The company was founded back in 1866, the year after the Civil War, and was incorporated in 1873. The company is now under the management of the fifth generation of the Garland family. The original products were items called pickers made of water buffalo hide for use on textile looms to weave cloth. These pickers moved the shuttle back and forth from one end of the loom to the other and water buffalo hides were used because it was such a tough material. These items were made until the year 1900 when the company started making rawhide mallets and rawhide faced hammers, once again out of water buffalo hides because of the toughness of the material. These items are still being made today.

In 1950 Garland bought out a defunct company called Snowcraft in Norway, Maine that was down to one employee repairing snowshoes that had been made by the company for the government during the second world war. Over the following twenty-four years that was built up to fifty employees manufacturing snowshoes and wooden toboggans. In 1974 that division was sold off. During that period the parts that the company made for the textile industry started showing up being imported into this country made out of a new plastic material that was lasting ten to twelve times longer than the water buffalo hide pickers.

Following the philopshy of "sink or swim" Garland imported from Europe the first five hundred pounds of UHMW resin ever brought into North America. Here Garland was a company specializing in products made from water buffalo hide with five hundred pounds of resin. Charles Garland, President of Garland Mfg. Company, can remember his father, Harry Garland, bringing the powder home to try out in his mother's oven to see what would happen at different temperatures. Garland first tried to injection mold the material and then subsequently got into the extrusion of this unique plastic. At that time back in the mid fifties, Garland was the only company in the world that was able to extrude UHMW.

In April of 1984 the company moved to a new 53,000 square foot manufacturing facility located in Saco's Industrial Park. Previous to that move the company had been located in the same building for ninety-seven consecutive years.

Over the last forty years Garland obviously has seen many changes in the plastic industry and has diversified into selling a countless number of industries. The company no longer sells to the textile industry as it has changed drastically and no longer uses pickers in the new modern shuttleless looms. Garland now extrudes its Gar-Dur Plastic UHMWP in nine different colors and sells its products around the world. The company obtained ISO 9002 certification for its quality control program in 1994.