The St. Croix Valley has been known since the late 1800’s for its candymakers. Ganong’s in St. Stephen is said to have invented the candy bar and even today produces quality chocolates sold all over the world. Many local individual candymakers, who subsequently made a name for themselves in the business, got their start working for Ganong’s. One was Ella Lowther, pictured above, although it was working with Jane Todd in Calais that Ella perfected her skills to the point she was once referred to in the Bangor Daily News as Calais’ “famous candymaker”.
Ella Lowther was born on July 8th, 1891, in Calais to Robert and Ida Lowther. Both of her parents were from New Brunswick and we have no record of when they moved to Calais. In those days relocating across the border in either direction was as simple as “crossing the bridge” which is the way some described how they had changed their nationality. By the mid 1880’s Robert and Ida appear in the Calais Directory as living on Union Street, below Main Street, probably in the large tenement house pictured. Robert is listed as a laborer.
This tenement, since demolished, just below Main street on Hog Alley was likely where Ella first lived in Calais.
They lived on Union Street behind what many of us remember as Pickard’s Laundry until the early 1900’s before moving to the home on Monroe Street which is so familiar to those who knew Ella. The 1935 Calais directory has Ella and her mother Ida, then a widow, living at 20 Monroe Street. In the Directory Ida’s profession is dressmaker and Ella’s candymaker.
Ella attended school in Calais through the eighth grade and four days of high school before dropping out in 1903 to work to help support the family. This was fairly common at the time. Although Calais had a population twice that of today her class graduated only 25 students in 1907. Most young people were in work of some kind well before their 18th birthdays. She worked for a brief time as a telephone operator in Calais and at Ganong’s for three years as a candymaker before she went to work for Jane Todd, Calais’ premier candymaker.
Jane Todd’s store on Main Street Calais where Ella worked for 45 years
She retired from Jane Todd’s at 67 to relax and enjoy her retirement. Always involved in the community through church, the Woman’s City Club and other civic organizations, she planned to enjoy a leisurely retirement. It was not to be. By 1958 she was back in the candy business and on her way to becoming “Calais’ Famous Candy Maker”.
Calais Advertiser 1961:
Ella Lowther’s amazing success as a candy maker and businesswoman may appear at first sight to be a matter of chance, a flip of the coin which came out heads instead of tails. Because when she retired, after 45 years from Jane Todd’s, it was, as she thought, to live a quiet life of leisure. “I thought I just live on my Social Security, “she said, “but after a while I decided against it. I don’t know I just couldn’t stop.”
So, on April 1st, 1958, she opened her candy business on Monroe St. in the house which had been her home for 62 years.
But at second sight, her own now literally world-known candies turned out to be the logical and happy end of a long process.
Her father was from Saint Stephen, her mother from Miramichi. Ella was born in Calais, but her first job was “over the river”- you may have guessed it- Ganong’s candy factory. At Ganong’s she learned how to dip chocolates, and in fact she became so good that soon she was made an assistant supervisor and trainer of dippers. Those were the days when Ganong’s numbered over 200 employees, and dippers were imported like good whiskey from Scotland.
After three years she took a job at Jane Todd’s in Calais. She worked on the candy counter, but in her spare time she helped the candy makers. Here her professional training was completed, but it was a training based on what she saw. “No one showed me anything” she said “I learned the candy business entirely from observation.
45 years was a long preparation, but the result was well worth it, for now the old house, which had served as an army barracks during the War of 1812 is filled with the sweet smell of chocolate, and Ella Lowther is known as far away as Japan.
She makes 46 kinds of chocolates, fudges and bonbons, but her favorite recipe and biggest seller special, given to her by a travelling man while she was working at Todd’s. It is a crunchy butterscotch, and it must be watched with vigilant eyes during the cooking, because the butter burns so easily. Sugar and butter, and nuts roasted in the batch itself. When it reaches a certain temperature, it turns a golden brown and then brittle. Then it is poured out upon a granite slab, looking like a printer stone and quarried at Red Beach. It is pulled very thin, coated with the veneer of milk chocolate and dusted with ground almonds and cashews. It sounds easy, but as Ella says, “you can make it beautiful candy from Fanny Farmer recipes- if you know how”.
