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 cut the price to two cents and then, a year later, convinced the US government to close the border to force a further drop in the price of Canadian maple sugar.
Syrup farmers on both sides of the border decided to organize, reasoning that unity would give them strength to bargain with Cary and keep more maple money in their own pockets. Vermont maple producers formed a co-operative in the early 1920s. Two things doomed that effort: the independent nature for which Vermont farmers are famous, and the lack of capital to get the enterprise underway. The Vermont co-op even had to rent syrup barrels from Cary. Not long after its birth, the Vermont co-operative collapsed in bankruptcy, with Cary’s company buying up its remaining products and equipment.
Before World War II, farmers in Canada who made maple sugar or maple syrup in larger quantities, whose main export market has always been, and remains, the US, served at the mercy of a few buyers. Cary was the most famous: the Maple King had the power to dictate the price of maple sugar and maple syrup.
This servitude lasted until Quebec farmers organized. In their bid to unite and flex power, maple syrup farmers had a specific geographic advantage: nobody has successfully established a sugar bush in Europe or Asia; the tree that makes maple syrup thrives only in the northeast of North America. Once Quebec syrup farmers organized, they had a better chance to wrest control of the price.
The visionary, the Napoleonesque figure behind the move to unite Quebec maple farmers and take on the power of Cary, was Cyrille Vaillancourt. One of a family of fifteen children who grew up south of Quebec City, Vaillancourt is a founding father of the modern maple syrup industry in Quebec. Vaillancourt later led what is now North America’s biggest credit union (Desjardins), sat in the Senate of Canada from 1944 to 1969, and was named to the Order of the British Empire. But his origins were in maple syrup.
Vaillancourt’s story begins in the village of Saint-Anselme on the Etchemin River, southeast of Quebec City; a place whose religious devotion and rural simplicity would shape the man Vaillancourt would become. In the 1820s, the Catholic Church commissioned Quebec architect Thomas Baillairgé to design a church for the town; the stone sanctuary opened its doors in 1850. During this period, Cyrille’s grandfather built the village’s first sawmill and flour mill. Cyrille’s mother, Marie-Louise, married Cyrille-Émille Vaillancourt, a doctor. His father was later elected to Parliament as a Liberal.
When Vaillancourt was eight, his parents sent him to the Saint-Louis-de-Gonzague boarding school in Quebec City, where he played a bit of hockey. Later, he attended university, majoring in philosophy. After a brief stint as a journalist, Cyrille returned home as a young man and applied for a job at the St. Anselme post office. The local member of Parliament was a Conservative; as the son of a Liberal, Vaillancourt couldn’t get a federal job. He travelled quite a distance west along the St. Lawrence River and found work with the Trappist Fathers at their monastery in Oka, west of Montreal, a centre of agricultural research still renowned today for excellent cheese. The monks sought to design a chicken coop that would incite chickens to lay eggs in winter. Vaillancourt’s job paid $10 a month but only required one hour’s work a day; Vaillancourt spent the rest of the time in classes, including a course on beekeeping.
World War I hit, and sugar was scarce; the Province of Quebec hired Vaillancourt to teach Quebec farmers to keep bees. His pay soared to $3 a day. He criss-crossed Quebec by train and horse and buggy to talk bees. Vaillancourt put a beehive in the window of a department store on St. Catherine Street, the principal shopping thoroughfare of Montreal; a thick throng of gawkers blocked the street, and the police ordered him to remove the hive. Vaillancourt founded a newspaper, L’abeille, or the Bee, to help teach beekeeping, unite the beekeepers, and help them with classification and honey packaging.
Seeing Vaillancourt’s success with honey, after the war, the Government of Quebec gave him a new assignment: maple syrup. To raise the quality of the product and attract more sales, the province had, in 1914, created the first sugaring school, or sucrerie école, in Sainte-Louise, northeast of Quebec City. In 1918, Quebec’s minister of agriculture enrolled Vaillancourt in the school.
At the time, maple sugarers in Quebec had few standards and less regard for quality; those who made a lot of maple sugar sold most of it to American buyers, principally George Cary. Cary’s buyers at the time paid the same price for any maple sugar or maple syrup, regardless of quality. In one sugar shack, a producer told Vaillancourt: “We’re not going to travel 100 miles to sell our sugar. The American buyers come to us. They buy our nice sugar at the same price, whether it’s brown, blond, black, or not very nice.” And the prices were low. One day, a sugar buyer arrived by train at the station at Bras d’Apic, east of Quebec City, and offered farmers five cents a pound for their maple sugar, adding that he could just as well offer two cents since he was the only one there.
