S Their leader was a handsome man about 30 years old, of good height, but not apparently robust, of gentlemanly address and faultless toilet; such a one as you might expect to meet on Broadway. In fact, in the popular sense of the word he was the most gentlemanly appearing man in the stage, or that we saw on the road. He had a fair white complexion, as if he had always lived in the shade, and an intellectual face, and with his quiet manners might have passed for a divinity student who had seen something of the world. I was surprised to find, on talking with him in the course of the day’s journey, that he was a hunter at all, — for his gun was not much exposed, — and yet more to find that he was probably the chief white hunter in Maine, and was known all along the road. He had also hunted in some of the States farther south and west. I afterwards heard him spoken of as one who could endure a great deal of exposure and fatigue without showing the effect of it; and he could not only use guns, but make them, being himself a gunsmith. In the spring he had saved a stage driver and two passengers from drowning in the backwater of the Piscataquis in Foxcroft on this road, having swum ashore in the freezing water and made a raft and got them off, — though the horses were drowned, — at great risk to himself, while the only other man who could swim withdrew to the nearest house to prevent freezing. He could now ride over this road for nothing. He knew our man (Joe Polis) and remarked that we had a good Indian there, a good hunter; adding that he was said to be worth $6,000. The Indian also knew him and said to me “the great hunter.” The former told me that he practiced a kind of still hunting, new or uncommon in those parts; that the caribou, for instance, fed around and around the same meadow, returning on the same path, and he lay in wait for them.” — from In The Maine Woods, Henry D. Thoreau. Thoreau and Leonard became famous for different reasons, in different ways, and for their interest in the same thing — nature. Thoreau, the more known, for his writing about people and nature, and Leonard for his particular engagement with nature. Hiram L. Leonard was born in Sebec, Maine, near Monson, in 1831. He was well known in the Maine woods by the time he met Thoreau on that stagecoach. He was known to be a hunter with an uncanny instinct for locating game and approaching within firing range. That range didn’t have to be close, since excellent marksman was among his abilities. His shooting was the stuff of the tales of William Tell. One Bangor gunsmith who worked along side Leonard, is said to have described him as one of the greatest hunters ever. He went on to say that, “the Indians acknowledged that he was a far better hunter than any of their people.” True to the anomaly, he was also a vegetarian. His strength and endurance in hauling these large animals out of the woods made for mythic tales of strength. “It is recorded that in 1856 he carried a quarter of moose meat weighing 135 lbs. (about the size of a horse’s hind quarter) from Little Spencer Pond to Lobster Lake, a distance of seven miles.” (The Angler’s Club Bulletin, 19.) Stories like this gave him the storied stature of an armed Paul Bunyan. But Leonard’s lasting fame, which lives on among fly fishermen, would be made elsewhere. Leonard’s parents made ash paddles and oars. They may have been independent oar manufacturers, which could explain their having moved to Honesdale, Pennsylvania, possibly to find ash and markets, when Hiram was a child. Raised in Pennsylvania, by his late teens he was “in charge of the machinery” at a coal mining company. But Leonard’s health was failing him and doctors recommended, as they did then for asthmatics, that he live outdoors more. He went back to his home state where he became a, taxidermist, gunsmith, professional market hunter and fur trader. He was a skilled precision machinist who had apprenticed with the highly regarded Bangor gun-maker V.G. Ramsdell. This skill probably contributed to his legendary marksmanship. Leonard later set himself up as a Bangor gunsmith and at the same time hunted for logging camps, very likely with a rifle he had made. In the 1850’s there were many one man and small shops making guns in the U.S. An economic slump in the late 1860’s however, had made things worse in a difficult business. Leonard decided to try making fishing rods in 1869, the first was built of ash and lancewood. He sent it to the Boston sporting goods company Bradford & Anthony, they in turn sent a salesman to Leonard with two split bamboo fly rods. He was asked if he could make similar rods. Though he had never seen a bamboo rod, he examined them and said, “Yes, and better than those”. He was 40 years old and before long he had more orders than he could handle. Many early rod builders were trained gunsmiths, having developed skills in working metal and wood to fine tolerances. The rifles and fishing rods they made were both sporting goods. Before the 1830’s most American fly fishing rods were made of wood. They were easy to manufacture, but they were long (11 feet), heavy, and awkward. These wood rods warped and the tips broke off easily. Bamboo fly rods had been around 100 years before Leonard got started, but they worked about as well as throwing a line with a bare hand. Split bamboo rods were first made by hand, using two pieces, and later four. Sam Phillippe, in Easton, Pennsylvania used six pieces for the tips. Leonard made his with six pieces for the whole length of the rod, gluing and then trimming them. Some of these rods had tip ends nearly the diameter of an automobile antenna tip. A single piece bamboo rod would snap at the nodes — the darker rings along its length. Cutting the strips and staggering the nodes disperses the weak spots, strengthening the whole.
