More Model Railroad Sudoku: Cow Cars to the Ainsley Cannery

If we want to understand how a railroad and a cannery worked together, we need some data - preferably details about the number and types of freight cars doing to a particular industry. We’d done that in the past with Tom Campbell’s data about the grocery wholesaler’s siding in Sacramento a few years ago, but there’s always more we’d like to learn.


Getting information on the actual freight cars heading off to canneries is always a challenging task. Summary data often survives, either in terms of how many carloads the Santa Clara Valley sent, or canneries bragging about their canning prowess. Lawsuits might suggest the amount of traffic, such as this description of the fruit produced by several canneries. Although I’ve found occasional other facts (such as delivery notifications for freight cars at the Golden Gate cannery), the information’s spotty.

Luckily, occasional gems turn up. The Campbell Museum shared this Ainsley Packing Co. letterhead as part of reminding us of Campbell’s cannery heritage. They were most excited about the letterhead. I was most excited about the contents.

The letter gives the “pear account” of fruit coming to the Ainsley cannery from the Treat Ranch. It’s unclear where this ranch was. One possibility is a 160 acre ranch in Elk Grove run by the Gage family — which would explain why the fruit was arriving by rail on the Southern Pacific. There’s several other Treat Ranches that show up in searches; I’ll let someone else decide on the right one.

We see a carload of pears arriving every couple days from late July through early September. We see multiple carloads on August 3, but otherwise there’s usually a couple days between cars. There’s a larger gap at the end of the season, with 16 days between the arrival on August 24 and September 8.

What do we know about the freight cars? We can use the Official Railway Equipment Register (ORER) to track down what these cars were. The ORER was a frequently-published list describing each railroad's freight cars: reporting marks, size, weight, and special characteristics. Indexes in front can help us identify the owner from reporting marks. It was intended for use by shippers and others to check on the features of the cars they were assigned for loads.

We see 14 cars listed on the Ainsley receipt. (I’ve put them in a Google Docs spreadsheet if you’d like to examine the data in detail.) All are SP or subsidiary cars, suggesting the Treat Ranch was on the SP. Many of the cars come from the Texas subsidiaries, so they may not be familiar to us West Coast SP modelers. The GHSA is Galveston, Harrisburg, and San Antonio Railway, LW is Louisiana and Western, MLT is Morgan’s Louisiana and Texas.

They’re a mix of new and old cars; Most cars at least 15 years old, but two or three are new cars, built in the last few years. The twenty year old CS-2 ventilated fruit boxcars were common, showing up four times. Only one load is carried in a regular boxcar.

Half the freight cars are actually stock cars. I've certainly heard of stock cars being used for carrying fruit in high season. Melons were frequently carried in stock cars as late as the 1950's. However, this is a nice reminder how prevalent use of stock cars was for tree fruit. There’s also several mentions of “boxcar/stockcar” hybrids which I don’t know much about, and couldn’t find pictures.

The use of stockcars as a cheap ventilated boxcar is interesting, and could potentially be fun to model on the Vasona Branch. There's explicit evidence that stock cars carried fruit to canneries in the 1920's. Here's a photo showing workers unloading fruit from stock cars at the Richmond Chase cannery in San Jose. The Feb 1926 reweigh date for the nearest car indicates that apricots were still being carried in stock cars in the late 1920's. Note all the lug boxes are marked with the Richmond-Chase logo. If the cannery supplied the lug boxes, then that probably means the boxes needed to be shipped out to the farm by rail too. Doug Debs also pointed out a 1928 wreck of the Shoreline Limited passenger train at Bayshore involved the train slamming into several stock cars of apricots. The accident overturned the engine and forced some poor soul to go and recover the less-damaged apricots.

So, 14 carloads of pears, and 150 tons of fruit just from Treat. What does that tell us about the total amount of fruit arriving at the loading dock at the Ainsley cannery? How many more cars would have been arriving during the year? We can guess that from some of the news reports about the production at the Ainsley cannery. A 1918 news article, four years after these loads, mentioned that the cannery canned 5.5 million cans of fruit during the season. They spent $300,000 on fruit alone that year. Treat’s $7500 in pears would have been 2 to 2.5% of Ainsley’s total purchase, so if Ainsley bought the same amount of fruit in 1914 (and if all the fruit had the same price), we’d expect the equivalent of 750 cars of fruit coming in during the year, or six cars a day for 120 days. Now, not all of Ainsley’s fruit would have come by train; this is the Santa Clara Valley, after all, so pears, peaches, apricots, and plums would have been arriving by wagon. But I could also imagine that Ainsley would want to lengthen their canning season as long as possible, so bringing in fruit from elsewhere would allow them to can even when the orchards in Campbell weren’t producing. (On the other hand, we’re seeing fruit from Treat Ranch from mid-July to the beginning of September - a pretty wide season already.) It’s easy to assume that we’d have a few cars of fruit a day arriving at the Ainsley cannery throughout the season.

For my model railroad, this information gives me more details about the Ainsley Cannery, and how to make freight operations at the cannery better match what really happened in the 1930’s. First, this data suggests I should have cars coming to the cannery bringing fruit. If Ainsley was receiving fruit from elsewhere in the ‘teens, I can guess they were also receiving fruit from outside the valley in the 1930s. The use of stock cars for fruit is interesting and eye-catching, so I should should build a bunch of SP, EP&SW, and LW stock cars to bring in fruit. Finally, with so many cars coming in from Treat, I should definitely keep the Ainsley cannery busy - pushing many carloads at the industry, and also perhaps considering switching more than once a day to get realistic amounts of fruit into the cannery, and keeping my operators extra busy.

All of the research and guessing I’m doing here can be done for your favorite railroad or industry. Keep an eye out for paper and documentation, or check photos to see if you can spot the cars being loaded or unloaded at your favorite industries. Finding information on specific cars is easier than ever; Google Books has a bunch of ORERs on line. Westerfield also used to sell CDs with scans of particular years. I use Tony Thompson’s Southern Pacific Freight Cars books for more information and photos on the car classes.

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Thanks to Ed Gibson for noticing the reweigh date on the stock car in the Richmond Chase photo, confirming that stock cars were used in the 1920's. Thanks to Doug Debs for pointing out the 1928 Bayshore wreck. Most of all, thanks to the Campbell Library for scanning and sharing the letterhead!

Bring in the Photographers!

Full disclosure: all photos here are mine documenting the weekend, not the shots the pro guys made.

Well, that was an interesting weekend. As part of preparations for the NMRA 2021 National Convention, Rails by the Bay, I got a chance to get my layout photographed for articles about the convention. Model railroading’s a lone wolf hobby for me, so I’ve never had anyone else doing serious photos of the layout. I instead got to sit and see how others thought of my layout, and how they worked to get great photos. I also changed a bit how I think about the layout as a result.

So let’s talk about aiming for good photos in terms of planning, preparation, and the photos.

If model railroading taught me anything, it taught me project management. Building a model railroad always involves a long effort to build something significant: deciding what to build, sequencing all the work, rolling with the voluntary and involuntary changes, and ending up with a completed model railroad. I found out about the photo sessions at the beginning of the year, and realized I had some time to finish a couple scenes that had been lingering. I used my usual tricks for deciding what to figure out what to do: fix what annoyed me the most, and fix what I was in the mood for.

Two projects won. First, long suffering Glenwood’s scenery finally got redone. I’ve written a bit about that previously, but to recap: it has the potential for an eye catching scene, the prototypical curve makes it easy to stage reproductions of historical photos, and who doesn’t like model trains in mountain scenery? I’d first ripped out the old scenery and fixed some notoriously unreliable trackage near and in the summit tunnel. I redid the hills and Glenwood Highway to better match the terrain. I then covered the area in trees. Normally, I try to build trees from Woodland Scenics kits, but this time I bought from Grand Central Gems at a recent train show, and had a redwood forest ready in days. I ballasted track, detailed the former turntable pit, and built a quick reproduction of the Glenwood station from styrene. (I’ll talk more about the station another time.). Glenwood needed a water tank, so I quickly grabbed one of the venerable Atlas kits and put it into service.

