3D Printing Stories: Flats of Drying Apricots

[Sorry, history buffs - feel free to skip all the 3d printing and model building articles coming up.]

Here's the latest project for the 3d printer: stacks of drying flats.

The new version of the "Abinante and Nola Packing House" is getting finished. The building is now labelled as J.S. Roberts, the actual occupant in the mid 1930's. I've got the rough building done, but there's still some details... like a roof... to finish. But it's looking finished.

The J.S. Roberts packing house had one unusual feature: a separate addition contained a "sulfur box" - a sealed box where apricots could be smoked in burning sulfur fumes to preserve the fruit and keep the bright orange color. Many farm drying yards had a makeshift sulfur box. However, our packing house had the sulfur box on the third floor, right next to where the fruit would be sorted and graded. That makes some sense - the dried fruit would be brought to the packing house in sacks, and carried to the top floor for sorting and grading. If it met our packer's standards, it was dropped into bins on the second floor, and pulled out on the first floor for boxing. Having the sulfur box at the top meant that it was queasy to unload.

Now, having that third floor addition for the sulfur box is kind of interesting - it's 20 feet off the ground, and probably stuck out because of the different construction and exterior look. I took some creative license, and decided having burning anything close to the main building would be inappropriate, so I put the sulfur boxes on the far side of a small deck off the second floor. And if I've made the sulfur boxes visible to the outside, I'll also need to show the fruit going in.

That means I need drying flats - the real sulfur boxes would have taken stacks of flats each holding a layer of apricots. Drying flats are useful for other scenes on the railroad. In farm drying yards, women in the cutting shed would have halved apricots and put them on the flats; stacks would then have been rolled on small carts out into the drying yard to be laid out for drying in the sun. I've made a few drying flats by hand out of card stock and 1x4 scale lumber, but those pieces are tedious, small and fiddly. Doing a stack of 15 would be even worse. Luckily, a 3d printer doesn't know about tedious.

The drying flat stacks are about 3/8 inch wide, one inch tall, and one inch deep. The center of the model is hollow, but the individual flats are actually separate on each end. These were painted with a weathered black, then washed with Floquil grime for a translucent, white look of weathered wood. I made stacks in several different heights: five flats, 12 flats, and 15 flats. Printing some individual flats would also be fun, but I'll need to figure out how to set up the prints.

I did the 3d design for these in SketchUp, which is wonderful for rectangular designs like these. My first designs were too thin; I'd started with a one inch lumber border around each frame, but the printer needed walls to be more substantial than 0.010 inch. The image from SketchUp shows how the side rails were two scale inches wide except for the top frame. Each flat goes back 1/8", with the bulk of the model hollow to save on resin. The fruit isn't very realistic, but it does add a bit of detail.

I'm not the only one making industry-specific details on a 3d printer. Ken Harstine has been selling orchard ladders, field boxes, and fruit lugs at Shapeways for quite a while, and his models definitely inspired me to see what I can print.

Still to come: flatcars and lumber loads, straight from the 3d printer!

And That's Why You Stare At Old Photos

J.S. Roberts, 1934

The dried fruit packing house at the corner of San Carlos Street and the Los Gatos branch has always gotten a lot of attention on my layout. When I was first planning the layout, I saw the name Abinante and Nola on a 1950 Sanborn map, and decided then to leave space for a packing house with that name on the side. The current model of the plant, kitbashed from a Campbell Scale Models "Tower's Flowers" kit, was a decent model - large, and with plenty of loading doors - but didn't actually match the real building.

When I finally got serious about history, I also found out that the building wasn't occupied by Abinante and Nola during the time I model. I instead found out about Higgins-Hyde, and prune pools, and crafty dried fruit buyers during the 1930's, and J.S. Roberts taking over the business after Higgins got run out of town on a rail. One of the Abinante or Nola sons told me about how he remembered the plant as a big, dark barn, and also that it was his dad's favorite warehouse because its location on a dead-end section of San Carlos Street made it easy for farmers to drop off fruit... and how my model didn't really look anything like what he remembered.

And then, I found an actual picture of the plant, and confirmed that the model was very, very wrong. Since then, making a more accurate model has been pretty high on my to-do list.

Model being assembled

Building the Model: Fast forward a year or two, and I finally start on the improved model. Because the one picture I had of the building was so poor, I instead grabbed my favorite photo of the Guggenhime packing house in San Jose and used that as inspiration. After a few pencil sketches to plan, I pulled out the styrene sheet and started cutting. This was going to be a big model - maybe 14 inches by 8 inches, and six inches high. I'd had problems with similar models warping horribly, so this time I built the model on a plexiglas core to give it some additional rigidity. That worked - I pretty quickly had the four walls, and so I moved on to painting them using my favorite trick of gesso and india ink on weathered styrene to get the appropriate weathered look.

