Ayr is a small settlement in southwestern Ontario, especially compared to its neighbors in Waterloo Region, the much larger cities of Kitchener, Waterloo, and Cambridge.
Part of the township of North Dumfries, this community on the Nith River is the hometown of Henry 'Buddy' Maracle, one of the NHL’s first Indigenous players. Stanley Cup champions Jay Wells and Kyle Clifford also hail from Ayr, as does Hockey Hall of Fame hockey broadcaster Ken 'Jiggs' McDonald.
Dean Prentice, who played 22 seasons in the NHL, retired to Ayr and became the township’s recreation director.
The Ayr Centennials, founded in 1982 and now a member team in the Greater Ontario Junior Hockey League, are the main winter tenants at the North Dumfries Community Complex.
Despite its deep hockey ties, there is very little in Ayr today to indicate that this is where Canada’s last remaining hockey stick manufacturing business has its roots. In Greenwood Park at the intersection where Church, Piper, and Stanley Streets come together, there is a plaque on a rock to mark the site of a foundry built by a Scottish immigrant named John Watson.
Watson was born near Glasgow in 1820. He began learning the moulding trade as a child in Scotland and came to Canada via Boston and Niagara Falls, New York. Arriving first in Hamilton and then in Galt (now part of the city of Cambridge), he worked for others before deciding to go out on his own. Watson settled in Ayr, a burgeoning community in southern Waterloo County.
He undoubtedly felt at home there, as Ayr and North Dumfries were heavily populated by other Scottish settlers, and in fact Ayr had been named for a town in Scotland that is about 35 miles away from Glasgow. Watson opened a small foundry in Ayr in 1847, which is how Roustan Sports Ltd. can trace its roots back to 20 years before Confederation. (1)
Watson was successful right away and opened a larger foundry in 1852 on the triangular plot of land that now comprises Greenwood Park. There, he and his employees manufactured stoves, ploughs, mowers, reapers, threshers, and other farm implements that were well-received by farmers across a very rural province that was then called Canada West.
The railway companies that had started to connect the cities and towns of the province had yet to find Ayr, but the canny Scot set up a supply chain along the wagon road between there and Paris, a larger town about seven miles away. Paris had not one but two railway lines – the Great Western, which connected Toronto and Windsor, and the Buffalo and Lake Huron, which facilitated rail traffic between that lake and the Erie Canal.
These rail lines took Watson’s well-made tools and machines far and wide, and because they carried his name as well as that of his foundry, they won him great renown at provincial and international exhibitions. Watson’s business was originally known as the Ayr Foundry, and by the 1870s it was called the Ayr Agricultural Works. But as his name became more closely associated with the items he produced, the business officially became the John Watson Manufacturing Company.
In 1882, with Ayr finally having attracted a railway of its own – the Credit Valley Railway, which would soon be taken over by the Canadian Pacific – Watson built a new and even larger foundry a short distance away on Stanley Street. He so thoroughly dominated the community that when Ayr was incorporated as a village in 1884, he was acclaimed the first reeve.
For a few years after he opened the new foundry, Watson kept the old foundry as a separate business called the Ayr American Plow Company. It appears to have been retained for the purpose of manufacturing smaller farm implements while bigger machinery was being produced at the new site. Business directories of the era establish him as the head of both firms in 1884 and 1885. (2) But Watson divested himself of Ayr American Plow by 1887, and it was soon liquidated. He continued to run his primary business until he passed away in 1903, an occasion that resulted in Ayr all but shutting down for his funeral. (3) But his surrender of Ayr American Plow and its subsequent liquidation is what allowed our second entrepreneur from Ayr to enter the picture.
William Hilborn, born in Waterloo County in 1848, had worked at a few different businesses as a young man. He was a merchant, according to the 1871 Canadian Census. By 1881 he was an innkeeper and running a hotel in Ayr called the Hilborn House. A local business directory lists him as operating a livery stable in 1887. But his lasting accomplishment would be Ayr American Plow, which he took over by 1888 and which he would eventually rename the Hilborn Company. (4) He would own and operate this business for the rest of his life; he died in February 1909.
