Candy canes come from 19th-century American stick candy. Confectioners were pulling and striping peppermint sticks by the 1840s, and the earliest known printed "candy cane" turns up in an 1866 magazine story called "Tom Luther's Stockings." The famous origin stories, a German choirmaster in 1670 and a candymaker spelling J for Jesus, have no trace in print before the mid-20th century.
The documents tell a plainer story. Hooked sticks were hanging on American Christmas trees by the early 1880s. Red and white peppermint became the standard look around 1900. And canes only became cheap and everywhere after a Catholic priest in Arkansas patented a machine that bent the hook without snapping it.
The Cologne choirmaster of 1670
This is the version on most gift tags. In 1670 the choirmaster at Cologne Cathedral, tired of restless children during the long Living Creche service on Christmas Eve, asked a local candymaker for sugar sticks. To justify sweets in church, he had them bent into shepherds' crooks, after the shepherds who came to the manger. The white was meant to teach the children about the sinless life of Jesus.
No one has found this story written down before the mid-20th century. By 1968 it was settled enough for the Milwaukee Journal to run it as plain fact in a Christmas feature, date and cathedral included. Three centuries is a long silence for a cathedral city full of printers and clergy.
The choirmaster has no name in any version. The National Confectioners Association, the American candy trade group, has every reason to like a 350-year pedigree, and even it opens the tale with "Legend has it." That is about the right weight to give him.
Why are candy canes shaped like a J?
The second story is a meaning more than a person. Here the cane is a coded sermon: one way up it is a shepherd's crook, the other way up it is a J for Jesus. The white stands for purity, the red for his blood, and in some versions the peppermint recalls hyssop, a plant used for purification in the Bible.
The red stripes this reading needs did not become the normal dress for a cane until around 1900. Even whychristmas.com, a site happy to pass on Christmas lore, says that "all of these meanings were added to Candy Canes after they had become popular." None of the 19th-century descriptions in the table below mention a J.
The shape has a duller explanation. A hook is what lets you hang a stick of candy on a branch.
August Imgard's spruce in Wooster, Ohio, 1847
The most repeated American claim puts the first candy canes on a Christmas tree in Wooster, Ohio. August Imgard was born in Wetzlar, Germany, in 1828 and reached Wooster before he was 20, where he set up as a tailor. In 1847 he cut a spruce from a nearby wood and had the village tinsmith make a star for the top.
The tree is well remembered in Wooster. Accounts say it stood on a slowly turning platform while a music box played, hung with paper ornaments, gilded nuts and kuchen, a German cake, and that people came from miles around to see it.
The candy canes are shakier. The credit comes from the National Confectioners Association and a 2003 food science textbook, both of which call Imgard "German-Swedish," though he was born in Germany. Neither points to an 1847 document. A Cleveland TV report adds that early canes were all white, so if he did hang any, they had no stripes.
Imgard is a fair candidate for an early Ohio Christmas tree, part of the larger story of how immigration built American food culture. As the first man to hang a candy cane, his case rests on modern retellings.
Who invented the candy cane? What the 19th-century record shows
If you go looking for the words themselves, the trail is short.
| Year | Source | What it says |
|---|---|---|
| 1837 | Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association fair, Boston | "Stick candy" on show, no canes |
| 1844 | Eleanor Parkinson, The Complete Confectioner, Pastry-Cook, and Baker | Peppermint sticks kept "perfectly white, except the stripes," pulled long and twisted |
| 1866 | "Tom Luther's Stockings," Ballou's Monthly Magazine | "Candy canes," described as mammoth, no color or flavor given |
| 1874 | The Nursery | Candy canes in a Christmas setting |
| 1882 | Babyland | "Tall, twisted candy canes" hung on a Christmas tree |
Americans were making and selling stick candy by the 1830s, a trade that ran on the cheap sugar described in our history of sugar. Parkinson's recipe, printed in Philadelphia, shows that striping was already routine in the 1840s: the colored pieces are laid "over the surface in narrow stripes" and the sticks are pulled out and twisted. By 1866 "candy cane" was ordinary enough to drop into a children's story without explanation.
The 1882 Babyland story is the clearest picture. A mother who had always been too poor for a tree finally buys "a tall, handsome tree" and hangs it with oranges, apples, popcorn balls, dolls and "tall, twisted candy canes."
Nobody in this record is an inventor. There is no first maker and no patent before the 20th century. The first person to bend a warm sugar stick into a hook probably did not think it worth writing down.