This weekend, after much of the painting was done, I finally squared up the model and glued together the basic block. That, of course, meant it was time to move on to adding details, and the only way to do that was stare at some real packing houses and steal the best bits from them all.

Guggenhime packing house, San Jose.

Here's that photo of the Guggenhime packing house that inspired this model, taken by local commercial photographer John Gordon back in the early 1930's. Like the J.S. Roberts packing house that this model represents, the Guggenhime packing house was a big barn-like structure, three stories high, and already looking weathered here in the 1930's. My first detail was going to be the loading dock doors - I'd planned on using plastic castings, but they wouldn't fit with the plexiglas walls behind the cut outs. Instead, I turned back to the Guggenhime photo and zoomed in on some of those loading dock doors for inspiration.

Here's a close-up of one of those doors, along with my notebook scribblings as I stared at the photo. The loading doors are obviously simple things - some siding nailed on a frame of 2x4's at best. The door hangers look an awfully lot like the tracks used for boxcar doors (I even went rummaging around in my scrap box looking for just those sorts of tracks without luck, so looks like I'll be visiting the model train store soon for reasonable parts.) I really like the angled sheet metal keeping rain off the door, the half-circle metal hangars holding the door up, the 2x12 holding the track away from the building, and the plain wooden blocks acting as door stops. Look at the scratches and gouges as well - the scratches at the height of a hand truck, perhaps, and the wear and dirt close to the ground, and that scratch just where the door would be when the door was fully opened. These are great details, and I ought to be able to use them in the model. And if you zoom in on the original photo at SJSU, you'll even see that funky "2" indicating the door number in a surprisingly artistic hand.

Zooming in on Door 1:When I started looking at that photo tonight, I was having a great time writing down all these little details in hopes I could add them to the model. I even zoomed in on those doorstops, and decided they were crude blocks of 2x4s - nice detail, and easy to model. And then I zoomed in on door one, and saw many of the same details... and then realized there was a strange box stuck on top of the doorstop, maybe eight inches high. Zooming in, you can even distinguish the lettering on the box front: "SWITCH LIST".

Now, when a railroad switch crew comes to your warehouse with a boxcar, they need to figure out where to place that car. If your loading dock can only hold one car, maybe there's not a lot of choice, but Guggenhime & Co. had at least six doors spread across three buildings here in San Jose, and if the prunes for Poughkeepsie are behind door number one, you'll have some very unhappy warehousemen if they need to cart those prunes down the dock to a New York Central car spotted at door number six. Now, the railroad crew has three ways they can figure out where to put that boxcar. They might go by convention - you always want the boxcars on the near end of the track, and the tank cars over by the piping. They might rely on hearing your preferences, getting off the locomotive when they arrive and searching for the foreman to tell them what to do. And if it's the middle of the night and no one's there to tell them what to do, you might leave them a note.

The Switch List box is likely to be the place where the manager of the packing house would leave notes about where to put the different cars. He would have had his phone call with the agent or car department to find out that the empties he needs (or the cars he's waiting for) are arriving tonight, he would have known what cargos would go in each, and he could quickly scribble down what he needs. The Northern Pacific boxcar full of box shook goes to door six. The two cars for the East Coast go to doors 1 and 2. The SP car getting bags of prunes for a steamship out of San Francisco to Europe goes at door four. He pencils that in, folds the note, and puts it in the box. Late that night, the train crew rolls in with the cars for Guggenhime, stops, pulls out the instructions, curses a bit because they've got the cars in a completely different order, and starts their switching. The next morning, the manager comes in, checks his cars, and starts the crews loading and unloading them. (If it's a weekend, we might see something more like Vince Nola's memories of driving by the warehouse with his dad on Sunday night to make sure the SP had placed the cars they'd promised would be there by Monday morning.)

If an army marches on its stomach, the Switch List box reminds us that a railroad marched on a lot of paper, whether for internal consumption, sharing official correspondence with shippers, or leaving helpful notes to a crew about where a boxcar should be placed. Tony Thompson has talked about the equivalent for a station agent - the bill box used to trade the waybills (official billing papers) and switching instructions between station agents and the crews that might be visiting the town when the station was closed. Guggenhime's switch list box was very unlikely to have official paperwork because the railroads held onto that tightly for billing purposes, but the switchlist box seems just right for unofficial instructions that needed to survive a winter rainstorm. My model for J.S. Roberts will only be a third the size of Guggenhime and won't need the bill box to tell where cars should be placed, but I suspect my model will still have the bill box sitting up on top of one of those 2x4s.