Her business in three years has grown to such a point that she wonders how she can take care of it. Her marketing in Calais is almost incidental. Her candy now is shipped all over the world. She has customers in Turkey, Japan, Korea, Australia and she believes that every state in the union.
Locally she sells mostly to Canadians and tourists. “How the tourists found out about me I’ll never know” she said. This past summer was very busy, and August was simply one sleepless night after another. Christmas orders are coming in now every day. From early November she must work every night to build up supplies for the holiday season. Then there is the short winter respite until there is a steady but not hectic period, soon the holidays begin again- Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Easter- and then the summer business is again upon her.
Her reputation is carried by word of mouth of a satisfied sweet tooth. Aside from a few little ads placed in local papers at the very start of her business, she has done no advertising at all.
And, amazingly enough, she makes every bit of the candy herself. Her only assistants are a dipper and a packer who help out occasionally. Her regret is that no one seems interested in learning the candy maker skill. “At my age”, said Ella “I just can’t keep up this pace very much longer Then, I guess, this candy business will be just one of the forgotten enterprises of history.” But anyone who has tasted her buttercrunch candy will not forget very soon. We can vouch for that.
Over the years she continued to get good press which only increased her fame and business- a boost she hardly needed in her 70’s.
From the Bangor Daily News-January 5, 1971
On the Maine Street With Bruce Hertz of the NEWS Staff.
Sweet Tooth Want to live the sweet life?
Miss Ella Lowther of Calais, who has been producing homemade candy for 62 of her 79 years, has a few secrets which can be chomped upon by candy lovers or lovers of life in general.
The sweet career of Miss Lowther began in 1908 when she took a job with Ganong Candy Ltd., in St Stephen, N.B. In three years, she worked herself up to second the forelady in the dipping department.
After a short and uninteresting stay with the telephone company, Miss Lowther joined the Jane Todd concern-a candy store and luncheonette on the Main Street of Calais. While the Jane Todd candy was of national renown. Miss Lowther was the prima chef who was responsible for production and original creation. She got no credit for the Jane Todd notoriety.
Twelve years ago, Miss Lowther left Jane Todd and came home to her light chocolate colored house on Monroe Street behind the A & P grocery store in Calais., By improvising, shifting, and rearranging ingredients and recipes, Miss Lowther has built up a national trade in her own right. She has refused to use any commercial ingredients, always maintaining that the customer can tell the difference between pure butter and cream, pure chocolate and filler. Any other way would not be home-made, she said. She has never spent any money on advertising, always relying on word of mouth to carry the interest in her goodies. During Christmas, her stock of 46 varieties was completely sold out, the most popular item being the rich chocolates.
The all-time bestseller, especially for the tourist trade, are the fudges. In a statement, which didn’t seem the least bit immodest. Miss Lowther said she has never tasted butter crunch better than her own. Before a doctor-imposed weight program, Miss Lowther said she ate at least a half-pound of candy a day. She confessed that she probably has eaten her weight in candy.
I just can’t keep my hands off it. Asked if she had any philosophy on people and candy, she said that people shouldn’t be told not to eat candy. Candy is good for you if you use restraint. Anyone who eats a pound of candy at a sitting deserves what they get.
Ella Lowther retired from candy making in 1974. This tribute was paid to her by local historian John McFaul.
In 1981 the Calais Advertiser published the last article we can find on Ella:
1981 Calais advertiser
Ella Lowther sits in a chair in her warm cozy kitchen beside the old black stove that served her well when she was in the candy making business. For 17 years her home on Monroe Street in Calais was filled with hundreds of pounds of chocolate, nuts, sugar, and the delightful smell of sweet treats cooking in the kitchen. She made and sold 54 kinds of chocolates, seven kinds of fudge, and a variety of nougatines, caramels, and cremes in a shop in the front of her house.