The Cary company in the early twentieth century bought up to two-thirds of the sugar produced in Quebec’s most prolific sugaring region, the Beauce. This particular maple sugar, known at the time as Beauce Sugar, was darker and had a stronger flavour, making it the preferred sweetener to blend with tobacco.
It was akin to a race to the bottom. Vaillancourt was not proud of the era’s maple sugar. Producers, Vaillancourt said, made sugar in loaves of ten to eighteen pounds, of every shape and colour, and packed them in empty bags that had contained bran, oats, or even cement. The farmers brought their sugar to the train station, packed in torn and gutted bags and carried on wagons that had been used for anything save for moving clean products. Vaillancourt later told a biographer: “I thought, ‘If this is really our national sweetener, we have to get out of this rut and present the product with more dignity.’”
Quebec’s deputy minister of agriculture told Vaillancourt that, to improve quality, he’d have to convince buyers to pay more for higher-grade syrup and sugar. The biggest buyer was Cary. In 1925, Vaillancourt decided to visit him. He had taken some English classes as a child but never mastered the language; Vaillancourt asked the deputy minister to join him for the trip. The train that carried the two men clattered past the warehouses where Cary stockpiled maple sugar on its way to the headquarters of the Cary Maple Sugar Company in St. Johnsbury. Sitting across from the Maple King in his spacious office, Vaillancourt asked Cary to pay producers more for higher-quality maple syrup and maple sugar. Cary refused. Vaillancourt then told Cary, to the deputy minister’s surprise, that producers would form a co-operative to take control of syrup quality and to wrest better rates for their wares.
Cary laughed in his face. Then, with a sardonic grin, Cary dared Vaillancourt to try to gain control over the price of maple sugar and maple syrup. Cary told him that the people of Vermont had tried to form a co-operative but failed and went bankrupt, after which Cary bought their syrup barrels for pennies. According to Vaillancourt, Cary said: “Today they all bring me their products, and they don’t speak of their failed co-operative. You won’t do any better, young man, and you will soon be happy to see me again. I am still the Maple King.”
After his 1925 Vermont visit, Vaillancourt returned to Canada not defeated but rather determined. Gathering together seventeen maple syrup producers that year in the village of Plessisville, southeast of Quebec City, in the heart of sugar maple country, Vaillancourt founded the Company of Sugar and Pure Maple Syrup Producers, known in French as the Société coopérative des producteurs de sucre d’érable. To communicate with them, he renamed his newspaper L’abeille et l’érable, or the Bee and the Maple.
Vaillancourt realized that the maple sweetener industry could never win a price war with cheaper cane sugar and corn syrup. For maple sugar and maple syrup to survive, they’d need to evolve them into a specialty or luxury product. But he faced a tall task: to prove that he could command a premium price for higher-quality maple syrup and sugar. He sent empty barrels to the seventeen producers and asked them to fill the containers with their finest syrup. Vaillancourt wasn’t too sure how to sell the high-quality syrup, so he asked the producers to send it to his home in Lévis, on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, across from Quebec City.
Workers at the Lévis train station were a bit surprised to see the syrup barrels pile up on the platform. His wife may have raised an eyebrow when Vaillancourt took it all home and stored the syrup in his basement.
In 1925, during his lunch hour or when he got home from his government job, Vaillancourt went to see possible syrup or maple sugar clients: friends of his brothers, doctors, lawyers, government officials. Some ordered one gallon of syrup, some took two. Vaillancourt set up a stove in his basement, and at night, after a quick supper, he and his wife, Marie-Blanche Normandin, boiled syrup for clients who had ordered maple sugar, which they stored in waxed paper.
The next day he wrapped his twenty little loaves of sugar to make a twenty-pound package. With the package under his arm, and carrying two one-gallon jugs of syrup in the other hand, he caught the streetcar that stopped in front of his house. At the port, he boarded the ferry to cross the river to Quebec City. On the city side, he took another streetcar to deliver the sugar and syrup.
Somehow, that year, Vaillancourt managed to move 3,000 pounds of syrup on his own. The co-op began to grow. The co-op rented a room in the basement of the Plessisville City Hall and expanded to the house next door a year later, but they couldn’t fit all the syrup. One night, an agronomist working with the group slept the night on top of a delivery of five-gallon cans to keep them safe, because people had heard about the quality of the syrup, and everyone wanted some. Vaillancourt’s promotional efforts met with success: producers saw their payment for a gallon of syrup rise—and, most importantly, saw a pricing structure emerge that rewarded syrup quality with a better price.