[Guggenghime packing house photo from the John C. Gordon photo collection at San Jose State University. J.S. Roberts photo taken from the edge of another John C. Gordon panorama of the San Carlos Street viaduct, also in San Jose State's collection.

If you've got better ideas about how the switchlist box was used, leave a comment below or drop me a note. I'm guessing at a lot of this, and I'd love either some confirmation or suggestions about how to use a switchlist box like feature to make switching more realistic on my layout.]

Ha Ha! You Fell Victim to One of the Classic Blunders!

Everyone remembers the Princess Bride, right? And Vizzini's famous gloat?

Ha ha! You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders - The most famous of which is "never get involved in a land war in Asia" - but only slightly less well-known is this: "Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line!"

And of course, there's also the slightly less-known classic blunder: "Never try to break a prune pool when every prune grower in the Santa Clara Valley is trying desperately to stay solvent."

We've heard previously how the Higgins-Hyde packing company, based out of that packing house at San Carlos St. and the narrow gauge line, tried just that and managed to get pretty much every prune grower in the Valley out in force with pitchforks and torches, and encouraged the Sacramento politicians to demonize them for misstatements. Good times, good times.

When I first wrote about Higgins-Hyde, all I knew was that they had occupied the packing house I've previously described as Abinante and Nola around 1930 or 1931, and that they'd pissed off pretty much the whole Valley in 1932. I also showed how their chattel mortgages - loans to growers against the upcoming prune crops - show up in county records, giving us a chance to both understand what farm equipment the growers had as collateral, as well as the agreements that started the anger towards the company.

Luckily, there's a bit more available with some more poking around at the Clerk/Recorder's office, census records, and city directories. If you're into that sort of thing.

The Higgins-Hyde Packing Company appears around 1929, leasing the former Pacific Fruit Products / Sunsweet packing house right at the railroad tracks and West San Carlos St. The principals are Albert A. Higgins and Warren Hyde. As we saw previously, J.S. (Jack) Roberts, a salesman and fruit buyer, was a vice president, and Jacks's name often appeared on the fruit contracts.

Albert seems like a newcomer to San Jose, born in 1890 in New York. I'm not sure where he's come from; there's an Albert A. Higgins in San Francisco in 1928, an A. A. Higgins in Los Altos listed as a rancher at the same time, and an Albert A. Higgins, fruit merchant in Los Angeles in 1920, but I'm not sure which would be our man. He's newly married to Edith (Bea) Rea (he's 40, she's 23), and living with her parents on South 13th St. in San Jose.

His father-in-law, Edwin Rea, is worth an aside; a well-known San Jose lawyer, he's remembered these days primarily for defending David Lamson in his murder trial, and for getting in a fist-fight with the district attorney during that trial. Justice may be blind, but those lawyers have enough eyesight to know how to connect with a strong right hook.

Warren Hyde, however, was a very well-known and respected local citizen: an early orchardist in the Saratoga area, and a former Sunsweet director during some organization troubles back in 1922. Warren Hyde and George A. Hyde appear to have had adjoining properties out by Prospect and Quito Road at various times, making me think they might be related, or even brothers.

The building and lot at 750 West San Carlos St. were owned by H. H. Kooser and his wife at the time of Higgins-Hyde's occupancy. We know about the Koosers thanks to the legal documents associated with the building of the San Carlos St. Viaduct in late 1934. The re-routing of the road required selling a small strip of land and removal of a garage and scale, and the sale agreement included $200 for Higgins-Hyde as compensation for these changes (5/29/1933, book 652, page 386). (The viaduct was allowed by the California Railroad Commission decision 20559, if you're into that sort of thing.)

Higgins-Hyde is listed in the 1929, 1930, 1931, and 1932 San Jose city directories, hinting that they'd been around for at least a few years before the big kerfuffle with the prune pool in the dark days of summer, 1932. There were at least six chattel mortgages filed in 1932 with Higgins-Hyde: the Leo, DiSalvo, Oliva, Galvin, Greco, Rose, and Lester orchards all borrowed against a crop they were planning to sell to Higgins-Hyde that year. But once Higgins-Hyde challenged the Prune Pool and lost, they released all their growers from their contracts so they could join the prune pool. Higgins-Hyde probably lost their chance for a crop to sell over the winter of '32. At that point, having a packing house and storage space wasn't terribly useful, so Higgins-Hyde leased their packing house on July 19, 1932 to the Lawrence Warehouse Company, much as Hyde had done a few years earlier.