No one knows exactly when William Hilborn figured out that the curved plow handles he was turning out at that foundry in Ayr could be turned upside down and used as hockey sticks. An article published at the time of the foundry’s demolition said that it was in 1892, and this may well be true because Ayr’s first hockey team is known to have been formed in that same year. “Owing to the small amount of practice which the Ayr players have had, they being only newly organised, they are to be congratulated on playing the game they did with so strong a team as Galt,” the Globe newspaper from Toronto reported after Ayr’s first game in February 1892, a 6-2 loss to Galt. (5)
Hilborn’s sons, Albert and William Jr., began playing the game after its introduction to Ayr, and they were soon making names for themselves as excellent young hockey players.
Ice hockey as an organized sport was sweeping across the Dominion of Canada in the 1880s and 1890s, with teams springing up in cities, towns, and villages, and leagues being established for those teams to play in. Operators of these early teams recognized the sport as a way of generating prestige for themselves, and they began recruiting players for that purpose.
Albert Cornell Hilborn, born in Ayr in February 1876, was an employee at the village’s only bank – the Canadian Bank of Commerce. This, along with his obvious hockey ability, caught the attention of bank officials in Toronto.
At some point in the early 1890s, the bank transferred Albert to a branch in that city, and he was enlisted to join the Commerce team in the Toronto Bank Hockey League. This historic league had begun play in the winter of 1891, and by 1895 it had separate senior and intermediate competitions, with the participating banks that year entering teams in both series. (6)
Albert, who played defense – the defense positions in hockey were known then as “point” and “cover point” – was with the Commerce team when it won the Toronto Bank League’s senior championship in 1895 and travelled to Montreal to play that city’s Bank of Montreal team to decide the informal “bank championship of Canada.”
Montreal won the game 12-2 but, in fairness to Commerce, two of Montreal’s players were simultaneously members of the Stanley Cup-champion Montreal Victorias. (7) Possibly, the Bank of Montreal team had simply been better at recruiting ringers!
William Hilborn Jr., born in December 1877, joined his brother as both a Commerce Bank employee and as a forward on the Commerce team in 1896-97. He immediately made an impact, with The Globe newspaper reporting after one game that season that the rookie, “although hardly more than a boy is as fast as they make them, and a fine stickhandler.” (8)
It reported after another game that the Hilborn brothers had thoroughly dominated their opposition; Albert, “at point, made his opponent look several classes beneath.” William was described as a “speedy, fast-shooting, unselfish lad . . . who rushed down the side of the rink like an infant cyclone.” (9)
The Commerce team won the Bank League championship again that year, then successfully challenged the University of Toronto’s Varsity team for the city title. (10) No national bank championship was contested that year, although Albert Hilborn was selected to play for “a selected seven of bankers” against both the Montreal Hockey Club, former and future Stanley Cup champions, and the Montreal Victorias, the current Cup champs. (11) No evidence is known to exist that shows those games took place, but the point is that Albert and William Hilborn were undoubtedly top-level players at what was quickly becoming Canada’s national sport.
Back in Ayr, they had left behind a thriving hockey scene. The village organized a senior team in the Ontario Hockey Association – the highest level of hockey in the province in those pre-professional days – and it excelled in group play. It handily defeated all its local opposition and advanced to the provincial semifinal in three consecutive years. If William Hilborn Sr. was not already actively manufacturing hockey sticks, the elite play of his sons and of others in their community would undoubtedly have inspired him to move in that direction.
Early hockey players had to make their own sticks out of branches from hickory or alder trees, cutting them down to a manageable size and filing them into something approaching the correct shape.