Why are candy canes red and white?
The sources pull in two directions here. The National Confectioners Association says canes were white for about 200 years and that red stripes and peppermint became the norm around the turn of the 20th century. An Akron newspaper puts the red-striped cane as standard more than 50 years after Imgard's tree, which lands in the same place.
Against that, Parkinson was already striping peppermint sticks in 1844, and the 1882 canes were "twisted," which sounds like a striped rope of sugar. Both can be true. Striping was an old trick for straight sticks, and what settled around 1900 was red-on-white peppermint as the default for the hooked Christmas version.
You may also read that peppermint canes were hung on trees to keep rodents and cats away. That claim circulates with no source behind it.
Bob McCormack, Father Keller and the machine that bent the hook
For most of their history, candy canes were bent by hand. A sugar stick has to be curved while it is still warm and soft, and the crook is where it breaks.
An early attempt to fix this came from Detroit. On November 21, 1921, Brasher O. Westerfield filed a patent for a candy-forming machine that "is designed principally for forming candy canes." Knives cut a strip of candy into pieces, and rollers pushed one end of each piece around a rounded form. It was granted on August 14, 1928. Some accounts credit an early 1920s cane patent to the Bunte Brothers of Chicago, but the patent record names Westerfield.
The company that turned canes into a mass product was in Albany, Georgia. Bob McCormack, an investor from Birmingham, Alabama, chose Albany in 1919 and began producing sticks of candy for his Famous Candy Company. In 1924 he and Bob Mills bought out the other backers and renamed it Bobs' Candy Company.
On February 10, 1940, a tornado hit Albany's business district, killed 17 people and destroyed the Bobs building. The company had no tornado insurance and rebuilt anyway.
The fix came from inside the family. Gregory Harding Keller, McCormack's brother-in-law, became a Catholic priest. On May 13, 1957, giving his address as North Little Rock, Arkansas, he filed a patent for a "candy cane forming machine." Gripper jaws on a moving chain held each soft stick, a fixed angled piece bent the loose end to a right angle, and rollers wrapped it the rest of the way around a curved die.
The patent says the bending was "accomplished by a rolling action whereby complete control with little or no breakage is attained." Keller assigned half the rights to McCormack, and the patent was granted on October 18, 1960.
When did the machine arrive?
The dates around it are loose. The New Georgia Encyclopedia says that by 1958 the Keller Machine could mass-produce hooked canes, and describes it as a machine that twisted and cut scrap stick candy. Other accounts credit a family member with a twisting and cutting machine in 1952 and a bending machine a year later. The 1957 filing is the firmest date. By the end of the 1950s, Bobs was producing 1.8 million sticks of candy a day, with national sales of $3.3 million.
What happened to Bobs, and to Imgard
The choirmaster and the J are later decorations hung on an older candy, like many origin stories that read better on a gift tag than in a library.
The McCormack family sold Bobs to Farley's and Sathers in spring 2005, and by the end of that year the new owners had shut down every Bobs operation in Albany. The Bobs name now belongs to the Ferrara Candy Company. In Wooster, August Imgard died in 1904, and every year the large pine above his grave in Wooster Cemetery is strung with Christmas lights.
Questions people ask
Who invented the candy cane?
No single inventor appears in the record. Americans were making striped stick candy by the 1840s, and the word "candy cane" first shows up in an 1866 magazine story. The first patent for a cane-bending machine came in the 1920s, and Father Gregory Keller of Arkansas filed the one that made mass production practical in 1957.
Is the candy cane story about a choirmaster real?
It is a legend. The tale of a Cologne Cathedral choirmaster handing out shepherd's-crook sugar sticks in 1670 has not been found in print before the mid-20th century. Even the National Confectioners Association opens its version with "Legend has it," and the choirmaster is never named in any telling.
When did candy canes become red and white?
Red-striped peppermint became the standard look around 1900, according to the National Confectioners Association. Before that, canes were mostly white. Striping itself is older: Eleanor Parkinson's 1844 confectionery book already described pulling and twisting peppermint sticks with narrow colored stripes.
How are candy canes bent into a hook?
For most of their history, makers bent soft sugar sticks by hand, and the crook was where they broke. Father Gregory Keller's 1957 patent for a candy cane forming machine used gripper jaws, an angled piece and rollers to wrap each stick around a die, with little or no breakage. Bobs Candies of Albany, Georgia, used it.
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