Six years ago, Ella fell and broke both hips, so she had to stop making candy. She’s 90 years old now and still gets the energy occasionally to whip up a small batch of butter crunch, a thin candy made of butter, sugar and nuts, coated with milk chocolate. “I like to keep my hand in,” she says with a slight smile and adds that butter crunch was always her favorite.
Ella’s attitude is one of strength and independence, and her mind is very alert. She has trouble walking and doesn’t go out much, except to attend church services with friends. Standing about 5 ‘3 “, Ella has short gray hair, blue eyes, glasses, and a calm face. She wears a gray and rose print dress, a dark rose cardigan sweater, gold earrings, and comfortable looking shoes.
Ella stood on her feet and made candy for 64 years. She quit high school after four days and went to work at Ganong’s candy factory to help her mother support the other four children in the family. “I felt I had to help,” she said. “My mother was working very hard as a dressmaker.” Ella dipped chocolates and watched other workers make candies. Her two sisters finished high school, and her two brothers entered the Navy.
After she left Ganong’s, Ella worked a short time for the telephone company before taking a position in Jane Todd’s combination candy store and soda fountain. There she was involved in making candies, dipping them, packing them, and waiting on customers. “I was busy all the time working at something,” she said.
By January of 1958, that candy business was beginning to slow, so Ella left. Friends suggested that she start her own business. She remembers that she didn’t have much money, but she knew a lot about making candy and enjoyed it enough to give it a try. In April she opened her shop and rapidly learned about business while making almost all of the candy herself.
Ella worked day and night, and still it took a year or two to make a profit. She employed a full-time dipper, and relatives stopped by to help out in busy times-especially just before Easter, Mother’s Day, and Christmas, when people would buy two, three and five-pound boxes of candy to give as gifts. Ella’s Christmas special was a small solid chocolate Santa Claus made in a metal mold. She said people paid $.25 apiece for them; now one would be worth $1.
Many mornings saw Ella up at 5 or 6 a.m. cooking fudges in a solid copper kettle, roasting nuts in the upper compartments of her stove, running center cremes in corn starch molds, spreading butter crunch to harden on a marble slab near the dipping table, pulling molasses taffy on a hook, and cutting it into kisses. Her wintergreen candies were too big for the dipper to handle with her fingers, so Ella dipped those. She would run them late Saturday night and dip them Sunday morning. Most nights she worked until 11p.m. preparing candies for the dipper to finish in the morning. ”Tricks in all trades you know, ·· she said.
Candy was all over Ella’s house. Cinnamon sticks, coconut fudge, pistachio nougatines, brown sugar fudge, caramels covered in chocolate, cashew clusters, peppermint candy cremes, and butter crunch to name a few. ”Everybody who opened the door -they’d say. ‘Oh! Smell that,’ “she said lighting softly. “Seems like a dream to me. The whole thing,” she added. “With all that time I spent just candy making. I miss it like the dickens.”
Ella would like to keep making candy, but bursitis in her arms and lame hips make it too difficult. She has trained her niece to take over the business but feels that now is a bad time to start it again. Prices on sugar, chocolate, and nuts have risen a great deal in the last decade. In order to break even, her niece would have to buy all the ingredients in large quantities from a wholesaler, and there isn’t one this side of Bangor.
Ella used to buy cases of nuts and 500 to 800 pounds of chocolate at a time from a wholesaler in Boston. One big shipment cut down freight charges. The recent increases in the price of gasoline have made shipping costs very high. “There’s no money to be made now,” said Ella. She and her niece are going to wait and see if next year’s economy will allow them profitably to make and sell candy. “I hope I Jive long enough to see it (her niece in business),” she said.
When Ella was making candy she said she ate about half a pound a day. She eats very little factory-made candy. “The chocolate now has got a peculiar taste to it,” she says. “They use a different grease, I think, than cocoa butter.” Candy isn’t the same as it used to be, and neither is life in Calais.
