Heritage, weather bring leathersmith to Canton

For more than 160 years, the Crane family has been in the leather business.

Tony Crane is an eighth generation leather craftsman. He and his wife, Misty, recently opened a shop – Crane Custom Leather – in Canton’s Old Mill Marketplace Pavilion V Shop 174.

“I’m originally from east Tennessee,” Mr. Crane said. “I learned the business from my grandparents and a great uncle. I’m the only grandkid who went into the business and it will probably die with me unless one of my kids decides to go into it.”

The Cranes first operated a shop in Gatlinburg (Tenn.) National Park.

“We were in Gatlinburg about five years in the national park and then our shop flooded,” Mrs. Crane said. 

The Cranes lost a lot of inventory and supplies. A disagreement between their insurance and their landlord’s insurance was hard on the business. So when a friend working at the Grand Canyon suggested they move out west, they did.

The friends was a saddlemaker working for the Grand Canyon Park Service and “he said he always had people asking him for wallets and purses and stuff but he couldn’t do it because he worked for the park,” Mr. Crane said.

Crane Custom Leather would come in and provide the tourist-type items. “If you work for the park, you can’t compete with anybody in the park,” Mr. Crane said. “We had to go in and sit down with park officials and tell them we wouldn’t do saddles and tack but that if he had to be gone, I’d be on call for emergencies. He did all the saddle and tack for the mules that go to the bottom of the canyon.”

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