When manufacturers like William Hilborn Sr. became aware that there was a market for hockey sticks, they also realized that sticks could be mass-produced given the proper resources and equipment; a good-sized piece of rock elm, Hilborn learned, could generate as many as eight sticks.
By shortly after the turn of the century, Hilborn was producing hundreds of thousands of sticks per year and, thanks to the CPR line, shipping them as far away as Manitoba, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and New York. The sticks were reasonably priced, and salesmen appear to have had little difficulty convincing stores to carry the items. In 1912, according to local historian Kathryn Hansuld Lamb, a hockey player could walk into a store with a dollar and walk out carrying a dozen Hilborn sticks. (12)
Albert Hilborn was in charge of the family operation by then, having left the Bank of Commerce to take over the factory’s management after the deaths of his father in 1909 and his older brother Harvey the following year.
The Hilborn Company thrived under his direction. After the founding of the NHL in 1917, Hilborn began manufacturing special, exclusive orders for NHL players, helping to establish a continuing relationship with the world’s top professional league that continues today with Roustan Sports Ltd. By 1920, the Hilborn Company, which also started producing baseball bats, counted the Spalding and CCM sporting goods firms and the Eaton department store chain among its clients across the country. (13)
Design and production practices evolved, and by 1928, Hilborn had perfected a two-piece spliced stick that allowed for the incorporation of other hardwoods, such as elm that the company imported from Wisconsin.
In a process that must have been similar if not identical to that of its competitors, the wood was first dried in a kiln, steamed and bent, then left to dry again. Wally Gillespie, who began working for Hilborn in 1925, said in an interview in 1982 that a jointer was used to flatten and smooth the wood, and ripsaws were used to cut the wood into the various stick designs. The sticks were then sanded and rounded before a final inspection. The sticks deemed acceptable were labelled, packed in crates and shipped out to their destinations. (14)
Hilborn’s work was a fusion of his manufacturing sensibilities and an intimate familiarity with his product, and customers responded by bringing robust business to Ayr. According to Kathryn Hansul Lamb’s research, Hilborn’s employees worked 10 hours a day, six days a week, and were paid 30 cents an hour to produce sticks by the hundreds each day. Sometimes, two shifts of workers were employed to keep up with the demand. (15)
Unfortunately, the good times could not last. The Hilborn Company was hit hard first by the death of Albert Hilborn in April 1929, and then by the Great Depression which began later that same year. William Hilborn Jr., who had remained with the Bank of Commerce throughout his career, continued to operate the business with the help of staff, but he made it clear that he didn’t want to or couldn’t take on the responsibility of running the factory full-time. Even if he had wanted to, it was still a family-owned company and his four sisters wanted to sell out, so in early 1931 he arranged the sale of the Hilborn Company to Seagram interests from Waterloo. (16)
When the sale was completed in February, it closed the book on the Hilborn family’s long and storied connection with hockey. William retired from the bank in 1934 and died in 1938.
There are indications that the Ayr stick business may have splintered – pun intended – with some employees including a manager named Arthur Cropp establishing a new firm called Milton Wood Products in Milton, about 40 miles east of Ayr. This was announced in March 1932, with the Brantford Expositor newspaper reporting that “arrangements have been completed for the transfer of the firm’s operations” from Ayr to Milton. A week later, the same paper said the new industry would take over an old carpet factory on Commercial Street. (17)
Subsequent articles noted that the business got off to a strong start in Milton, adding a night shift to help deal with orders for tens of thousands of sticks from all parts of Canada. (18) Unfortunately, this early success was not maintained, and Milton Wood Products had collapsed into bankruptcy by the spring of 1935. (19)
Whatever business had remained in Ayr after the move to Milton was fully taken over by the Seagrams no later than 1933, according to yet another article in the Brantford Expositor that suggested the old Hilborn plant was still operational in July of that year. (20) The outcome of the bankruptcy proceeding is not known; perhaps the Seagrams, operating by then as Hespeler St. Marys Wood Specialties, bought those assets.