Higgins-Hyde could only hope for the 1933 year to be better, but it wasn't. In May, they cancelled their lease of the Hyde Cannery as storage space (5/8/1933, book 683, pg 374). On May 27, they cancel Lawrence Warehouse's lease on the 750 West San Carlos St. plant. They also appear to have started wrapping up the company in bankruptcy court. On May 29, Albert and Bea transfer orchard land in Saratoga to T. J. Miller, the trustee in bankruptcy for the company; the bankruptcy case opens for real in San Francisco on June 3. And then it's all over, except for unwinding all the various deals. It doesn't sound happy, but there's probably some stories there.

Early the next year, during that unwinding, T. J. Miller finds that Higgins-Hyde may have made the classic legal blunder: Never annoy people who might be jurors on your trial. The May 9, 1934 San Jose News has a little blurb under the title "Packing Firm Trustee Loses $2578 Prune Suit":

T. J. Miller, trustee of the Higgins-Hyde Packing Company, lost his $2578 action involving a contract for the purchase of 800 tons of prunes against Nathan L. and William Lester, growers, in Superior Judge William F. James' court yesterday when a jury awarded judgement in favor of the defendants.

I can't imagine the locals were friendly to the company that tried to break the Prune Pool, regardless of how good the contract was. I also have no idea whether this was one of the lingering contracts left over from the no-good-very-bad summer of 1932.

Analysis

Warren Hyde's connection makes me wonder if the creation of Higgins-Hyde has anything to do with the demise of George E. Hyde Packing in Campbell. The reports that the company started fading in 1928 might suggest that Warren had been selling through his brother, but the looming demise of the Hyde Cannery and dried fruit packing meant that he needed a better place to sell his crop. I'll need to keep an eye out for more hints about the history of Higgins-Hyde.

Now, all this corporate information is quite fun for those of us with some obsessive-compulsive tendencies, but it really does have an application to model railroading. For, after all, I've always been uncertain about exactly what business should exist at the site where I've now got Abinante and Nola. Now, I can lay out all the options:

• Before 1928: unsure.
• 1928 - summer 1932: active packing plant run by Higgins-Hyde.
• Summer 1932 - Summer 1933: Higgins-Hyde painted on the building, but used by Lawrence Warehouse.
• Summer 1933 - Summer 1934: Higgins-Hyde painted on building, but probably empty.
• May, 1934: San Carlos St. viaduct is being built.
• Late 1934: San Carlos St. viaduct is completed.
• Late 1934: Active plant run by J.S. Roberts. John C. Gordon takes photo of completed viaduct with old bridge still around, and J.S. Roberts painted on the packing house.
• Pre-1935: Bypass line around San Jose built. Old San Carlos St. bridge removed as seen in unpublished John C. Gordon photo.

So that's it: if I'm modeling before 1928, I need to do more research. If I'm modeling before summer 1934, I can put Higgins-Hyde on my layout, but I can't have the San Carlos St. viaduct. If I'm modeling after Summer 1934, I'll want both the viaduct and J.S. Roberts.

There's only one problem: I spent last week ripping out the track around the San Carlos St. viaduct to get rid of some frequent derailments. As part of getting the track running again, I redid the scenery at the same time to include Los Gatos Creek and the former site of the old San Carlos St. bridge. It looks like I've just post-dated my layout to late 1934... or at least one corner of the layout to that year. Doing so means that the Hyde Cannery shouldn't be running and the Hunts Cannery in Los Gatos needs to be abandoned, which either I've just lost two key industries... or I've just arranged my model railroad so that half the layout will be set in 1928, and half in 1934. I should put a tricked-out DeLorean on the road between San Jose and Campbell just so folks understand why they're moving six years when turning round that corner. Oh, what a tangled mess I've gotten myself into...

[Photo still taken from the movie The Princess Bride. If you haven't seen it yet, you've missed something amazing. Go watch it. J.S. Roberts photo from a John C. Gordon collection panorama at San Jose State.]

Exciting Times at the Recorder's Office with Chattel Mortgages

For various reasons, I've been down by the County offices at lunchtime lately, and decided this would be a great time to poke around in the Santa Clara County Clerk/Recorder records. In California, the county recorder stores critical legal records: births, deaths, deeds, mortgages, subdivision maps, and the like, going all the way back to the 1850's. I'd always been a bit curious about land ownership, so I thought it might be fun to poke around on properties, both our current house as well as some of the canneries and packing houses I've been following.

I'll give the results of some of that research another day, but for now I'll highlight one tidbit of information I found, and I'll tell a little about what's good and bad about searching legal records.