By the time the scene was done, COVID-19 had hit and the original deadline for the work - the Prorail operating event had been cancelled. We rescheduled the photoshoot for August, which gave me motivation for another project. This time, I decided to go after downtown Campbell. The Campbell scene’s always been a focal point for the layout, but the scenery and structures have been half-done for years. I’d built the station model years ago and scenicked the station side of the tracks. However, the opposite side of the tracks was still temporary buildings and little scenery. That included downtown Campbell, Sunsweet, the Hyde Cannery, and Ainsley cannery. This area provided some great scenes - space to photograph long trains, switching action, and lots of canneries. I started on a big push a couple months back to redo everything. For downtown Campbell, I redid the road and building bases, and started trying to pull all together.

I’d already done four of the five buildings for the downtown Campbell Ave., but had held off on the most impressive of the group - the Growers National Bank building that had been downgraded to the local movie theater by the 1930’s. (The building still exists in 2020, though I think they're still fighting about whether to allow it to become a night club.) I’d made a couple attempts at starting the bank, finding a suitably regal plastic model, but the space on the layout was tiny - only about twenty feet wide - and the model wouldn’t fit. Unable to do things perfectly, I just gave up and decided I’d do the model another day.

That day finally came as I cleaned up Campbell Ave. I tossed out my ideas of a "perfect" model and decided to just start building and see what turned up. Like the Dutch signal box, I finally got annoyed enough to just start building. Like that model, I used styrene sheet primarily. Again, large dimension styrene rod worked really well - the 2 foot inset for the doorway was simply 0.250 styrene bar, simplifying the construction. A leftover door and window served for entry. I used brick sheet for the walls; the detail along the roofline were strips of board-and-batten siding standing in for carved stone. I crafted the theater sign from styrene sheet. I would have liked to 3d print it to get the lettering perfect, but my older SketchUp software doesn’t seem to want to render 3d characters.

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Campbell Theater

Bank of Camera Close-up

With Campbell Ave. in, and the road glued down, my next project was fixing the Ainsley Cannery. The Ainsley site’s had a posterboard mockup ever since the layout was built; I still remember Byron Henderson complimenting me during an early operating session because the freight door spacing matched my 40 foot freight cars. Back in 2006, I had a great solution for the cannery - I’d found a YesterYear Models “fruit packing house” - actually a former Sunkist packing house from Riverside, California. The box has been gathering dust ever since as I waited for just the right inspiration to use it for the cannery. This was finally the time to pull the kit out of storage. The overall shape of the buildings are similar - both were a row of wooden barn-like buildings. Like Sunkist, the Ainsley cannery had an office in the end closes to Campbell Ave, and a loading dock dominating the front of the building. As a result, the rough arrangements of windows and doors would work fine as-is. One big difference was that Sunkist’s building had two joined wooden sheds, while the Ainsley cannery had two corrugated iron sheds and two wooden sheds in a line; historic accuracy went out the window in order to get a "good enough" model done as I ignored the corrugated iron sheds. I ended up cutting the Sunkist building in half, and using both ends side-to-side, and ignoring the different materials in the various sheds.

The Drew Cannery, formerly Ainsley

Preparation

All that major work took me up to last week. However, I still hadn’t done much of the preparation work, so I kicked into a big cleanup mode. Our photographers recommended doing a serious cleaning so extraneous dust or debris visible on photos. I also got rid of all the little problems I'd ignored over the years. Some was operating session damage - having folks handle models is always going to trigger a bit of damage. I fixed broken signs and bumped trees, repaired damaged cars, fixed scratched paint or bent grab irons, and filled in ballast holes triggered by past cleanups. I dusted off a set of “good cars”, and stashed away cars that were the wrong era or had visible damage. I fixed long-lingering projects -holes in scenery I’d never addressed, half done patches, and rough surfaces. Some were really quick - I’d never patched scenery when I’d rearranged the Wrights tunnel. Some were larger, such as finishing half-done spackling in the Meridian Road scene.

Most of the preparation work was the same I’d do for an operating session. For operating sessions, I’d also be worrying about reliability, cleaning car and locomotive wheels, testing that engines were working fine, testing couplers and trucks. None of that sort of work mattered much here - the trains would be stationary in the pictures. I was pretty relieved not to be doing a serious cleaning. Serious cleaning's always a huge time sink, and I always want to over-prepare - I’m always worried before operating sessions whether a balky engine or dirty track will make for an unpleasant operating experience.

Another great advantage of photos is that locomotives don't need to run well. The real Vasona Branch likely had small 0-6-0s switching the canneries. On my model, larger 2-8-0 locomotives instead get the job. I really like the little 0-6-0s, but can never use them for operations. They tend to be balky runners and stall way too easily. When operators are focusing on how to solve a switching puzzle, the last thing they want to do is deal with a stalling or broken locomotive; it interrupts the illusion of working on the railroad, and usually ends up with waiting for the layout owner to clean track, fix the engine, or provide another locomotive. With photos, however, a balky or stationary locomotive isn't a bad thing, for the trains don't need to move in a good photograph. I cleaned one of the rarely-used 0-6-0s, and it got a few chances to be on center stage. To be fair, it's still good to have working locomotives if only to quickly pull cars around the layout to a new photo site, but a photo session removes a lot of the worry of mechanical problems.

While some tasks such as wheel-cleaning and locomotive tuning don’t make sense for photos, other tasks not needed before operating sessions were needed. I’m usually a bit hesitant about putting detail on the layout. It’ll often get damaged during operating sessions. I’ve hoarded some details so they’re available when I need to fill in a scene to be photographed. The layout hasn’t always been at a stage where it’s ready for detail.

But hey, if the layout’s going to get photographed for real, this is the time for all that detail. I pulled out my box of various details I’ve hoarded during my time in the hobby. Every Woodland Scenics pallet I’d ever gotten from a detail kit went on the layout. Extra parts from a Fine Scales Miniature kit that couldn’t handle more crowding. All the 3d printed boxes, bags, lugs, and can stacks I’d printed went on any available loading dock. I plopped down figures where they were appropriate. I took a pair of 3d printed flagmans shanties and phone booths and placed them wherever they’d fit. I took the large fruit bins from the YesterYear kit and made a box yard for Del Monte #3, just as can be seen in photographs.

I also put in a bunch of telegraph poles along the right-of-way. I’ve had these on the layout before; they tend to get a lot of abuse, but they’re eye-catching. This time, I spent an evening assembling and painting a set of telegraph and power poles from Rix Products and Atlas. I also painted them a bit more carefully than before. Previously, I’d just painted the telegraph poles a quick brown and added a bit of green for insulators. This time, I made the colors stronger than last time - darker posts, silvery supports, green insulators. In place on the layout, they really catch the eye. For the Meridian Road scene, I also made a point of doing a power/telephone line paralleling the road which helps to make the scene even more realistic.

And thanks to some crazy times at work, I crammed a bunch of this work into the last week, and into a mad three days. We were also in the middle of a serious heat wave here in San Jose, so the hardest part was avoiding heat stroke in the garage, but on the plus side the matte medium dried really, really fast. The roof of the Ainsley cannery got painted just as soon as the glue holding the paper tarpaper on appeared to stick. I laid ballast in a bunch of places that had never been ballasted, and managed to paint and clean the rail in time. I decorated new scenes - bushes hiding a farmhouse along Meridian Ave, a path to the bathroom around the edge of the Rio Grande gas station, and a row of posts to keep parked cars away from the Campbell depot. I was bouncing back and forth between touching up scenery, weathering cars, and touching up structures. When I was checking old photos to get the sign on the Ainsley cannery declaring it to now be the Drew Cannery, I noticed a speed limit sign, and quickly printed up several of those to control the HO scofflaws. I was still touching up ballast and fabricating a set of stairs for the Glenwood depot a half hour before the photo session.

