Explore Regina: the city through a tourism lens

Looking for more information about this baler from the Regina Plains Museum collection

I am current preparing curatorial statements for a couple of Regina Plains Museum artefacts.

This is substantial piece, well over 2 meters high. It is a gift from Isman Furs of Regina, a family business no longer in operation.

I tracked down Van Isman, one of the family members who confirmed that this is indeed a baler. He was gracious enough to tell me about this type equipement, although he did not recognize this particular baler specifically:

There were a number of different commodities that we dealt in where the product had to be baled. Typically you would start by putting in burlap at the bottom and you’d put in some of the boards to build sides up. You would block off the ends with burlap, right side and left side, and then you would put the commodity inside and you could build it up all the way to the top.


We used to use the baler back in my grandfather’s day and my dad’s day when they would ship fur overseas. One of the things you wanted to do is not seal it so it can’t breathe. You needed to allow air in, but you wanted to compress it. And fur weighs next to nothing, but it is bulky. You would lay pelts down and compress it down until it was about two feet high off the ground. So you are only paying to ship the weight, as opposed to just the volume. Similarly (and this something with which I had a lot of fun when I was a kid) we used to buy something called Seneca root. Seneca is an herb that grows wild in the North American prairies and it has a purplish flower and blooms in the spring. The aboriginal people used to hold it in very high esteem. They used to do is dig up the root, dry the root out and then make a tea with it. This tea had very much a cleansing effect. It was a very strong laxative. It would literally cleanse you, probably more than you’d ever want to be cleansed.


There were pharmaceutical manufacturers in Europe that wanted to buy it because it was natural and it was wild. There were likely many chemical products that could be used with the same results, but there was a strong belief in favour of using something natural instead of using something manufactured. Even today there are laxatives that can be bought under the brand “Senokot,” after the root of the same word. We used to put it into bales of 200 pounds. Because it was a root, it took up a lot of space. You wanted to compress it, so we baled it and shipped it overseas. It seems to me that it was in Switzerland mostly that we sold it.



The baler bears the above inscriptions when the front panel is lifted into the closed position.

Here is Van Isman again:

We baled and shipped fox, coyote, mink, muskrat, and beaver. There were huge auction houses. We dealt mostly with some of the fashion houses in Italy and France. We would ship stuff to them and reach an agreement on what type of grade the fur was. They knew what kind of colouring the animals from this part of the world would have. Coyotes in central Saskatchewan have very different colouring than coyotes further west of here in the Swift Current area. It would depend on what they wanted and we’d make a deal. They’d want 500 fox pelts or something like that.

My grandfather started the business in 1916. My great Grandfather was an immigrant. His name was Coleman Isman. He came from Russia. He and his brother left Russia in 1880; they were 14 and 16 at the time. They went to Montreal; they were draft dodgers. They tended to use the young Jewish fellows for target practice in the Russian army at the time. They spent several years on the honeywagon in Montreal, which was where the immigrants that could barely speak the language ended up working. In 1883, they came west as part of a group led by the Bronffman family heading for near Edenwold, to establish a small Jewish Community. The Bronffman had some money then and they took their own rabbi with them. That is what they used as a lure to start the community and they did.

When my grandfather started the company it had been originally trading in fur pelts, then they got more so into cattle hides, and cattle hides became bigger and bigger. I remember when I was a kid working with my dad; we were still dealing in fur, but by the time I came into the business in 1978 when I finished school, just a couple of years after that, we got out of it completely. We had people protesting in front of the business. The whole anti-fur movement had started.

By 1982 we were just concentrating on cattle hides and we were exporting cattle hides predominantly to Europe and Asia. It was successful business, but in 1991, we’d lost 80 percent of the volume that we had 10 years earlier in 1981. The reason was because it was a by-product business of the meat processing industry. There used to be an InterContinental Packers plant and a Burns plant in Regina, and a Burns in Brandon and in Prince Albert; and InterContinental in Saskatoon used to slaughter beef , all these places stopped slaughtering beef. So basically our supply dried up on us.

Cattle hides were used for virtually everything. There is a standardized grading system, broken down into about 50 different grades. We would put up container loads. We used to handle quite a few. At the peak of the business, in the early 1980s, we would go though 1200 to 1500 cattle hides a day, which would be the equivalent of a container and a half to 2 container loads. They would go to everything from upholstery tissue leather to you name it.

I will post information we will acquire about it as it comes in. We are attempting to find out as much as possible about its use, the manufacturer, how it got here.

Van Isman:

Knowing the way my dad and grandfather did businsess, they never bought anything knew. If they found something that was in good working condition, why go out and buy something new. So it is probably from the early 1900.

I never knew my grandfather. He died the year before I was born. I was told there was never a deal that culminated without the bottle being brought out on the table. That is the way business was done. Fortunately for our livers, we have changed.

It was patented on December 4th 1880, and manufactured in Buffalo, N.Y. by the W.L. Loeser Company, we believe.


Please post your comments on the blog, or just email me at: cj@greatexcursions.com

posted by Claude-Jean Harel, MA MAHI @ 3:02 PM