Published September 21st, 2025

Photography by Jennifer Bain

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Heavy-duty gloves that Elvis wore when he served in the U.S. army in Germany. An antique travelling glove salesman kit. A chain mail armour glove discovered in a Georgian village that’s hundreds of years old. Cowhide leather hockey gloves from the 1940s.

Who knew that gloves could be so fascinating? The people of Point Leamington did.

This small town (population 574ish) in rural Newfoundland and Labrador has long been home to Superior Glove but the seaside manufacturing plant now doubles as Canada’s first museum devoted to gloves.

“We’re the pros, and we have a lot of history and culture when it comes to glove knitting and sleeve knitting and engineered yarns,” says research and development co-ordinator Tammy Fudge. “But Tony Geng, our president, also wanted to draw people to rural Newfoundland, especially this area, to promote it.”

I’ve come to Point Leamington — about 90 minutes northwest of Gander in Central Newfoundland — to visit the Canadian Glove Museum and learn how hands are protected around the world.

The story begins in Acton, Ontario in 1910 with the Acton Glove Co., the company that Frank Geng (Tony’s father) bought in 1961 and renamed Superior Glove Works. He expanded here in 1988 with several home sewers working on three machines in 700 square feet of the town hall.

Now Superior Glove is the leader in industrial safety gloves and sleeves and has production facilities across Canada, the United States, Mexico and Central America. Its 33,000-sq.-ft. Point Leamington plant is home to about 120 workers and is the perfect place for a crash course in engineered yarns, knitting machines and all the steps to make modern safety gloves and sleeves.

Plant manager Frazer Stuckless and wife Madonna Stuckless.

“There’s still a lot of people that don’t know we exist and we’ve been here since 1988,” plant manager Frazer Stuckless confides. That’s slowly starting to change since the museum launched in spring 2023 and pledged to always have free admission.

The museum could have opened in busy southern Ontario, but Geng insisted on Newfoundland because of its “resilient, creative and proudly unique” character and the chance to draw visitors to the unsung area for stories of protection, innovation and human connection.

The sun-splashed, one-room museum preserves, displays and studies gloves of historical and cultural significance. It’s open daily in the summer and year-round whenever the plant is open, but call ahead to book free tours.

Tours start with an overview of the history of personal protective equipment (PPE). You’ll hear how the Industrial Revolution created more manufacturing plants and manual labour jobs which in turn sparked a boom in the hand protection business because precious hands must be kept safe from potential dangers.

The first glove the company founder designed is here. So is the first glove to roll off the line at this plant in 1989. A section celebrating different designs showcases a glove connected to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, a chainsaw glove with nine layers of protection, and a snowmobile glove with a Velcroed attachment used to wipe your mouth.

“This area right here is our famous section,” says Cooke at the museum’s most popular area. “These belonged to Elvis Presley. We acquired them from his nurse at an auction.” The nurse was outside Graceland making snowmen with her children during a rare Memphis blizzard wearing latex dishwashing gloves when Elvis found out and offered her much warmer gloves to keep.

Then there’s the royal blue rubber glove with a missing pinky finger tip that helped save one of Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki’s fingers while spending a day working on a commercial fishing boat in British Columbia.

“This is the glove he wore fishing one time, and this is the string that cut around his finger,” explains tour guide Carolyn Cooke. “The glove went and saved his finger. So he had it hung up in his office and he sent us a picture of that — and he also illustrated it in one of his books.”

Short white nylon gloves with a single pearl-like wrist button passed from starlet Marilyn Monroe to her Hollywood stylist and then eventually, though auction, to here. Audrey Hepburn's black leather Ralph Lauren gloves with three gold button accents came via the same stylist.

Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Heburn gloves.

In an antique and cultural gloves area, you’ll see everything from corn husking gloves and beaver fur gloves to Japanese firefighting gloves and 1939 Royal Air Force air-gunner’s gloves.

My favourites are Newfoundland handknit trigger mitts (part glove and part mitten) still used for hunting, a conical tin contraption to dry children’s mittens on a wood stove, a vintage briefcase that belonged to a travelling glove salesman, and oven mitts.

The food safe heavyweight mitts with maximum heat protection are actually for sale in the gift shop area for a pittance. “Those oven mitts? My family goes crazy for ‘em,” confides Cooke. “They say to me `They’re not very pretty but they’re excellent gloves — they’re the best oven mitts I ever wore.’”

School groups love touching the glove sensory wall and crafting a keepsake mini glove from coagulant and a dipping mixture, but everybody is welcome to do those things. For now, tours are year-round and on demand, and you can tell your guide what you want to focus on.

The tour of Canada’s largest glove manufacturing plant — and chance to meet people who diligently make all these gloves — shouldn’t be missed. It usually happens after the museum tour (but mine happened before on what happened to be an annual inventory day).

Children’s mitten hanger for a wood stove.

“The museum is still in its infancy,” Stuckless stresses. “There’s a lot of plans going forward to add some more things and even more visual displays on different sewing machines and what they do, that type of stuff. There’s still a lot of history to present here yet, but we’ll get there.”

Most of the artifacts come from the founder, auction or donations. If you’ve got gloves, glove-making tools or artifacts that showcase the craftsmanship, industry and cultural significance of gloves in Canada and beyond, you might want to get in touch.

Fits Like a Glove: Visiting Canada’s Only Glove Museum

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