I never completely believed those model railroad magazine articles where someone built a well-detailed layout in a year or two. I couldn't imagine they had time to decide on models, do the construction necessary, or add the details. This week's mad rush convinced me it was possible. All I needed was some definite ideas of what should be built, an urgent deadline, a bit of wiggle-room on what counted as "good enough", some well-stocked supplies, and way too much manic energy.

And the Photographers Arrive

Dan and Doug, the photographers, were spending several days just photographing layouts in the Bay Area. They've also done this before for previous conventions and other layouts, and came fully prepared. Although I've read about model photography in magazines, this was my first chance to see pros in action.

They came prepared: lights, power cords, and various secret photographer paraphenalia. The extension cords helped when the breaker blew on the garage circuit - our 1960's house wasn't designed for this kind of model railroad lighting, and we quickly found another circuit to share the load.

Lighting the whole length of the layout

Dan also had lots of cool tricks so he could get into the scene with his SLR - mirrors to capture scenes the camera couldn't reach, beanbags to hold the camera steady on the layout, high tripod for the upper level photos.

And they took photos different from me, too. Some of that was expected: they visited the Vasona Branch for only a couple hours, so they were very careful to make their plan of shots, then slowly move around the layout to hit each.

Big difference number one from my attempts at model photography: they bring in lots of light. The Vasona Branch has a mix of lighting: the garage lights are cool white fluorescent strips, but I've got various cool white LEDs and warm white fluorescent fixtures lighting the lower deck. I'll usually just use the existing lighting when I take photos; if I'm really taking care, I might borrow a couple bright lights from one source or another. As a result, my photos often have weird colors if a scene has a mix of LED and fluorescent lights. Dan and Doug used two or three photo lamps. Their lights quickly overpower any layout lighting. They also didn't seem to worry about the narrow space between decks - bounce light off objects was enough to light the scene. Their biggest concern seemed to be getting the scene evenly lit, and avoiding shadows on the backdrop. In places where they couldn't get lights, they assumed they could photoshop in some sky into the black background of the garage door.

Dan and Doug use mirrors and a hand-held photo light to capture a train approaching Alma station.

Big difference number 2: The big surprises for me was just seeing what caught their attention. I haven't seen their photos yet, but they understandably looked for interactions between trains and the world. Signals were a common tool to add some action, as were road crossings. My best guess is that model photos need the extra busy-ness and action, and really need some focal point other than the train. The Vasona Branch's semaphore signals were common places for photos. (That was also true on the prototype; one real photo that inspired me is a 1920 photo of a passenger train coming into Glenwood. That photographer, like Dan, made sure to catch the train as it "split the semaphores".

SP Train 84, coming out of the tunnel at Glenwood

I also heard a bunch of interest about the farmhouse and orchard sitting in the blob where the tracks turn from San Jose to Campbell. This scene's always been half done and cluttered - details not glued down, ground not quite sloping correctly, the orchard too small to be realistic. I'd done a big cleanup of the scene in preparation for the photos - pulled out details, removed structures, and generally made it innocuous. But interest kept drifting back towards the farmhouse and barn. I'd started thinking about details as I was doing cleanup; I'd added a hedge to protect the farmhouse from the busier road. But the interest makes me think I should more seriously plan the scene out.

Dan and Doug also focused on the large details - freight cars and car models - rather than smaller details - not surprising because of the short time. They did spot one broken crossbuck that would have detracted from the scene; we pulled it out.

And that was pretty much it; they got ten good photos, and moved onto the next layout. I got to stare at the layout for a while; it's always fun to see the layout when it's been cleaned up for an open house or an operating session, and doubly-good when all the usual clutter in the garage has been relocated. Even though I'd crammed a bunch to get the layout in shape, I was still excited enough at seeing the layout in good shape that I finished off a couple projects that hadn't been done in time, replacing a remaining broken telephone pole, putting in some gravel around the Ainsley cannery, and fixing up the famous black walnut tree that sat at the start of Campbell Ave.

What did the photos show? I've seen the first photos, and they're great - Dan uses Helicon to combine photos taken at different focal lengths to get more depth of field. Looking at the photos, I see a few things to do differently.

• I'm vertically challenged. In a few of the photos, it's obvious I've been less than good at making sure everything's standing up straight. They're close, but as soon as several objects are in a photo: semaphores, building, water tank, telephone poles - it's obvious each has a slightly different idea what "up" is. I'll need to work on this, both ongoing, and fixing the more obvious offenders before I next take photos.
• Prepare for the story. I'd made sure to have cars set up in sample trains, but hadn't been good about choosing cars or trains to illustrate themes I'd want in an article about the layout. For example, large industries and lots of indistinguishable red boxcars is a big part of my layout, but I neglected to have a switcher ready at Plant 51, and also didn't make sure that the cars there were the uninteresting ones. I need to sketch out the story I want to tell beforehand, and share it with the folks doing photography.

What's next? The layout's clean and in good shape, and I'm excited to do some more building. Finishing Campbell is an obvious next step: the Hyde Cannery buildings are screaming out to be build. I'd held off on building the Campbell Theater and Ainsley Cannery because I wanted to make sure I did them right. However, my quick-and-dirty building rush seemed to work with these. Maybe I should just go build Hyde and see what happens?

The orchard scene's another obvious project.

Once both of those are done, there's obvious holes to fill. One advantage of cleaning the layout was that I got rid of all the building placed on the layout "temporarily" for lack of better space - a couple of farmhouses that never found locations, a drive-in market built for fun, a bunch of cars that needed repair. Now that the layout's opened up, I'm reminded that the area between Campbell and Vasona Junction is still completely empty. The Del Monte Plant #3 property's also still occupied only by foamcore buildings. There's also a stretch of bare plaster up on the upper deck near Alma. I'll need to take a pass on any of these scenes going forward.

If the last week's any indication, I know how to get those scenes done quickly: lock down my idea of the scene, build something that's "good enough" rather than waiting for perfection, and pull a bunch of all-nighters during a heat-wave.

Tracking Down the Lost Cannery of Campbell

A while ago, we heard Edith Daley’s descriptions of the folks coming down to Campbell to work in the canneries. Thanks to David Pereira, we can put some faces next to those caricatures. David, you see, has quite the connection to Campbell canneries, with his great-grandfather, great-grandmother, grandmother, and grandfather all working for the least-known of the Campbell canneries.

That cannery, as all the serious Campbell historians know, is the California Canneries, located just north of the Ainsley cannery. California Canneries is often forgotten; it didn’t have a high-profile local owner like Ainsley or Hyde; it didn’t have the brand recognition of Sunsweet's dried apricot business. Its buildings didn’t survive. It didn’t host the Doobie Brothers like the Farmer's Union Packing house. California Canneries does have a Hindenburg connection, but that all happened Back East, a long way from Campbell.

[ NO PHOTO OF CANNERY AVAILABLE -
NO ONE KNOWS WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE...
YET]

California Canneries was a San Francisco-based canner, started before the turn of the century, but run during the 20th century by Isidor Jacobs. The cannery’s home office was in San Francisco, in a wooden cannery building at 18th and Minnesota. The original building survived up until last year, with the California Canneries sign still visible from the 18th St. overpass across the SP tracks. It finally lost out to UCSF’s new campus, and was torn down for student housing. There’s a couple mentions of a Napa outpost, but nothing definite. However, in the expansionist era just after World War I, Jacobs came down to Campbell to kick the tires on a cannery.