In her 90 years, Ella saw the first train come into town and the last one leave. She saw the wooden International Bridge torn down and the new one constructed. She remembers wharfs lining the St. Croix River and schooners with two, three and four masts bringing molasses from Barbados, bananas, and coal for the paper mill. There were two shoe factories, a lumber business, steamboats, and electric railways. For a treat on Sunday, Ella would ride the train from Calais to St. Stephen, to Milltown, and back. Her first car was a small Model T which she bought in 1916.
“Boy, this was a busy river and a busy town,” she said thinking back. “People going lickety-cut in all directions. Calais now is mostly retired people. There’s no business to hold young people. They have to go away to get jobs,” she added with a trace of sadness in her voice.
In all her years of candy making, Ella acquired fans. Many sent letters of praise and thanks when she retired. One woman from Seattle, Washington, wrote and asked to buy her recipe for brown sugar fudge. Every time she had visited Calais she had gone to Ella’s shop to buy fudge and was craving some. Ella sent the recipe to her free of charge but later received a Christmas card and $5. “I wrote back and gave her the dickens,” Ella said. She likes to share recipes and see people making candy.
“The homemade candy business is on the way out,” says Ella wistfully. “It seems to be a lost art. Young fry are coming up on chocolate bars and cheap candy.” Different people have asked her to teach them her craft, but when they find out how much work is involved in making candy, most of them give up. “The candy business was a long, hard siege, but I liked it,” she said, reflecting on her livelihood for 64 years. “I guess 1 must belong to rugged stock.” Perhaps her niece does too.
Ella Lowther died in February 1985 and is buried in the Calais cemetery. She was 93 years old.
We will end with a poem written about Ella by Ms. Waite and Jerry Lapointe’s recollections of Ella. Jerry grew up on High Street and knew her well.
Ella Lowther, The Fudge Lady
By Ms. Waite
(Story Poem)
Surrounded by pans and pans of thick confection
Oh, the smell of sweet goodness
Peanut butter
Chocolate
Vanilla
Sugar
Cream
Butter
My mouth watered
My 5 year old eyes opened wide
I watched her child-like finger cover a small knife
And pull the knife across the fudge
Making perfect cuts like a finely tuned machine
Crisscrossing across the pan
Until blocks of sweetness waited
Slowly she put down the knife
Walked to the corner
Picked up a flat white piece of cardboard
Her tiny hands
Slowly
Folded and tucked
Folded and tucked
Until a box was formed
She lay down the box
And slowly cut wax paper to fit
How did she know the perfect size
In went the wax paper
In snuggled each piece of fudge
3 in the back and 3 in the front
More wax paper covered the layer
3 more in the back and 3 in the front
Then carefully she folded the wax paper like wrapping a gift
Slowly the box top was
Folded and tucked
Folded and tucked
My mouth watered and hung open
I was mesmerized by the whole scene
She got a special sticker with her name
And something about her confections
She slowly pressed it to the center of the box
Perfectly centered, with her child-like hands
She turned to ask if we wanted ribbon
A pink spool hung from above
I could barely speak
Still mesmerized
Yes, I managed (Nana will love it)
Slowly
She tied the ribbon around the box
One way, and then the other
Tying it at the top
And curled it with her scissors
And just when I thought the process was ending
My Dad ordered another flavor
And just as beautifully
Just as mindfully
She cut, folded, tucked, snuggled, wrapped, pressed, tied, and curled
And after we paid
I put my small hand
Inside my Dad’s large soft hand
With the other, I held
The two boxes
And I felt like this moment was one I would remember forever.