In addition to making guns and bamboo fishing rods and the skills mentioned above, Leonard had a reputation as a daguerreotypist, trapper, millwright, flutist and fish hatchery operator. He thought that anyone who could not play a musical instrument could not make a proper split bamboo fly rod. Dwight B. Demeritt, Jr., in his 1997 book Maine Made Guns and their Makers, described Leonard as “the Renaissance man of the nineteenth-century Maine woods”. In 1874 he was also well known among a small group of scientists working to bring the Atlantic salmon back to the rivers of New England. His wide-ranging curiosity and interests would have given him an edge over others in the business. This edge was evidenced in a couple of instances. The bamboo used in Bangor at the time was “calcutta” bamboo. It had a pulpy core and a thin structural outer wall. One day in 1877, Leonard was shown an umbrella with struts that seemed unbreakable. He contacted the supplier and learned it was Tonkin bamboo from Southern China. This bamboo had a thicker, stronger outer wall and less pulp. Tonkin bamboo was one of the things that made his rods superior for 30 years. But this is not the first that set Leonard apart from other rod builders or what would keep his company so far ahead of the others in making good rods great for decades after he died. All split bamboo rod builders, including Leonard, made the long tapered, triangular in cross section, pieces by hand. A great craftsman, Leonard brought a new level of perfection to the workmanship, producing good rods at the start with simple hand tools. He was the first to use compound tapers, which he calculated to produce a snap as the rod straightened at the end of a cast. But his skill with machines, his intelligence and possibly exceptional mathematical abilities, enabled him to design a machine around 1876, that made the beveled cuts needed for each rod. It made the cuts with great precision and unfailing accuracy. No other manufacturer had anything like it. It was his greatest secret. Aware of the consequences if the secret leaked out, he kept the machine under lock and key. Only he and his nephew ever used it. The machine melded the highly skilled craft of cane rod building with the industrial revolution. This particular first and his choice of Tonkin bamboo, put his products and productivity far in the lead of other producers. Several fly rod makers who later gained fame in their own right worked for and trained under Leonard. How he kept them from seeing and figuring out his machine might also be counted as an industrial first. In 1877 Leonard entered into a partnership with a Boston man who sold his interest the following year to William Mills & Sons of New York. Mills had recently become the sole agent for Leonard’s fly rods. The Mills company wanted Leonard’s operation closer to New York and he moved it to Central Valley, N.Y., north of New York City, in 1881. Around 1906 after internal company turmoil, Leonard sold his interest in the company to Mills. He was not much involved with the company after that and died the following January. His most valued employees, Thomas, Hawes, Payne and Edwards later left and started companies of their own. Leonard never taught anyone, not even his nephews who worked for him, about the calculation of rod tapers. It was decades before anyone, anywhere could calculate the design of a rod as he had been able to do. Thoreau became far more widely known than Leonard. Most American high school students know him as an observer of nature and a proponent of a kind of spirituality in nature. This philosophy was popular before the upheavals of the industrial revolution. Leonard on the other hand, was a directly engaged observer of nature as a means of using it. He did the same with industrialization. Leonard’s name is still widely associated around the world with the best of split bamboo fly rods. He appears to have earned the title, “Father of the Fly Rod”.
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