California Canneries, 18th and Minnesota, San Francisco. Torn down. (Google Street View)

The cannery that Jacobs was eyeing was the Orchard City Cannery, run by Perley Payne, son of James Payne (who Payne Ave. in San Jose is named for.) Perley had started a cannery just north of the Ainsley plant in 1910. Payne’s Orchard City Cannery suffered during World War I; while Ainsley was selling to London, Orchard City primarily sold to Germany, and all its customers were on the wrong side of trenches, barbed wire, and mustard gas... a bad way for a cannery to make a profit. So they didn't make a profit, and Payne ended up selling out to Jacobs in 1917; he ran the cannery for the new owner for a year, but washed his hands of the canning business and fell back to orchard labor. His son noted he had quite a gift for grafting walnut trees.

“Campbell, the Orchard City”, lightly notes that Perley Payne’s son played in the rafters of the cannery building “and [was] reprimanded for his escapades.” Perley Payne Jr., in his own words, told a much more realistic and bittersweet story. He highlighted the dark side of trying to hit it big in the canning business when he talked about how his father handled the business failure. Perley later attempted to organize the workers in the local canneries.

“You see, after he lost his cannery, he kind of felt he was disgraced. And I felt, and my wife too, we really felt bad about it, because, he kind of lived on his knees the rest of his life. He depended on his brothers and his sisters when he wasn’t - like one time I remember, we didn’t work for about two or three months it rained so much here that he had to ask them for money all the time to keep us going, you know. I remember he used to charge groceries at Field’s Store in Campbell and I was working and I would take my check to Field’s Store and cash it and pay so much to Fields on dad’s bill and take some down to the gas station and Fred, I forget his last name, anyway, the guy who owned the gas station - He had a charge there, and I’d pay him, too. And I had, outside of the sorry part here, my aunt and uncle, my uncle George and my aunt Aileen — after my uncle George had died, my aunt Aileen told me, "You know George and I were figuring on sending you to college, but we figured you were too irresponsible. And here I was taking all my money that I earned for five years — all of it went home, except for what I did spend to buy that Model T Ford. All of it went home to help my mother and dad with the grocery bills and whatever else they needed. The only thing I kept out was for a haircut and a little bit to go to a show once in a while, something like that. (Perley Payne, Jr.)

Jacobs, meanwhile, managed to do reasonably well with the property, running the cannery through the 1920s and early 1930’s. But the Great Depression was lethal for canners, and California Canneries declared bankruptcy in 1932. The Campbell property went to Fred Drew, who had just bought the Ainsley Cannery. The flagship San Francisco plant went to Jacob’s broker, Moritz Feibusch, who rebranded the company as Calbear Canneries. Feibusch died in the fire on the Hindenburg airship in 1937, putting an end to California Canneries.

The Place

There’s not much evidence of California Canneries. I’ve seen its name on Sanborn maps and on an SP track diagram, but I’ve never seen a photo of the cannery. There’s a corrugated iron warehouse just south of Fry’s on Salmar Ave that must have been built for the cannery, but a tin building with a linoleum dealer and an irrigation contractor is nowhere near as photogenic as Hyde Cannery’s brick buildings closer to downtown. (The Campbell Museum does have a photo of the warehouse along Salmar Ave., but we don't see the cannery in that photo.)

California Canneries, Campbell Ca. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, 1920

In the 1920 Sanborn map, Harrison St.is to the left and the railroad tracks cut across the page from southwest to northeast. Ainsley Cannery is on the bottom. Perley Payne grew up in the house on the corner of Harrison and Hopkins. Hopkins no longer exists; both canneries are now under a row of townhouses.

The 1920 map shows four structures: the cannery (one story, 15’ high, corrugated iron with a wood floor), a separate boiler house, a box nailing shed, and a 10,000 gallon water tank. Southern Pacific railroad valuation maps suggest the railroad spur was installed in 1919 as part of the Jacobs improvements, and extended further to the north in 1926. The railroad map also describes the cannery building as 83 x 138 feet, but doesn’t list the size of the warehouse.

Havens-Semaira Cannery, Campbell Ca. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, 1928-1935

On the 1928-1935 Sanborn map, we see Havens-Semaira Cannery running the cannery; they were founded in 1935 by John Havens of Oakland and S. J. Samaira of San Francisco. Havens had run the Sebatina Canning Company in Sonoma; S. J. Semaira had been importing dried fruits and nuts. The Sunburn map shows that the cannery expanded to take more of the lot, and the turf dealer warehouse appears to the north. The boiler house has moved, and there’s several more accessory buildings including the kindergarten, and garages. The building is still wood, and the loading platforms are now on the north side.

And A Photos Turns Up

That’s awfully dry. We know the size of the building, the materials, the size of the fuel oil tank, and the size of the kindergarten. But we don’t know anything else about the cannery and the people.

Luckily, David turned up with an employee photo from 1926. Many large companies had group panoramic photos taken during the 1920’s, and the cannery photos are particularly interesting because they give us an idea about both the number of folks working at a cannery, and the ethnic groups that made it up.

David has the photo because it contained four of his family - his great grandfather and great grandmother, his grandmother, and her future husband. His great grandfather was a carpenter; his great-grandmother and her two daughters worked at the canning tables. David was also told his grandfather is somewhere in the photo; he likely met his future wife working one summer.

1926 Employee Photo, California Canneries, Campbell. Courtesy David Pereira

View the photo in high resolution here (7 MB). Spot anything interesting? Mention it in the comments!

There’s a lot in this photo - more than 200 workers (48 men, 7 women who look like office workers, and 158 women from the canning tables.) There’s a shot of the tin building that held the cannery. There’s a box car, and houses.

The People

Let’s start with the people. We’ve got five sources to tell us something about the people in this photo: the 1920 census, a 1920 San Jose City Directory, David’s family story from 1919, Edith Daley’s article from the same summer, and Perley Payne’s stories of growing up in Campbell.

The People: The Census

Census data gives us a starting point about who was living in Campbell. The 1920 census had around 1300 people in Campbell township. Most were American; if we count the families where at least the head of the household was foreign born, we find about 25% of Campbell came from immigrant households. There were 59 Italians, 52 Portuguese, 44 English, 28 Swedes, 25 Canadians, 15 Danes, 12 Germans, 12 Austrians, 10 French, 9 Japanese, 7 Norwegians, 6 Spaniards, 5 Scots, 4 Swiss, two Finns, two Russians, and one Australian, one Irish, and one Pole.

These numbers seem a bit lower than I would have expected. By 1920, immigrants were huge part of cannery workforces in other places (as evidenced by Del Monte's employee newsletter having sections in multiple languages, and the size of the Italian and Portuguese communities in San Jose and Santa Clara.) However, the group photo shows more workers that look American than I expected. I could imagine Campbell wasn't as interesting a place for new immigrants. The land was probably expensive because it was good soil and well irrigated (compared to the east side); projects like the Kirk ditch brought water from Los Gatos Creek to orchards as far away as Willow Glen. The land had also been settled early. Lesser quality land - drier land, or hillside land - might have been all that the new immigrants could afford to work. Campbell also might have been a little less welcoming of new immigrants; a 1930 editorial cartoon in the Campbell Interurban Express sounded like they still weren't terribly pleased by the newcomers, ten years after the Johnson-Reed act in 1924 limited the number of immigrants from Southern Europe, and banned Asian immigration completely.

The ethnic makeup does match Perley Payne's memories:

Interviewer: “I know there were lots of Mexicans in Campbell.” “We had no Mexicans in high school at all - or grammar school. We had Italians, Portuguese, Yugoslav, two Japanese, and that was about it. The rest of us were just uh, people…. A bunch of [cannery workers] came out of Dos Palos every year [to work at Ainsley].

(Listen to the Perley Payne Jr. interview or read the transcript.)

About a hundred of the Campbell residents listed occupations related to canning. (See this spreadsheet for a list of all the cannery workers in the 1920 census.) Most were “laborer, canning factory", with the occasional owner, superintendent, or foreman or forewoman. Those numbers are a bit skewed; the census was taken in January, so it omits temporary help. The people willing to list occupations were likely also the workers with sufficient seniority or skill to stay around Campbell during the off-season. (Still, although there's a lot of older men declaring themselves to be cannery workers, there's also still some twenty-somethings declaring that canning is in their blood.) We also only see occupations for the men. Very few women listed cannery work as their occupation.

