By STEVEN JUPITER
PITTSFORD—If you dig around in local barns, garages, or antique shops, you’ll almost surely find a pair of vintage Vermont Tubbs snowshoes. Expertly crafted of bent wood and strips of rawhide, they’re beautiful as well as functional—it’s not uncommon to find a pair hanging as décor in local homes and camps.
Yet, when Baird Morgan bought the company in 1968, it was struggling to find a market for its products.
“The U.S. government had put out contracts for thousands of snowshoes during WWII,” said Morgan at his home in Pittsford, where he’s lived for 55 years. “There was an enormous surplus. The market was saturated.”
Plus, in the post-war years, snowshoes were utilitarian, intended for hunters or power-company linemen who needed to access utility poles.
But Morgan had a different vision for the company.
“Snowshoeing wasn’t a sport in the 1950s,” said Morgan. “My contribution to the industry was making snowshoeing a sport.”
Morgan had left a career as a math teacher in Pennsylvania in the early 1960s to help found a “3rd-level air carrier” in Burlington, Vermont. That company, Northern Airways, shuttled air passengers from larger airports to regional airfields—like today’s Cape Air, which flies passengers from Rutland to Boston and Cape Cod.
But Morgan wanted to branch out into manufacturing and began to look around for an opportunity.
“My father was in manufacturing in Pennsylvania,” he said. “Watching things being made was fascinating. I wanted to do something similar.”
A college friend tipped him off to a small snowshoe company in Wallingford, Vermont that was looking for a buyer: Vermont Tubbs. The owner at the time, Harold Underwood, was “a bit rough” but he and Morgan hit it off.
“I was young and naïve and spent too much money on it,” laughed Morgan. But Morgan would eventually expand Vermont Tubbs from a struggling snowshoe maker with 3 employees in Wallingford to a successful furniture manufacturer that employed scores of people in Brandon.
“When I took over, we were selling to hardware stores, not sporting goods shops,” he said.
Part of Morgan’s retail strategy involved demonstrating the handicraft that went into the shoes at trade shows.
“In 1970 or 71, we had a little 10’ x 10’ booth at the National Sporting Good trade show in Chicago,” Morgan recalled. “We knew we’d be surrounded by huge companies with attractive women demonstrating their products. So, we had a woman demonstrate how to string a snowshoe with the rawhide strips. We soaked the rawhide in the hotel bathtub overnight to make it supple and had the lady string shoes all day at the show. People were mesmerized. That was the beginning of the snowshoe craze.”
Morgan had sales reps clamoring to work with Tubbs and the company was able to get its products into high-profile retailers like L.L. Bean.
Soon, the company’s space in Wallingford was insufficient. Some operations were moved to Middletown Springs, but eventually the company bought several buildings in Forest Dale over the years, including the old Newton Thompson toy company’s compound on Newton Road and the building that would eventually house New England Woodcraft before it burned down in the late 70s (NE Woodcraft rebuilt and remains in that location).
Vermont Tubbs became a fixture in Brandon for the next few decades.
“A lot of people in the area used to work for us,” said Morgan.
Wanting to diversify beyond winter sports, Morgan tried manufacturing canoes in order to tap into the summer market. The canoes’ seats had woven rawhide just like the snowshoes.
“Our canoe handled well but we didn’t manage that business very well,” he noted. “We never really made any money at that.”
He sold the canoe company, but the idea of making “snowshoe” furniture stuck with him. He eventually made a “snowshoe” chair that he offered to sporting goods stores for people trying on shoes. The chairs caught on and people started buying them for their vacation homes. The furniture is now considered highly collectible.
“I saw one of our rockers on eBay recently for $2,500,” he laughed. He and his wife, Betsy, still have a bunch of the furniture in their summer home, with one of the aforementioned rockers in their home in Pittsford.
Morgan was still determined, however, to put the company’s manufacturing techniques, particularly their skill at bending hardwood, to use in other products.
“I was getting nervous depending on snow for our revenue,” he said. Tubbs started manufacturing a range of housewares for a company in New Jersey, but the demands of that kind of production were intense.
“We were making too many things,” Morgan said. “I was naïve.”
He hired a designer named Ed Whiting to conceive two chairs out of caning and bent ash (“ash stays supple when bent; oak gets brittle and snaps”). The chairs caught the eye of a major player in interior design at the time: Sir Terence Conran.
Conran had a chain of design shops called “Habitat” in the U.K. and “The Conran Shop” in the U.S. From the mid-70s to the late 80s, Conran’s sleek aesthetic was extremely influential and his stores were extremely popular. He asked Morgan to design a bentwood bed for his shop.
Conran liked the sample that Tubbs came up with and ordered 50.
