Death in 1907

ike Sam Phillipe, Hiram L. Leonard set out to found a gunsmiths, but he found demand so low that he turned instead to making fishing rods. It turned out to be an inspired choice, for he could make rods like no-one else before him and possibly since. Leonard was born in Maine, but he grew up in Pennsylvania, where he worked for a time minding the machinery at a coal mining company before he returned to his home state. These were hard times and in addition to gunsmithing, Leonard tried his hand successively at taxidermy, hunting and fur trading before he hit on the idea of making fishing rods. When Thoreau met Leonard in 1857, he described him as a tall, handsome man, faultlessly groomed and of 'gentlemanly address' . Leonard was also an accomplished musician, played the flute and the bass viol, and was possessed of the peculiar belief that no man could make a good fishing rod unless he could play at least one instrument. Maybe he was right, because few other rod makers ever approached him for quality.

It was Leonard who took Phillipe's invention and perfected and popularised hexagonal rods in America early in the 1870s. Leonard's break came in 1871, when Bradford & Anthony, a Boston sporting shop, saw a rod Leonard had made for his own use and commissioned him to build split-bamboo rods for them. At the time, Leonard was forty years old, and it wasn't long before had more work than he could handle. The names of the men he hired in those early years are the roll-call of the great American rods makers: Fred Thomas, Ed Payne, Billy Edwards, and Hiram and Loman Hawes. All of them subsequently went their separate ways, but not before they learned some special magic from the master.

Quite how Leonard's men learned the magic is a good question, because the master kept his cards quite obsessively close to his chest. His greatest secret was a bevelling machine of his own design, which first went into use in 1876 or 1877. The beveller cut the six strips needed for each rod with incredible precision and unerring accuracy; and there wasn't another manufacturer who had anything like it. Well aware of the consequences if the secret ever leaked out, Leonard kept the machine in a locked room and only he and his nephew Rube Leonard ever used it. Fred Thomas must somehow have gotten a look at it, because if he hadn't one of the secrets of building split cane rods would died with his mentor.

But there was more to Leonard than a fancy machine: he was the first rod maker to build rods with compound tapers which were calculated mathematically, and it seems that he discovered Chinese 'Tonkin' cane long before anyone else guessed how much better it was than the Calcutta cane in such universal favour at the time. The story goes that in 1877 Loman Hawes bought an umbrella with struts of such high quality that they couldn't possibly have been Indian cane. It didn't take Leonard and Hawes long to trace the supplier, and the discovery of the material gave Leonard's products an edge which they didn't lose for thirty years.

By the time Leonard died in 1907 at the age of 76, Thomas, Payne, Edwards and the Hawes brothers had all set up businesses of their own, which preserved the tradition of the master's way of rod making, but Leonard went to his grave with the secret of how he calculated his rod tapers, and it was several decades before the rest of the industry worked out how to make a good rod great.