Whatever happened and when, the factory built in Ayr by John Watson in 1852 was shut down and abandoned, as was an adjoining warehouse.
Left behind for some reason were hundreds of finished hockey sticks that were soon discovered by local boys. They raided the premises, carrying out sticks as they were needed, until everything was gone. The factory’s windows were then smashed out by vandals, leaving the building in a derelict state until it was finally demolished in 1936. (21)
The Ayr Horticultural Society gained possession of the property two years later. (22) It has been a park ever since, and a commemorative plaque on a rock is the only evidence that any industrial activity took place there, much less an enterprise that helped to shape Canada and its national winter sport.
It was a sad end to a historic business and factory, but some old Hilborn sticks have survived to this day, and they stand as testaments to the entrepreneurial nature of the Hilborns and the excellence in stick manufacturing that they and other residents of Ayr demonstrated for the four decades. Indeed, Ayr’s involvement in the manufacturing of hockey sticks in Canada and in the genesis of Roustan Sports Ltd. is of immense importance. Truly, we have William Hilborn Sr., his hockey playing sons Albert and William Jr., and, before them, John Watson to thank for starting it all.
Jonathon Jackson is a hockey historian based in Guelph, Ontario.
Follow along as we post new chapters of Hockey's Oldest Business – Since 1847 on TheHockeyNews.com.
Read the previous chapter: Introduction
(1) John Watson of Ayr (1820-1903) biography, Waterloo Historical Society, Seventeenth Annual Report, 1929.
(2) Ontario Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1884-85; Farmers’ and Business Directory for the Counties of Brant, Halton, Norfolk, Waterloo and Wellington, 1885-86.
(3) “John Watson’s Funeral,” Hamilton Spectator, December 18, 1903.
(4) Ontario Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1888-89.
(5) “Landmark,” Windsor Daily Star, April 11, 1936; “Galt Defeats Ayr,” The Globe, February 6, 1892.
(6) “Business Begun in the Bankers,” The Globe, January 17, 1891; “Commerce Leads the Banks,” The Globe, February 12, 1895.
(7) “Commerce the Champions,” The Globe, March 4, 1895; “Too Fast For the West,” The Globe, March 12, 1895.
(8) “Commerce Wins the Purse,” The Globe, January 11, 1897.
(9) “Down Went the Champions,” The Globe, February 15, 1897.
(10) “Commerce City Champions,” The Globe, March 8, 1897.
(11) “To Play Montreal,” The Globe, January 22, 1897; “The Vics on Tour,” Montreal Gazette, March 5, 1897.
(12) Kathryn Hansuld Lamb, “From Plows to Hockey Sticks,” Waterloo Historical Society, Seventieth Annual Volume, 1982.
(13) Lamb, “From Plows to Hockey Sticks”; Tom Reitz, “He Shoots, He Scores,” Waterloo Region Record, November 13, 2010.
(14) Lamb, “From Plows to Hockey Sticks.”
(15) Lamb, “From Plows to Hockey Sticks.”
(16) Letter from William Hilborn to Leo Henhoeffer, January 29, 1931; Lamb, “From Plows to Hockey Sticks.”
(17) “Industry Being Moved From Ayr,” Brantford Expositor, March 30, 1932; “A New Industry,” Brantford Expositor, April 7, 1932.
(18) “Hockey-Stick Order Means Night Shift,” Toronto Daily Star, August 6, 1932; “Items of Interest of Dufferin and District,” Orangeville Banner, November 10, 1932.
(19) “Have Assigned,” Hamilton Spectator, April 16, 1935.
(20) “Business Transfer,” Brantford Expositor, July 24, 1933.
(21) “Landmark,” Windsor Daily Star.
(22) Lamb, “From Plows to Hockey Sticks”; “Physician Heads Ayr Flower Body,” Kitchener Daily Record, January 7, 1939.