“That’s a lot of beds!” laughed Morgan. “We were set up to make snowshoes, not beds!”
The order was placed in March with August delivery, but in July one of Conran’s buyers, Joyce Haley, called and expanded the order to 500. The bed was placed on the front of the company’s catalog.
“It was the hottest-selling bed in the country for a while,” said Morgan. “We were in the right place at the right time.”
Vermont Tubbs started making other designs. Morgan traveled regularly to Europe to study trends and find inspiration. He even won some design awards. Soon Tubbs was selling furniture to other retailers.
A small housewares store in Cambridge, Massachusetts called and placed an order for 25 beds, an unusually large order for a shop that sold only tabletop wares like dishes and glassware.
“It was Crate & Barrel,” said Morgan. And Tubbs’s bed was one of that chain’s first successful forays into furniture sales, forever linking Brandon, Vermont to the birth of a retail juggernaut.
By the late 1980s, however, Tubbs was a victim of its own success, finding itself unable to fulfill all the orders it was receiving.
“We didn’t have enough space. We needed new equipment. We needed a new building.”
A company conference at the Mountaintop Resort in Chittenden in 1988 convinced Morgan that change was needed for the company to survive.
“20% of our product line was responsible for 80% of our sales,” he said. Vermont Tubbs needed to streamline.
Morgan sold the snowshoe division to Ed Kiniry, who owned Stowe Canoes, and narrowed the company’s focus to just furniture. However, Morgan had also taken on investor-partners who had different ideas about how to run a company.
“It didn’t work out well for me,” he said.
Morgan’s partners wanted to live high on the hog, treating themselves to an expensive lifestyle that Morgan didn’t think the company could support.
Vermont Tubbs reaches its end
Morgan sold his stake to Bill Carris in 1989. Carris moved the company’s operations to a new facility in the Brandon Industrial Park off Arnold District Road and began trying to sell to large department store chains.
“I warned him he’d have trouble with that,” said Morgan. “And it came true. When you’re dealing with retailers on that scale, they get very demanding. Every piece has to conform to their standards. It was a nightmare for him.”
And then the nature of the U.S. furniture industry changed as well.
“Manufacturing went overseas,” said Morgan. “It was cheaper. There used to be so many furniture makers in western New York and central Massachusetts. Pretty much all gone now. I don’t think there was anything they could’ve done to save Vermont Tubbs furniture.”
Under Carris, Vermont Tubbs reached peak revenue of $16 million in 2000, with 255 employees. By 2003, however, revenue had plummeted almost 27% and the number of employees had dropped to 140. That year, Carris sold the company to Vermont Quality Wood Products, which continued to run the facility in Brandon until 2008, when it was sold to Brown Street Furniture and relocated to New Hampshire. In 2013, Brown Street declared bankruptcy.
Though Vermont Tubbs may no longer do business, its vintage products are still sought after by collectors and its sturdy furniture still graces many homes.
As for Baird, he started another company to manufacture furniture for Conran’s, but that chain also went out of business in 1991.
“I still have no idea why Conran’s folded,” Morgan said. “It was very sudden.”
After short stints at New England Woodcraft and a furniture company in Massachusetts, Morgan left the furniture business.
“It’s now dominated by online retailers and chains like IKEA and Ashley,” he said. “I didn’t want to sell to ‘big box’ stores.”
A new legacy
But Morgan hasn’t been idle. He and Betsy have helped facilitate the creation of the Pittsford Village Farm (PVF), across from Kamuda’s Market. PVF offers cultural events and concerts and will eventually house a community meeting room, daycare center, café, and affordable apartments.
“Back in the 90s, I was on the Pittsford Planning Commission,” said Morgan. “People often complained that there was no village green, no meeting place. And then in 2000, the Post Office wanted to move to Plains Road, where the Town Offices now are. I thought that would suck the lifeblood out of the village. People come to the Post Office and go to the library and Kamuda’s.”
Morgan eventually went to court to prevent the move. He thought perhaps the Post Office could occupy the house on what is now PVF. So, in 2000, he tried negotiating with Bob Forrest, who was then the owner of the property. But it wasn’t until 2015, after Mr. Forrest had passed, that Morgan was able to reach an agreement to purchase the house and 22 acres.
“I bought it so it couldn’t be developed,” said Morgan. “It’s too beautiful and it’s right in the center of town.” The Morgans purchased the property personally and then donated it to a nonprofit called Pittsford Preservation Corporation, which had been formed in 2001 in anticipation of the purchase. This nonprofit now owns the property and operates as PVF. The Morgans have no ownership stake.
The Morgans, who celebrate their 55th wedding anniversary this year, may be out of the furniture game, but they’re still making their mark on their community.
