for his son to take over the business. In 1890, seventeen years after James had been given free rein to make candy rather than bake bread, he became president and general manager, immediately increasing the presence of candy in the company’s growing product line.
The history of Moirs was part of a pattern in early Canadian candymaking that concentrated the bulk of the new country’s confectionery industry in the east. But chocolate did not transport well in the nineteenth century and was in fact expensive to ship. This barrier alone gave rise to small mom-and-pop candymakers, producing small batches of candy suited to local and often neighbourhood tastes.
L.H. Belanger, which began manufacturing candies in Montreal in 1881, produced an elaborate soft toffee called St. Catherine, which has never sold well outside of Quebec despite the one-time popularity of a cheaper version of toffee-based candy chews called Halloween Kisses.
All major candymakers in Canada faced common challenges: importing expensive ingredients such as sugar and cocoa (essential to manufacturing chocolate and candies) and serving a small population narrowly spread out in concentrated pockets along the world’s longest border.
Feeding such a population base was difficult enough for confectioners in the east. The challenge was magnified west of the Ontario border. Western-based independents with aspirations to follow the pace set by the Moirs and Ganong families often found they could not gather the traction to break out of local markets.
It is for this reason that the multinational manufacturers based in the east today provide the bulk of confections to satisfy the sweet tooth of western Canadians. There are notable exceptions.
Charles W. Rogers was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1854. Rogers was lured out west by the prospect of Klondike gold, but he never made it to the Klondike. He saw greater potential in Victoria selling provisions to the miners.
In 1885, Rogers and his wife, Leah, opened a small greengrocer on Victoria’s Government Street, a high-traffic thoroughfare that cut through the heart of the city up to the British Columbia legislature. The shop sold a variety of staple items, fresh fruits and vegetables, and a selection of quality candies imported from San Francisco. Candy was the most popular item on the Rogerses shelves, but delivery was hopelessly erratic, and the high tariffs contained in Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald’s National Policy of 1878 made it unnecessarily expensive.
Rogers began experimenting with his own candy recipes in a small kitchen located at the back of his store. He would often rise at 4:00 A.M., dressed only in his red underwear, stirring his candy centres as they bubbled in a large copper kettle. Leah, who had previously worked as a printing typesetter with the Daily Colonist, looked after the retail trade and administration.
Local inhabitants and visitors to Victoria travelled to Rogers’ shop to purchase assortments of chocolate-coated caramels, mint wafers, and chocolate almond brittle. As the candy side of the business grew, fruits and vegetables were getting in the way. Charles and Leah decided to discontinue the grocery side of the business and concentrate on candy.
“A pattern soon developed,” wrote camagazine. “Charles and Leah would make their chocolates early each day. The store on Government Street would open for a few hours in the afternoon, and, once the last chocolate was sold, the doors would close.”
On occasion, Charles and Leah were forced to ration boxes of their chocolates to one per customer.
In 1888, Rogers introduced his most unique and popular creation, cream centres covered with dark chocolate in a range of flavours, including vanilla, peppermint, chocolate nut, and strawberry.
It is interesting to note that a few years later, Frank Mars, an amateur candymaker, penny candy salesman, and father of Forrest Mars, founder of the multinational confectionery and food giant that bears his family name, was struggling to set up his own candy company in neighbouring Seattle.
It is not known whether Mars senior ever bit into a Rogers Victoria Cream, but the man who liked to experiment with his mother’s candy recipes began selling Victorian Butter Creams through the Woolworth five-and-ten store chain in the 1920s.
“Butter Creams were fairly common,” explains Jim Ralph, president of Rogers’ Chocolates. And there is a difference between the Butter Cream and Rogers’ Victoria Creams. “But it’s interesting that [Mars] would call his chocolates Victorian Butter Creams,” Ralph adds.
The origin of the Victoria Cream recipe remains a mystery. Most of Rogers’ work was trial and error, often conducted while hunched over a cauldron of chocolate. Victoria Creams were also the most expensive candies in the shop.
Rogers, the man who began making his own candy to spare the expense of importing confections from San Francisco, was later forced to admonish any young consumer fortunate enough to have ten cents to spend, but naive enough to think he could purchase a selection of Victoria Creams. “Ten cents buys you one chocolate,” he’d be told curtly.
Charles Rogers was notorious for his lack of patience with those who came into his shop. In addition to keeping odd hours—ignoring the lines outside the shop and only opening when he was ready—Rogers was often surly and rarely exchanged niceties or indulged in idle chatter.
Above all, Rogers appeared to cherish his privacy. This was confirmed in a historical retrospective published by the Victoria Times Colonist in 1951. Charles Rogers, the article reported, “seems to have succeeded fairly well in pulling a blind down around himself. Even when he married, in 1885, an ‘estimable young lady for many years a resident of Victoria’, the local papers were discreetly non-committed. For he was, at the time, according to the reports, a ‘worthy and energetic young man having established himself in a lucrative business.’ ”4
But the couple worked hard. On the coldest winter nights they would often stay in their shop to sleep only to get up before the sun to start working again. They also took few holiday trips, preferring instead to check into the St. Joseph’s hospital for a week whenever they felt they needed a respite.
In the 1890s, Frederick Barnes Wood moved from Nova Scotia to the British territory of Newfoundland. Upon arrival in St. John’s, Wood opened a fruit, confectionery, and flower shop. He too wanted to secure a steady supply of quality goods for his store and began manufacturing his own line of candies, alongside jellies, syrups, and marmalades.
In the early twentieth century Wood decided to transfer his shop to a magnificent new building on St. John’s fashionable Water Street. The Evening Telegram wrote about the new shop on January 11, 1902. “Woods new candy store is all but complete. A credit to all concerned.”
Certainly it was something that few residents of St. John’s had seen before: a candy shop, bakery, and soda fountain on the ground floor, beneath an elegant restaurant complete with starched white table linen and equally starched serving staff. The candy store and restaurant quickly became one of the most patronized locations in St. John’s.
The Water Street location would have a short run. Wood closed the shop in 1917 to concentrate exclusively on a second restaurant. In 1923, he retired completely, selling his business interests to W.R. Goodie, a local businessman who would transform Wood’s confectionery and soda pop interests into Purity Factories Ltd., the province’s largest confectioner and home to some of Newfoundland’s traditional favourites.
It was also during the nineteenth century that the story of what would become Canada’s largest chocolate company began. In the early 1800s, John Nilson, a weaver by trade, and his wife, Agnes, left the textile town of Paisley, Scotland, to seek new opportunities for themselves and their four children in the largely unsettled colony of Upper Canada.
