Grohmann Knives

Grohmann Knives Limited is a small family business with a big reputation.

It is an Old World story that began before the Second World War when a commercial buyer from Quebec traveled once a year to a factory in Sudetenland, then a German region of Czechoslovakia, to buy pocket knives. Every year the buyer would urge Rudolph Grohmann the production manager at a plant in Mikulasovice (Nixdorf), to come to Canada, promising him help to get started. Mr. Grohmann would always decline as he was happy in his own country, but after the war, the political situation grew desperate and in 1949 Rudolph Grohmann accepted the offer. Rudolph's daughter Berta married Michael Babinec Sr who was from Rudno nad Hrohom. Within a year, Grohmann and his family arrived in Nova Scotia at the invitation of the provincial government-funded Pictou Cutlery.

Here they worked along with approximately 30 other people. While Pictou Cutlery was in operation, an Arkansas knife company CASE was hired to assist with one large order of 200,000 pcs of folders. However, the Nova Scotia government closed the business after three years and sold off all the machinery. Mr. Grohmann and Mr. Babinec Sr then went to work at Trenton Steel making Canon shells for the Korean War and then to Fairy Aviation in Shearwater machining airplane parts amongst other jobs. Mr. Grohmann however was determined in his trade to make knives and built a garage workshop to begin producing and engraving folding knives designed by himself.