Generally, only the professional women show up in the occupations. Of the hundreds of women who must have worked at the cutting tables, only Mary King of Sunnyside Ave. listed her occupation as “pitter”. Four women declared themselves as forewomen: Alice V. Hutchins, 55 years old; Clara B. Baldwin, 42; Lulu V. Holmes, 34; and Minnie Lewis, 65; they were responsible for managing the cutting floor - choosing where people sat, handling discipline, ensuring quality. All the other women who spoke of their canning connection were clerical. Emma Swope, 52, was a bookkeeper at Ainsley (and listed as corporate secretary in the 1920 city directory.) Elizabeth B. Hall, 18, was a bookkeeper. Charlotte Thiltgen from Meridian Road, 17, listed her occupation as “saleswoman”. Mary Miller, 36, listed herself as manager of one of the cannery cafeterias. None were recent immigrants, or even children of recent immigrants.

We’ve got Perley Payne, builder of the Payne Cannery still listing himself as owner of a canning factory, while Solomon Jacobs, operating the cannery, listed his job as “manager, canning factory.” Warren Shelly, superintendent, will eventually be the Vice President of the Ainsley cannery in 1933.

On the men’s side, most of the cannery workers are British or American. Archibald Braydon, 32, born in England, lists himself as foreman at a canning factory. So does Leigh Sauders, 49, living at 26 Rincon Ave, and Thomas Mendel, 53. Braydon and Mendel explicitly list themselves as Ainsley employees in the city directory, and Saunders certainly seems a likely Ainsley employee. (If this was modern day, I could imagine salesmen from the London office spending a year working at the cannery so they can better extol the virtues of Santa Clara valley fruit in England and Scotland.) George Sloat, 57; Claude Gard, 42; Clarence Whitney, 54 all show up as foremen. There’s a couple night watchmen; Dudley Chaffee, 61, is boarding with Solomon Jacobs, so we can guess he’s working at California Canneries; Edward P. Green, 60, from Wisconsin, is also serving as night watchman for one of the other canneries. Harry Bloom, 49, and Arthur Cramer, 48, list their occupation as stationary engineers, running the steam boilers. There’s also some hints about which occupations might be more prestigious. Frank Peterbaugh, 19, lists himself as weigher, which I assume required literacy and a certain amount of responsibility. John F. Cooper, a Scotsman living at 27 Campbell Ave., declares himself a shipping clerk. William E. Spreegle, 29, of 21 Everett Street (where’s that?) is a box maker.

The majority of laborers are Americans. Out of 58 laborers, there’s 14 that are either foreign or children of recent immigrants: 5 Portuguese, three Italian, two Irish, two Canadian, and one Russian.

The other big surprise is that most of the fruit-related processing jobs were canning. There were exactly two workers in all of Campbell who said they worked in packing houses: Frank Pererbaugh (19, weigher), and Fred Griggle (34, laborer).

The People: David's Family

So let's compare that with David's family stories.

Anton

We think of the Santa Clara Valley as primarily settlers from the rest of the U.S., with new arrivals in the 1880-1920 time range coming from Italy or Portugal. The census data suggests that Campbell was still predominantly native-born. Anton, David’s great-grandfather, wasn’t; he was born in the Ukraine. He’d been a machinist in Portland, Oregon, but he became a carpenter in the Santa Clara valley, perhaps working in box-making, or perhaps on maintenance of the cannery. His wife, Lena, was from Hungary. The family lived on Harmon Ave in San Jose (Meridian Ave. near Auzerais), just on this side of the Del Monte cannery. Lena and her daughters were working the cannery line; all three were seated in the front row for the photo. From the census data, they were a bit of outliers; there weren't a lot of chances to talk in German (which David said was their primary language.)

Lena and her daughters

David’s grandfather, a Portuguese kid, was somewhere in the crowd according to the family story; he might have been one of the overexposed faces on the right side of the photo - a mix of young and old men who might have been ferrying the fruit into the canning machines. Some of those men would have been the laborers showing up in the census (though I imagine many of the folks we see in the photo are summer workers who didn't show up in the census records at all.) Perley Payne Jr. would have had jobs like this, too.

The Laborers

 We also get a bit of story from Perley Payne, Jr. He worked in the canneries when he was a teenager, always waiting until he was 18 when he could work more than 8 hours and make 40c an hour like the men. Although Perley's father had been a business owner, Perley went straight to the socialists, organizing for the cannery unions and eventually leaving for the Spanish Civil War to fight with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. His oral history not only documents his time as a labor organizer, but hints at who lived in Campbell and who worked in Campbell’s cannery.

(Listen to the Perley Payne Jr. interview or read the transcript.)

Mostly it was Italians and Portuguese women that worked in the cannery. My grandmother worked there. My mother worked in the cannery. My sisters all worked in the cannery…
[Most of the Cannery workers] lived in Campbell, and they knew Mr. Ainsley. They knew the man who owns it. They knew who he was and he had a restaurant for them for lunch. He had a camp where people would come and stay from Dos Palos and other parts of the Valley, they could come and stay during the summer. Of course, us young guys were always down there looking for girlfriends, you know.

Perley's story definitely matches the census records. The two Japanese families, the Makadas and Jios, lived over on Leigh Ave. Wakichi Jio and Suyezo Makada were farmworkers. Portuguese and Italian families both were farmworkers and farm owners; the women of the families represent a lot of the faces in David's photo, even if they didn't explicitly refer to their work in the canneries. Perley's mother also didn't include cannery work as her occupation, but she also had four kids under the age of 7 in 1920.

The older, no-nonsense women in the front row might have been Perley's family, and perhaps floor ladies, managing the women at the cannery. Minnie Lewis or Alice Hutchins might be one of the older women in the front row.

The Floor Ladies

The Women Perley Tried to Date

The young women workers might have been the ones he was chasing after work, or might have been some of the folks from the Central Valley who came to work in the cooler Campbell climate.

Edith Daley, meanwhile, talked about the iconic and stereotypical. There was the city girl who was in Campbell for spending money. The girl with the gingham and the bow, perhaps, and the oh-so modern haircut? Or was she working in the office?



"The City Girl"



"The '80's Material Girls"

The two girls who wouldn’t have looked out of place in a 1980’s new wave club looks like they’re having a good summer. 

There was the San Francisco family, here as much for the change of pace as the pay. Their tent might have been the one with the Victrola.

"The City Family"

There was the little Italian girl, the hardest worker of the lot, who would make sure she’d hit 5 or 6 dollars a day. She was a new immigrant, and she was getting money to live on.

"Edith Daley's Hardest Working Italian Girl"

There were also the bookkeepers and clerks running the office, much like Jennie Besana would have been doing this season down at the Contadina cannery in San Jose. The woman with the upturned hair and the long necklace is a giveaway - that's the last thing she would have had around the fruit side of the cannery because of all the exposed machinery. Any of these women could have been the bookkeeper or saleswomen we saw in the census data.



"The Bookkeeper"



"Management"

I’m torn whether this stern looking woman is a floor lady, or a woman from the business or sales side of California Canneries. The pearls are a much safer choice for cannery jewelry, and the haircut’s quite a modern length. Or perhaps this is Mary Miller, the no-nonsense queen of a cannery cafeteria?

For a final photo, here's a close up of the men on the left hand side of the photo. The leftmost kid has what appears to be a holster; at first I thought he had shears, but didn't see any other men with similar equipment. Then I remember my dad's summer job - he worked at Hunt's in Hayward one summer, and was responsible for punching a worker's ticket when she completed packing a tray of cans. I suspect this is the kid responsible for doing the punching at California Canneries that summer.

