hall’s grandson, has done considerable research into Hall’s inventiveness and said the key to the success of his designs was the waterproof glue that he used on the joints and kept as a trade secret.
“The early sticks were not reinforced with fibreglass so had to be physically stronger just via the glue joints,” Marshall said in an email interview.
Hespeler Wood Specialty quickly developed a reputation for quality, which caught the attention of pro hockey players, some of whom asked Hall to create custom sticks for them.
In the fall of 1932, Hall sued the Canadian Hockey Stick Company, a rival hockey stick manufacturer in nearby New Hamburg, for creating a two-piece stick that he argued infringed on one of his patents. The issue seems to have stemmed from the other company not believing Hall’s design was unique enough to have deserved a patent.
Hall sought an injunction that would have prevented his rival from continuing with production, but his request was denied. (31) Undaunted, Hall placed newspaper advertisements warning dealers that the matter was going to trial and that if they obtained sticks from the Canadian Hockey Stick Company and Hall was successful in his suit, they would forfeit their stock and possibly also be forced to pay damages to the Hespeler firm. (32)
Hall won the case in the spring of 1933, with the judgment offering him the choice of claiming damages or an assessment of the Canadian Company’s profits. He was also awarded costs. (33)
By then, Hall was accustomed to fighting for what he wanted. The Hall-Zryd union had broken up acrimoniously in 1927, with Hall settling the matter early the following year by buying out his former partner and assuming full control over the foundry – renamed the Hall Foundry – and Hespeler Wood Specialty. (34) Zryd began running a local flour mill and operated it until his death in 1936.
Hall also took over the former CMC plant – the one that his brother-in-law, George Forbes, had once controlled – and started yet another new factory to build wagons and sleds. (35) Marshall said this exemplified his grandfather’s interest in children – which is not a surprise given his first career as an educator – along with his desire to create goods for kids “outside of his foundry products, stoves and furnaces, for heavy industry.
The result was that the boom of births that followed the First World War formed a generation who had hockey in their blood because of the availability of inexpensive hockey sticks.”
The patent lawsuit was probably Hall’s last fight as owner of Hespeler Wood Specialty. It was amalgamated with three other local hockey stick manufacturers from Ayr, Preston and St. Marys in 1933, indicating that he likely sold out to the Seagram family and their holding company, Waterloo Wood Products Ltd., that same year.
But he didn’t stop tinkering even after he left that business, obtaining patents for hockey sticks as late as 1936. He remained an important manufacturer in Hespeler, where he continued to run the Hall Foundry and a related firm, Standard Castings and Manufacturing, until his death in May 1952 at age 87. A fire in September 1951 destroyed both of his plants, but Hall lived long enough to see the Hall Foundry re-emerge at the same site, albeit as a smaller operation. Later known as Hallmac, it produced stoves and furnaces until the 1980s, next door to the hockey stick factory that Hall had nurtured and developed through most of its earliest days.
Hall probably never imagined that the stick factory would outlive the foundry and continue to exist in its original location well into the following century. We think he would be proud to know that the business he incorporated in Hespeler more than 100 years ago would still be crafting Canadian-made wooden sticks today as Roustan Sports Ltd.
Jonathon Jackson is a hockey historian based in Guelph, Ontario.
(11) Town of Hespeler Bylaw No. 211 (1906), November 5, 1906; Town of Hespeler Bylaw No. 222 (1907), March x, 1907; Town of Hespeler Bylaw No. 268 (1911), March 6, 1911.
(15) Town of Hespeler Bylaw No. 211 (1906), November 5, 1906; Town of Hespeler Bylaw No. 222 (1907), March x, 1907.
(19) Chas. E. Goad Co., “Hespeler, Ontario,” Surveyed September 1910, Revised to March 1917.
(26) Chas. E. Goad Co., “Hespeler, Ontario,” 1910-1917; Underwriters’ Survey Bureau Limited, “Hespeler, Ontario,” February 1947.
(27) Division of Forbes Lot, Plan 88. Courtesy of the City of Cambridge Archives.
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