Earl Fruit Company

Even though I've been building an Earl Fruit Company packing house for my shelf layout, I still don't know that much about the company.

Earl Fruit Company seemed to be everywhere in California; all the Sanborn maps I looked at seemed to have one Earl Fruit Company plant present. Whether in a hamlet like Wrights, Walnut Grove, or Whittier, they had packing houses. I'd first thought they were a spinoff of the Southern Pacific, but then heard connections with the Armour and Di Giorgio companies. Luckily, I just saw this Bancroft Library interview with two of the Di Giorgio family about the company's origins. It's a great read both for details about how the packing house and fruit auction business worked.

Earl Fruit Company was actually started by Edwin Tobias Earl, who invented one ventilated refrigerator car. (I imagine it wasn't the first considering that the South Pacific Coast had some of his cars well before the company appeared.) Earl was involved with exporting fresh fruit east, but needed an inexpensive way to carry the fruit. At the same time, the large meat packers were shipping lots of meat in refrigerator cars to California, but were sending the cars back empty. Earl got the Armour family to buy his company, and the meat reefers started travelling back east with fruit. Armour owned the transportation, owned the packing houses, and owned the packing box makers, so they had lots of control over the prices paid to the farmers.

In 1910, the Supreme Court forced the meat packers to divest their refrigerator cars because of their monopoly power, and the railroads took over the refrigerator car business. Joseph Di Giorgio, a kid from Sicily who founded the Di Giorgio fruit brokerage business in Baltimore, realized that controlling Earl Fruit would give him access to the California fruit market. He bought the company and soon controlled the packing house and auction house ends of the fresh fruit business. Di Giorgio at first went for volume, following other fruit packers in extending credit to farmers to be repaid after the crops sold, but quickly found it less risky to primarily serve their own orchards and farms and leave the riskier deals for other packers.

Di Giorgio was huge, owning lumber mills, huge farms, the packing houses, and eventually even the S&W canned goods brand. They intended to be everywhere, and they were.

Check out the full Bancroft Library interview for lots of details about the railroad and packing industry in California; I'd learned lots about the business side, how fruit auctions worked, and how fruit labels were both expensive and important for the fruit sales.

[Fruit label cribbed from the California Digital Library and U.C. Libraries.]

Progress on the Earl Fruit Packing House

It's been slow, but the Market Street packing house is taking shape. There's still detail work to do, but the major assemblies went together today along with a temporary sign to check out proportions.

Major work still to be done: make the roof look more like composition roofing by toning down the color, attach the sign permanently, paint the roof trim, attach the steps. It's not the neatest work I've ever done, but it's been fun to research and to build.

The 1935 Ted Wurm photo from Prune County Railroading was the main inspiration, with this model having both the sign and half-walls matching what I suspect is the Earl Fruit Company's packing house.

One interesting excursion involved the sign. I checked my computer for the best typeface to match the sign, and found "Bank Gothic" was first created in the 1930's, so it's actually a very appropriate font for the time. I've seen other Earl Fruit Company signs with similar block lettering - at least one in San Jose and something similar in Lodi. I suspect Bank Gothic was inspired by sign painters, rather than these signs inspired by the font, but it's still nice to know that the lettering is appropriate for the era.

Note to self: I really ought to try to recreate that prototype photo on the layout. Time to make some miniature figures that match the two poses. I wonder how I can make an accurate STOP sign for the flagman?

Gems in Documents

The San Jose Library's digital collection has more documents than I thought; they've also scanned several city directories, including this
1910 San Jose directory.

A quick glance through the section on fruit packers listed all the different companies I've already seen when checking out the Market Street warehouses: J. B. Inderrieden at 200 Ryland, H.E. Loss on San Pedro, Earl Fruit on the other side of the tracks on Bassett at the northeast corner of Terraine. There's also some names I don't recognize down by what will become Del Monte Plant #3 and elsewhere on the west side of downtown.

They also list some of the packers outside town, including an Earl Fruit Co. branch in Wrights. That's unexpected to me; Wrights was a small hamlet and I wouldn't have imagined the farmers in the hills would have produced enough fruit to support a packing operation... even if I've modeled one of the warehouse buildings in Wrights that probably held them. However, Earl Fruit's presence in Wrights does connect some dots, for this photo from the Los Gatos Museum shows several narrow gauge cars on the short spur at Wrights loading fruit, with the Earl Fruit Co. placards displayed prominently on each car. Coincidentally, this photo convinced me to model that siding as well as Wrights on my layout.

And if anyone ever challenges me on whether Wrights deserves a refrigerator car or two for fruit occasionally, I'll show them the city directory.

Making the Tedious and Fiddly Less Painful

A while back when I was experimenting with the 3d printer, I realized that it might actually be better for the insides of model buildings than the outsides.

Yup, definitely.

One of the complications for the fruit packing warehouses near San Jose's Market Street station was their clerestory roofs. Many turn-of-the-century wooden warehouses (such as the Ainsley Cannery ones pictured here) had a small raised area at the roof line to let in more light and an exhaust path for hot air. They're very common around here, and even our lunchtime Italian restaurant in Campbell had such a roof. (Our lunch venue was formerly part of Sunsweet's Campbell (California) dried fruit packing plant, just down the road from the Ainsley Cannery.)

Unfortunately, clerestory roofs are a pain to build - lots of precise angles, small pieces, all sitting on top of an existing roof that may not be as square as I intended. These aren't very common in models, so I couldn't borrow an existing model for kitbashing purposes. Walther's Cornerstone Lumber Mill is one of the few plastic kits with such a roofline. There's a couple craftsman kits with such clerestory roofs (for example Campbell's Seebold and Sons), but I can't imagine they're not fiddly and tedious too.

I spent my weekend remembering how tedious and fiddly the roof could be, trying twice to cut identical ribs to hold the raised roof's shape. Neither came out square... or uniform... or even acceptable to my remarkably lax eye. The real problem in building the roof was making uniform ribs to get the proper cross section, matching the angle of the existing roof, and having pieces that could stay square as I glued the roof and sides on. Thin sheet didn't work well, even with lots of clothespins to try to hold them vertical.

Now, while the 3d printer can be a bit coarse, it's good at making identical parts and making duplicate parts with similar cross-sections. Why not print out the ribs? They don't need to be visible to the outside.

My first try was just making solid blocks with sloped bottoms and tops to match the existing roofline and the expected roof line for the clerestory roof. The blocks were also 1/4" thick, so they could stand on their own during construction. They still weren't easy to keep in place. The next revision added a vertical slot that could hold a plastic spline for the roof peak, and hollowed out the blocks so they'd use less plastic. The final splines are visible in the photo. They're not as thick as I would have liked, but the printer was starting to misbehave and I'm lucky I got these done.

To build the actual roof, I cut a strip of 1/16" styrene sheet for the spline, inserted it in the slots and spaced the ribs every 2 inches, and glued the spline in place. Next, I cut strips of the styrene for each side of the roof, then similarly cut pieces for the underside of the assembly (so it'll be easier to glue the roofline in place.) Next, I'll glue board and batten siding to both sides of the assembly for the outer walls (with window holes cut out), glue in the Grandt Line 5251 windows, and I'll be ready for final assembly.

These ribs didn't make the process completely painless; my first try at assembly failed because I hadn't cut the roof sheet correctly, and forgot that the building runs into the backdrop at an angle. However, the second try had everything go together remarkably smoothly. I'm tempted to make 3d models for the ribs in several different angles and widths/heights, and keep them on hand for my next clerestory-building adventures!