The Punch Kid

The Plant

Meanwhile, the machinery didn’t stop humming. Newspaper articles mentioned that Jacobs overhauled the plant in 1919, the peak year for many canneries. He started construction on May 13, but they were shipping apricots by July 9. The photo of the building shows the corrugated iron and simple posts for the cannery; it’s definitely designed for quick construction. For us model railroaders, the corrugated-iron buildings are very familiar; one of the long-time kit manufacturers, Campbell Scale Models, had a bunch of building kits that duplicated these sorts of structures. Campbell got most of their inspiration from the Los Angeles, area, but the California Canneries photo highlights that quick-and-dirty corrugated iron buildings were popular up here in Northern California, too.



The photo takes place on the angled loading dock along Hopkins Ave., a dead-end street paralleling Campbell Ave. that started at Harrison Ave., passed between California Canneries and the Ainsley Cannery, and quickly crossed the SP tracks to end at the cannery housing for the Ainsley cannery. Perley Payne grew up in the house at Hopkins and Harrison, hidden in the trees in the photo. Perley’s father must have hated the traffic from the cars coming to his former cannery. There's a bunch of cars all parked along Hopkins there; the cannery must have generated quite a bit of traffic and parking problems for Campbell.

The Sanborn map shows three houses along Hopkins that might have been annoyed by the traffic. The westernmost house was 80 Harrison, at the corner of Harrison and Hopkins. The Paynes still lived there in 1920, even though the records hint they no longer owned the cannery. 25 Hopkins Ave was next; George Sprague and his extended family were living there; George declared himself a cannery laborer. I'd guess he was a California Canneries employee, and he's probably one of the fifty-something men in the photo. His son-in-law, George Archibald, had the easier job; he was a salesman at a (presumably not-self-service) grocery store. The house closest to the cannery, 35 Hopkins Ave., apparently went with the cannery, for Solomon Jacobs, the manager, lived there in 1920. Dudley Chaffee, the night watchman, boarded with him.



Left side of photo towards Harrison Ave.

The location for California Canneries must have been sweet; I've heard from children of packing house owners that dealing with the line of trucks waiting to drop off fruit in season can be quite a chore; having their own dead-end street must have given California Canneries a bit more wiggle room when the trucks backed up.

By the time Havens-Semaira was running the cannery in 1935, the loading dock where this photo was taken was long gone; the cannery had built out to the edge of the street right-of-way, and the loading dock was now around back in the middle of the lot. For the houses that bordered the property along Harrison, they must have had a lot more problems with trucks idling and noisy unloading.

So now we know what California Canneries looked like. We know why Perley Payne was bitter about losing his cannery. We've got an idea about the ethnic make-up of Campbell in 1920. (I wonder how much things change in 1930?) And finally, we've also got some faces and names to put next to all those workers who canned the Santa Clara Valley's apricots in the summer of 1926. David's family stories, Edith Daley's observations, Perley Payne's memories, and the census data all give us some hints about those folks in David's photo.

---

Great thanks to David Pereira for sharing the photo and allowing me to include it here. The Perley Payne interview was recorded in 1999 by San Francisco State University's Labor Archives and Research Center. Census data came from ancestry.com, though I could have avoided a ton of typing if all the data was available in a processed way.

Spot anything interesting in the photo? Talk about it in the comments!

Edith Daley Visits Campbell

One of my favorite finds for Santa Clara county history has been Edith Daley’s cannery stories. Daley was a writer for the San Jose Evening News in the ‘teens and early twenties. During a slow news summer in 1919, she spent a few weeks visiting the canneries around San Jose and writing about the people and sights in the cannery. Through her booster-ish writing, we learned about the modern, clean concrete floors and nursery at Del Monte’s Japantown cannery, Elmer Chase’s prohibition on asking canners how long they’d been in the business, Jenny Besana’s knowledge of fruit contracts at Contadina, or the size of Greco Canning’s tomato paste boiler. Daley had a large collection of non-cannery writings; she also wrote poetry and a history of World War I from San Jose eyes. However, the San Jose articles tell stories about the fruit business that we couldn’t get anywhere else.

I’ve been disappointed because Daley’s articles only focused on San Jose canneries - no dried fruit packers, and no plants outside San Jose (except for a quick visit to Pratt-Low in Santa Clara.) I’d always assumed this was local paper provincialism. However, a while back, I followed one of the classic tricks of library research - poke around at newspaper issues before and after the interesting articles, and see what turns up. (Full disclosure: I first used this research trick as a ten year old when I figured out that if I found a model railroad book at a particular place on the shelf, I ought to look at other books on the same shelf in case they were interesting.)

Pay dirt.

There’s no signs of articles by Edith Daley, but there were a pair of uncredited articles about the mood in Campbell as the fruit came in. Both articles have Daley’s voice, and read like rehearsals for the articles to come in subsequent weeks. They also match Daley’s interest in worker and child welfare which appeared in many of her articles. The first, “Many Types on Campbell Sts. as ‘Cots Start” on July 10, 1919, highlights the crowds coming to Campbell to work in the canneries. The second, “Better Living Conditions for Fruit Workers” in the July 11, 1919 issue, highlight both housing for cannery workers and conditions inside the cannery.

Daley had plenty of industry and workers to visit in Campbell. 1919 was the middle of a cannery boom in the Santa Clara valley as technology, demand, and the end of World War I coincided. Edith remarked on three canneries in Campbell: California Canneries (a new outpost for a San Francisco canner, with a new building ready for canning within two months of construction), “J. C. Ainslee” (sic), and the George E. Hyde Company. The Hyde Cannery still exists as the Water Tower Plaza office complex near downtown. The Ainsley cannery, just north of Campbell Ave., is currently townhouses. California Cannery’s sawtooth warehouses still sit just south of Fry’s Electronics.

All three were going great guns during her visit. California Canneries, like Ainsley, exported canned apricots to England, and has just announced it had sent its first 1400 cases to Liverpool. Summer heat affected the ripening; the previous day, the canneries were able to handle all their fruit by mid-afternoon “but if the hot spell had continued they soon would have been working triple time.” Speed of ripening was a huge issue in those days; “one prominent fruit man” claimed we could have lost a million dollars in fruit if the hot weather had continued for four days, for the fruit couldn’t have been canned quickly enough.

Daley commented significantly on how the canneries and the fruit rush required many more people than could be gotten from Santa Clara county, and relied on attracting temporary workers. Now, a huge influx of workers isn’t always seen as positive. There’s stories about the pea harvests in Alameda County in the 1930’s attracting harvesters before the crop started; the locals weren’t always happy with the itinerant labor turning up, especially if they didn’t have cash to live on. Daley suggests that the gathering hordes in Campbell were more welcomed.

“They say that the population of Campbell has more than doubled overnight - in less than a week at any rate - and one can well believe it as one walks around the streets of the little orchard city.

“And what a variety of them there are! There is the city girl, who takes it all as a lark, and, it is feared, is a little more afraid of spoiling her hands than the efficient worker should be. She is not averse to earning a few dollars for fall hats during the summer months, however.

“Then there is the black-eyed little Italian girl - the most efficient worker in the game. It is a matter of dollars and cents with her and she clears $5 or $6 a day without half trying when the 'cots are running good.

“There are the ex-tired businessmen of the bay cities who want to spend a few days away from the pavements and who have brought their wives and kiddies with them to enjoy the celebrated Santa Clara valley. And kiddies! There are scores of them,, of assorted sizes, shapes, and colors. All with little sunburned noses and knees, and a universally happy expression of health and pleasure.”

The idea of city folks coming to help out isn’t new; there are stories of school teachers moonlighting at Contadina in the 1940’s, and judges acting as fruit buyers in the Central Valley, but Daley makes it sound as if pulling in temporary workers from San Francisco was commonplace. It’s almost as if Apple drew ten thousand temps from around California each summer to assemble the new new iPhone.

