The Button Factory Arts building was constructed in 1886, at 25 Queen (later Regina) Street South. The business, owned by Richard and Rudolph Roschman, closed in the mid-1940s. The building was subsequently used by Duffus Plywood Limited, the Ontario Glove Manufacturing Company, and Schendel Office Supplies. In 1982, it was designated by the City of Waterloo as a historical and architecturally significant landmark, now the cherished home of Button Factory Arts.

Richard Roschman

The start of the button factory

Richard Roschman stowed away on a ship near the end of the Franco-Prussian war to avoid joining the army. Fortunately when the 23-year-old German tool maker announced his presence to the ship’s captain, he agreed to let Roschman work for his passage to Canada. When Roschman arrived in Québec on March 23, 1871, the captain told him to head to Berlin, Ontario where he would find many of his countrymen.

Berlin supported a thriving button industry at the time with five local factories. Roschman began working at the Vogelsang and Shantz Button Factory, one of the first of its kind in Canada, shortly after settling in the area. After learning the trade, Roschman decided to open the first button business in Waterloo in 1878 with partner Daniel Bowman. When his brother Rudolph arrived, he began working there as well, and by 1884 the Roschman brothers were in business together. The Roschmans were just two of thirteen children born in Ulm, Germany, to a prominent soap manufacturing family.

“(Richard Roschman) came to the New World with little capital, but with strong determination and by unfaltering energy and perseverance he has worked his way upward in the business world from a humble financial position to one of affluence.” As the business grew, the Roschmans built a new factory in the late 1880s on what is now Regina Street in Uptown Waterloo. The historic factory has been designated a heritage landmark and is being used by the Waterloo Community Arts Centre. It is generally described as “Mennonite Georgian” and is considered to be an excellent example of a late nineteenth-century industrial building.

By 1900, more than one hundred men and women were making everything from buttons to buckles and cufflinks. A Waterloo woman who worked at the factory as a 14-year-old remembers: “It was dirty work, the shells were brittle and sandy, I sorted them and put them in baskets, then men carried them away to be stamped into buttons. There were a lot of young people working there; the girls sat at long tables to sort and grade. I made $5 a week.”