Jerry Lapointe:
Ella Lowther was one of the mainstays of Calais during the time I was growing up on High Street and during my young adult years as well. Her big double house was down over the hill at the bottom of Monroe Street and it was always kept in pristine condition. We would slide past it during the winter when Monroe Street was closed off to vehicular traffic, and walk or bicycle past it in summer. For a time it was popular for the boys in the neighborhood to build carts using wood and old axles and wheels, mostly from old baby buggies, and coast down the hill in front of Ella’s house, sometimes landing in the ditch. It was always said that her house had barracks in the cellar from the Civil War but I never knew if this was really true. However, I do know that a visit to her house by anyone who loves chocolate was a venture worth taking. I can well remember the smell of chocolate confection as soon as the front door was opened. The accepted procedure for visiting Ella’s candy shop was simply to ring the front door bell, then open the door and step inside. From the front hallway one could see into the kitchen and the big black stove on which she made her candy was in plain view. Ella herself lost no time in coming down the hall to wait on any perspective customers and, being a bit stout, she would seem to lumber, though at a fairly good pace, from the kitchen to greet you. She made candy every day, she always wore a dress, and she always wore those black, lace-up shoes that older ladies and nuns always wore. Ella’s candy shop was located in what ought to have been her front parlor, complete with its fireplace mantelpiece. Instead of furniture it contained rows of tables, each one laden with cardboard boxes covered in heavy sheets of plastic. Each box contained a different type of chocolate, some with soft centers, some with hard centers, and some with nuts or caramels. One table was reserved for all the various types of fudge she made regularly, each one as delicious as the next. There was chocolate, chocolate walnut, penuche, a white fudge with a thin dark chocolate layer on top, maple walnut, peanut butter, and who knows how many others. There was a wonderful vanilla cream centered chocolate, covered in chocolate and rolled in chocolate jimmies, and another that had a creamy green pistachio center which was also covered in chocolate but rolled in crushed nuts. In the summer she made jellied strawberries, complete with a little wooden stem and a paper leaf on top. There were chocolates of every variety and each was as wonderful as the next. I can still hear the snap of the chocolate when you bit into it. That sound and the smell of chocolate that permeated Ella’s house have stayed with me all these years.
Whenever you went to Ella’s to buy chocolates she would find out just what you wanted and then go about filling the box, whether it was just a few, or a full pound, or a two pound box. She would pull back the heavy plastic sheets, put each chocolate in a brown paper holder, and place each one in the box. When she was finished she would put on the lid and place a gold sticker on the bottom of the lid telling whether the box was soft centers, hard centers, or assorted chocolates. There was always a spool of thin pink ribbon hanging from the ceiling near the front windows that looked out onto Monroe Street and over to the house across the street where Glen Boardman lived. It was always magical to be there but never more so than during the holidays. It was never a proper Christmas without a visit to Ella Lowther’s. I believe she also made ribbon candy at Christmas, something my father always loved. We never had company come to stay with us without taking them to Ella’s where they inevitably bought boxes of her candy to take home with them. In between visits, we would often have to go to Ella’s to buy chocolates and mail it to our various friends and relatives. It was a sad day when her shop closed and her wonderful confections were no longer available. What I would give to have some of her candy today.
After Ella closed her shop and stopped making candy she continued to live in the house at the bottom of the hill on Monroe Street. She lived on the left side of the house and she rented the right side. When I was a child Harold Howland and his family lived there. Sharon Howland was in my class at school and was my good friend so I would be there quiet often. On Sharon’s birthday, as well as on the birthdays of her two sisters, Gayle and Gloria, Ella would give them each a pound box of their favorite chocolates. How wonderful I thought it would be to live there! If my memory serves me correctly Sharon’s favorite chocolate was the lemon soft center so that is what she got each year on her birthday. Of course, I may not be remembering correctly after so many years. Regardless, she received what I considered the envious gift of a box of chocolates and, I must admit, I still love my chocolates and nowadays I make regular trips to Ganong’s. I don’t recall when Ella left her house, or in indeed she remained there until her death. That is something I just don’t remember.
My last memories of Ella seem to be on warm days in summer and fall when, in the afternoon, she would be nicely dressed and sitting on her front porch. She no longer made candy to sell but I believe she “whipped up” a batch for herself now and then. She always said she ate about a half pound of candy every day and I know she lived well into her 80s. Ella’s house had a set of steep steps leading up to the front door but she never seemed to be deterred by the climb, even when she was old. I think anyone who grew up in the 50s and 60s and visited Ella Lowther’s candy shop has memories of their own but I would venture to say they all include that tantalizing smell of chocolate that wafted through her house and the snap and taste of each piece of her candy.