Vaillancourt’s efforts improved the quality of maple syrup and its appeal at home, but Cary was not defeated yet. Cary decided to expand his footprint northward; in 1929, on land purchased from the Canadian Pacific Railroad, the Cary Maple Sugar Company opened a three-storey plant in Lennoxville, in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, near the heart of maple syrup territory, with two elevators and a thirty-eight-metre smokestack. The plant featured the latest equipment to store, handle, cook, and pack huge volumes of maple syrup. Cary opened the factory to produce exports of syrup for British markets, thus sidestepping British duties on US products.
Pride goeth before the fall; the meteoric rise of Cary’s empire was surpassed only by its cataclysmic collapse—partly due to the syrup producers’ collective action and also due to the Great Depression of 1929, to which we must add Cary’s own hubris. Cary had visited Washington, DC, to call on the government to raise the tariff on maple sugar from Canada to eight cents per pound, effective mid-1930. To avoid paying the higher tariff, Cary bought as much Quebec maple sugar as he could find.
The American Tobacco Company knew Cary had lots of sugar and wanted to pay a lower price. Cary refused. He was left with a massive inventory of sugar and no buyer. With the global economy in free fall, bankers stopped loaning money to Cary. In the summer of 1931, he resigned as president of the Cary Maple Sugar Company. In September 1931, Cary declared bankruptcy, owing more than $3 million, much of it to Canadian banks. Suffering from stress, two months later, Cary died of kidney failure.
“Maple Sugar King Is Dead” announced the headline on the front page of the Brattleboro Daily Reformer for November 23, 1931, adding, “George C. Cary of St. Johnsbury Had World’s Biggest Business at One Time—67 Years Old.” One had to read the obituary to understand that, rather than the “world’s biggest business,” it was, in fact, the world’s largest maple sugar company. Creditors took control of the Cary Company.
The repercussions were devastating: maple prices plummeted, and syrup makers went bankrupt. Vaillancourt asked for help from Joseph-Léonide Perron, Quebec minister of agriculture. Perron told Vaillancourt that, if syrup makers put in one cent per pound of sugar to sustain the co-op, the province would double their money. Vaillancourt addressed a hall in Plessisville packed with 800 members of the nascent syrup co-operative, all of them frightened for the future of their industry.
“When a little boy is drowning in a river,” Vaillancourt told them, “when even his mother is shouting from the river-bank, ‘Pray to Saint Anne!’ the boy needs to swim, not to pray. I don’t think the saints can do anything for us; it’s our turn to swim.” More than 750 members signed on to pay a tithe to the co-operative. The group raised $32,000.
Faith remained central to Vaillancourt and to his fledgling syrup co-operative. In 1934, in the dark days of the Great Depression, the syrup producers’ co-operative, known today as Citadelle, coopérative de producteurs de sirop d’érable, asked a priest to compose for them a kind of prayer of consecration to the Sacred Heart, which the syrup makers’ newspaper, L’abeille et l’érable, published each June through 1970, so that syrup producers might recite the words as a family.
Vaillancourt believed that faith mixed with teamwork would conquer all. In a 1934 edition of a Quebec government pamphlet for syrup makers, Vaillancourt wrote: “According to the 1931 census, there are in Canada 46,639 cultivators tending 24.2 million maples; if all these sugar makers did a bit of promotion, either by themselves or by organizing co-operatives, imagine how far we could develop our industry! It’s always the same thing: an isolated man is weak, but, linked to others through a co-operative, what a powerhouse he can become! A bee in a hive is nothing, but a whole swarm together, what strength!”
The swarm of which Vaillancourt spoke—the maple syrup makers’ co-operative—helped the producers stay in business in the depths of the Dirty Thirties. The co-operative created testing labs and ensured standards for syrup and sugar from maple trees and packaged its members’ sweet stuff for sale across the US and Canada—and even to Europe.
Later, Vaillancourt turned his focus to other forms of collective action, including leading what became the powerful Desjardins credit union. Even so, until his death in 1969, at age seventy-seven, Vaillancourt remained general manager of Citadelle. He always kept his sweet tooth.
Excerpted from Maple Syrup: A Short History of Canada’s Sweetest Obsession by Peter Kuitenbrouwer. Copyright © 2025 Peter Kuitenbrouwer. Published by Doubleday Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