Daley’s “little Italian girl” is an interesting counterpoint with the likely-anglo workers from the city. 1919 was at the tail end of a huge wave of Italian immigration to the U.S. between 1900 and 1920. Although the little Italian girl was likely born in the U.S., she was still a bit alien to Daley’s eyes… and like most new immigrants much more focused on earning money for the summer than the city folks out on a lark. Daley’s newspaper articles for other canneries usually comment on workers in two ways - either the longevity of the (anglo) crew (“many have been here for twenty years”) or the many languages being spoken. Daley seemed bemused and interested in the newcomers; when she visited Contadina, she commented on packing cardoni (artichoke variant cultivated for the stems), she noted the new foods being introduced. “Our every day salt-and-pepper-and-butter with an occasional bit-of-onion palates are finding new satisfactions in Italian flavorings. Maybe before long we'll find Cardoni on every menu!” I suspect Daley wouldn’t mind that her children and grandchildren are eating pizza and burrata.

It’s a bit surprising that Campbell in 1919 was still using primarily anglo workers, and that the Italian girl stood out enough to get Edith’s attention, for new immigrants were awfully common in the fruit industry. A 1919 Del Monte Lug Box newsletter included sections in Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, hinting at the numbers of new southern European immigrants filling its canneries. Edith’s later visit to Bisceglia Brothers mentioned workers from Oregon, Nevada, Watsonville, Calaveras, and Napa and Sonoma Counties - many Italian, though Daley mentioned several languages being spoken. Bisceglia Brothers rounded up their workers with letters in the spring offering work and “free rent” in their cannery village.

Daley highlighted how the crush of workers drained Campbell’s housing. Daley’s guess that Campbell’s population doubled wasn’t too far off - Campbell only had 2,000 residents in 1939, so for 1919, a few hundred workers per cannery would certainly double the population. Workers pitched tents wherever they could - army tents, pup tents, and pieces of canvas stretched around poles. Some brought camping trailers. Edith noted that California Canneries had a canning village of wood and canvas cottages (with cot, table, stove, and running water); Ainsley’s canning village exploded in size in 1919, with “little red cottages nested among the rows of cot trees with the branches bruising against the windows”, and the dirt roads along the orchard lined with more cars than “First Street on a Saturday afternoon”. (That’s First Street in San Jose, the main shopping street, not some sort of rush for margaritas at the future site of Aqui in Campbell.) Ainsley’s cottages rented for $2.50 a month, and Daley claimed she could hear Victrolas playing “Over There” from within.

That $2.50 a month wasn’t free, but it was awfully cheap. Wages averaged $3.50 a day (unless you were the extremely productive little Italian girl.) Getting fed cost 25 cents a meal at the company cafeteria. Children under fourteen went to the cannery kindergartens to be minded. The working conditions weren’t too bad either, with Ainsley installing fans driven by belt to cool the cannery.

And, in typical Edith Daley fashion, the cannery was described as a fruit slaughterhouse where an apricot entering would not be long for this world.

“Cookers, syrups, all the machines are arranged a la Ford factory, with the fruit received at the receiving door at one end of the plant and issuing into the warehouse at the other end in the form of cases of cans of 'cots - extra fine. A cot never retraces its steps after it reaches the fatal doorway. It might as well abandon hope as it enters, for its doom is sealed and it is only a few minutes before it is pitted, sorted, syruped, exhausted, cooked, canned, its lid sealed on, labelled, and stored away until some bally Britisher orders it for his breakfast and it must start its long jaunt across America and the Atlantic towards its final resting place.”

So thank you again, Edith, for the local color. I’ll be pitching a bunch of tents in my HO scale orchards, and make sure the Campbell downtown streets are packed. I’ll make sure to add the little Italian girl to the Campbell street scene. She’d be twenty years older than when Edith saw her, and might have her children in tow for a month of canning ‘cots. But just like in Edith’s day, Ainsley’s kindergarten would still be operating in 1930’s Campbell, and Campbell’s city streets would still be filled during fruit season.

Coupon-Cutting Thursday I: Ainsley Dessert Fruits On Sale!

And now for the inaugural episode of what hopefully will be a regular feature: Coupon-Cutting Thursday, with newspaper ads related to Santa Clara Valley industry. No guarantees given that the vendors listed will honor these prices.

Apr 27, 1912 St. Andrews Citizen.

March 19, 1926 Kent and Sussex Courier

It's always a bit surprising to me how the Santa Clara valley fruit industry really was international, even as far back as the turn of the century. Vince Nola told me stories about playing on the burlap sacks to ship prunes to Germany. The San Jose Evening News in 1903 remarked on 200,000 pounds of A&C Ham Company's prunes sold in Antwerp in 1903. The U.S. Products cannery, run by the Dutch Vlessing company, exported canned fruit back to Europe.

But the most memorable for me is John Colpitts Ainsley's Ainsley Cannery in Campbell. Ainsley, an immigrant from Britain, worked with family back home to export fruit from the 1890's through the late 1930's. Ainsley was also known for its fruit packed quite attractively in glass jars. Although the most successful of the Campbell canneries, the plant itself is long gone; it's former location, north of the railroad tracks along Harrison Ave., is now townhouses.

April 20, 1928 Sevenoaks Chronicle

I'll admit I was always a bit curious about exporting fruit to England. I'd heard that each European country had its own preferences on fruit - prunes to Germany, apricots to England. But I didn't know much about what fruit they got, or how they used it. Luckily, with all the old newspapers scanned and put on the Internet, we've got a chance to see.

These three ads came from the 'teens and twenties. Ainsley was primarily known for its dessert fruits, at least according to the 1920's ads, advertising peaches, pears and apricots from the Valley to the Brits as they escaped the long winter. Ainsley also apparently did fruit salad and pineapple slices as well. The first sight to my modern eyes is the sheer size of the packaging - 2/12 lb apricots, peaches, and pears in cans, or glass-packed fruit for twice the price.

The earlier ad - from 1912 - highlights how folks were using canned fruit differently than how I grew up. I think of canned fruit as an old-fashioned and handy dessert source, but Ainsley was instead selling "Californian Apricot Pulp" for jam and marmalade making in seven pound tins. They even include the handy instructions for making jam at home - just add sugar and bitter almonds.

Possible Wired article intro sent back in time that inspired the St. Andrew's Citizen's typesetter.

I'll also highlight the sheer number of typefaces used in that St. Andrews newspaper advertisement, with at least eight typefaces appearing in the same ad - not just mainstays like a roman font and sans-serif font, but a stencil font *and* an Old Western typeface, all sitting there together. I might guess that a copy of Wired's Style Guide got sent back in time to land on the typesetter's desk, though it's a shame he couldn't also print the ad in several different contrasting colors.

I found these ads in the British Newspaper Archive, which also turned up a reporter's visit to San Jose in 1850:

"The valley of San Jose has quite won us by its extremely fine balmy climate and quietness... to us one of the pleasantest attractions of the place were the fine old orchards and vineyards attached to some of the old residences of the native Californians. Spacious and extensive, they are filled with sturdy and thrifty pear, apple quince, and other fruit trees, literally breaking down from the weight of the luscious burdens they bear...
We were quite surprised at the extent to which cultivation has been carried in the vicinity of San Jose, within two or three miles, quite a number of Americans have brought under cultivation large tracts of land, and with the greatest success. The labour has been mostly performed by Indians, who have been paid five to six dollars a week, we are informed. We heard of one gentleman having one patch of potatoes covering upwards of 60 acres. (October 24, 1850 Fife Herald)."

I never would have expected the Fife Herald to be featuring an article on San Jose agriculture (and a trip to the Almaden mines) just a couple years after the discovery of Gold, but we were certainly interesting enough to fill some column inches on a slow Thursday.

West Side Story, set in Campbell

I wonder if Preiser makes HO teenage gang figurines? It looks like they may be a necessary part for building a model of a cannery. And for those of you who always feared that Campbell was a violent town: congrats, you've been proven right.

RIVAL FRUIT WORKERS IN A CLASH AT CAMPBELL PACKING HOUSE
A gang fight which has been culminating at the Ainsley cannery at Campbell some time past broke out last night and for a time threatened to develop into serious proportions.
The seat of the trouble is the animosity of the Campbell faction to the outsiders who are given employment at the cannery and there have been numerous indications of feeling within the past few days.
By a tacit agreement, it was decided to settle the contention last evening by permitting the leaders, Frank Weeks for the town boys and George Hyer for the aliens, to engage in fistie combat and the opposing gang lined up at the closing hour to witness the fray between the champions.
Weeks was outside the cannery ready to do battle when Hyer came forth, but instead of doffing his coat and rolling up his sleeves the alien leader drew a big revolver and fired point blank at Weeks.
The bullet whizzed just above Weeks shoulder so close that the clothing was penetrated. Hyer then held the other faction at bay with his weapon and made his escape from town.
Word of the shooting was sent to Sheriff Ross and Deputy Sheriff Cottle arrived at the cannery in time to prevent further trouble. A warrant was sworn out for the arrest of Hyer on the charge of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to commit murder, and he was captured while attempting to escape on an outbound train from Campbell shortly after midnight.
This morning Hyer was brought before Judge Benson for arraignment and his preliminary examination was set for Thursday morning at 10 o'clock.
It is stated that there is danger of further trouble at Campbell as the local boys declare that they should be given preference at work in the fruit over strangers.

Seriously, conflict between the locals and out-of-towners for jobs was a challenge for the canneries in lean years; in the 1930's, there's comments about Ainsley giving priority to workers who had been at the cannery in previous years. For the crops that didn't attract locals, such as the pea harvest in Alameda County, there was always the tension of huge numbers of outsiders appearing, especially if the workers showed up before the harvest started. (See, for example, Migratory Labor in the California Market Pea Crop by Raymond Barry.

How Much Would You Pay For This Fine Cannery?

Let's go back to that nagging question: just how bad were things in the Santa Clara Valley during 1931 or 1932? The disappearance of the Ainsley and Hyde canneries give us some hints about that, along with property records of the time.

Let's start by considering the lucky seller, the Ainsley Cannery.

The Ainsley Cannery on Harrison Ave., on the edge of downtown Campbell, was one of the wunderkind of Campbell, producing voluminously from the turn of the century through the 1930's, and surviving as Drew and later Hunt's into the 1960's. I haven't written much about them yet (but certainly will once I start building the cannery building). Ainsley primarily sold to the British market, with Ainsley's family back at home in Britain doing the selling. This ought to sound similar to other canners, especially U.S. Products, who also did a very good business primarily selling outside the U.S.

But as the worst of the depression hit in the 1930's, Ainsley must have started thinking about exit strategies. In early 1934, Drew Canning (which had been operating a cannery in San Jose's Japantown) bought the Ainsley Cannery for $150,000. The sale document was recorded on March 13, 1934, (book 675, page 554), with J.C. Ainsley signing away the company as President and W.H. Lloyd as Secretary of "The Ainsley Corporation". On the Drew side, J.H. Townsend was listed Vice President and L. J. Campodonico as Secretary of Drew (and soon-to-be plant manager for the Campbell outpost.) The June 20, 1934 issue of the Campbell Interurban Press documented Campodonico's restart of the plant with the reminder that the first fruit canned would be arriving from Brentwood - strongly suggesting railroad deliveries of fresh fruit. In July, the Campbell Interurban Press noted that peach canning was delayed because "of the strike" (and which strike that is, I haven't bothered to check down. Feel free to poke around in Google News Archive if you're so inclined.) Drew planned to hire 500 during the 1934 season, quadruple the number needed by Ainsley in the horrible 1931 year!

Looking Inside the Cannery

The sale document didn't list more than the sale price and the principals of the two companies, so it's not terribly illuminating about the operations of the cannery. However, at the end of 1933, the family was obviously preparing for the sale by moving the Ainsley Packing Company assets to the "Ainsley Corporation". (Full grant deed transferring the assets filed Dec. 28, 1933, book 670, pg 321.) Exactly why they were doing the corporation jiggery-pokery I don't know, but wonderfully, they list the major assets of the cannery - land and some of the movable items - right in the reorganization document, and so give us an idea of what a successful canner might be like.

In terms of land, Ainsley owned the large parcel with the cannery - 470 feet of frontage on Harrison Ave., three warehouses, the factory itself, and the boiler house. The site also had its own well and water tower. The deed also lists four other properties owned by the company: an odd shaped lot on the other side of Harrison on the current site of the house cherished as the company office, a small "Hopkins Ave" lot, and two larger properties, one on the other side of the railroad tracks and a larger orchard on Hamilton Ave. The Hopkins Ave. property would be quite a mystery if I hadn't seen its name on a railroad property map, for the street no longer exists; it just north of the property between Harrison Ave. and the railroad tracks, and separated the Ainsley cannery from another cannery site. There wasn't an official crossing there, but it would have been a handy shortcut for workers headed from the cannery line over to the temporary housing on the other side of the tracks.

The deed also mentions some of the outbuildings needed for a cannery. The cafeteria building (along with stoves, kitchenwares, and furnishings) was included in the sale. The campground, rest room building, and cottages for cannery workers also were mentioned. They also call out two named cottages specifically ("Gillig cottage and Sharp cottage"); I suspect we'll never know where the names came from, but I'll give a quick guess they might have named the families that lived there before Ainsley took over the properties for the campground and cottages.

The transfer also included all the contents of the business, which isn't surprising for transferring between two Ainsley-controlled corporations. However, it's interesting that the canning equipment was included in the sale (I would have assumed it was leased, not purchased). The transfer also left out precisely five pieces of equipment: "one oak flat top desk, three oak chairs, and one gas heater". A more conspiracy-laden, suspicious science fiction fan might assume the furniture had some supernatural link that provided super canning powers. Either that, or Mr. Lloyd had brought his own furniture into the office, and didn't want it given away when they sold the company.

From a modeling perspective, the list of cars gave some interesting details. Ainsley owned four trucks: 1 1926 one ton Ford dump truck, a 1926 one ton Ford flat bed truck, a 1926 two ton Federal truck, and a 1927 1.5 ton Chevrolet truck. With that level of specificity, it's easy to go searching the internet for photos of the particular truck models, and my first thought is how primitive all the trucks look. I've bought several of the Athearn Ford Model A trucks, and those look positively modern compared with the 1926 trucks. To really set the scene for the early 1930's in San Jose, and to really convince people that rail, not cars, dominate the valley, I really need to include more of the small trucks and primitive cars that would have existed at the time.

And on top of all that, we also learn about Ainsley's other assets - a pretty decent list of stocks, bonds, cash in savings accounts, 640 acres in Fresno, and an apartment house in San Francisco at Stockton and California (which I suspect is still there). They also list 90 tons of prunes, worth a paltry $6,800 - not that much more than the value of the lug boxes needed by the cannery. I'd love more detail on how many and what size those lug boxes were, for they'd make a very prototypical and impressive pile beside the cannery.

So if Ainsley sold for $150,000 in mid-1934, how much do you think the Hyde Cannery sold for two years before? Both were modern canneries, fixtures of the Campbell industrial scene, with established businesses. But 1931 and 1932 were bad years to be owning a cannery. The exact sale price will be disclosed next time.

[Photos of Ford Model TT one ton truck from Mike Stockard's photos of his truck on Model T Central. Photo of 1926 Federal truck from photo at Reynolds Alberta Museum, found at www.federalmotortrucks.com. Ainsley Cannery photo from Calisphere / California Digital Library, from an image in the Frasher Foto collection at Ponoma Public Library.]