Higgins-Hyde Lends Some Money

Now, land records alone aren't very interesting for the model railroader. They're not necessarily good for tracking down industries in a particular area, for land is often leased to businesses. The personal records - births, marriages, and deaths - can be found easier through ancestry.com or other genealogy sites without the trip downtown, and the legal records usually have much less color than, say, census records.

But that doesn't mean there aren't gems to discover. While tracking down the ownership of the "Abinante and Nola" packing house at 740 West San Carlos St., I got stuck trying to find the owner of the property before around 1950. After some failed searches, I decided to check in the 1930's records for mention of the occupant at the time, the infamous Higgins-Hyde Packing Co. I didn't find any deeds on my search, but I did turn up a couple agreements between Higgins-Hyde and local orchardists called "chattel mortgages".

A chattel mortgage is an agreement to borrow money on "movable personal property". In these cases, Higgins-Hyde lent money at the start of the year to orchardists to help them with the year's crop and also provided a minimum price for the crop. The orchardists mortgaged the crops of prunes on some or all of their land and perhaps some of their equipment, and in return got the cash immediately. The orchardists promised to properly care for, harvest, and prepare the crop for market, and use the proceeds of the sale to pay back Higgins-Hyde. If the sale price of the fruit was greater than the borrowed amount, the orchardists kept it. Higgins-Hyde kept the right to go and grab the fruit if the orchardists failed to maintain the orchard or protect the crop, and would also grab any additional collateral if the orchardists didn't cough up the prunes.

Here's one of Higgins-Hyde's agreements with Fred and June Lester, well-known Willow Glen residents, from mid-August 1932. (Just to be precise, this mortgage was filed 8/17/1932, recorder's book 620, pg 294). This agreement, adding another $400 to an existing $4100 debt due in November of 2012, was signed just before Higgins-Hyde was savaged in the press for trying to undercut the Prune Pool.

And the agreement gives us a few hints about some of the Lester's orchard lands. The Lesters were best known for farmland south of downtown San Jose. Like a lot of orchardists, it appears they also owned and leased land in other parts of the Valley to expand their business or diversify their crop. This agreement covers two of these orchards not on the family ranch: a quarter quarter section of land (40 acres) at Bascom and Hamilton Avenues (now the site of a Whole Foods and large strip mall), and another 60 acres on White Road near Penitencia Creek in the Berryessa District of San Jose.

The Lesters also pledged a car (Studebaker) and tractor (50 h.p. Best Tractor. That Best tractor would be a nice detail for one of my orchards, for Best was a Bay Area company that produced continuous tread tractors that wouldn't compress the Santa Clara Valley's soft orchard soil. Best later meddled with Holt to form Caterpillar.

Note to self: buy more Studebaker models. Campbell sounds like it was more a Studebaker town than a Ford town.

The Lesters must've been a bit desperate for money after the low prices of the previous seasons; the agreement shows they borrowed $1500 in December 1931, then $2000 in March 1932, then $635 in April, and the final $400 in July, all payable in November.

There were at least three other similar mortgages filed the same year - the Leos on Latimer Ave. in Campbell, the Avilas off Monterey Road, and Gwins in San Martin. There also might have been separate contracts to sell the fruit at a fixed price to the company, but those wouldn't have gotten officially filed because they were simple contracts and not pledging ownership of specific assets.

One last note on the chattel mortgage: note that the Vice President of Higgins-Hyde at the time was Jack Roberts, probably the J.S. Roberts that occupied the site after Higgins-Hyde. Looks like Higgins-Hyde didn't skulk off into the night, but instead changed their name and kept packing after the Infamous Prune Pool Caper.

Searching at the Recorder's Office

I've only done a few searches at the Recorder's office, but here's some advice based on that experience.

• Searching legal records is painful; they're not available online, so you need to be in the Recorder's office to see any of the actual deeds and mortgages. Indexes are awkward. Do as much research as you can about potential landowners and sale dates (to a likely year or month) before going to the Recorders office. Census records, city directories, and personal interviews can help you narrow searches before you start.
• Deed searches require using an index book to find the "book" and "page" of a recorded instrument, then going to that "book" to see the actual record. For post-1980 records, the index is a computerized database, so it's easy to search for a particular owner. For the 1970's, you leaf through microfilmed computer-printed indices (luckily sorted alphabetically).

  Before that, the indexes are no longer alphabetical. Instead, you find the index book for a year or set of years. Each book is grouped by the first couple letters of last name and sorted by date. For Higgins-Hyde, you'd find the "H-J index book" as a set of images to browse. You'd then look through that book to find the section containing records involving people with the last name starting with "Hi-Hu" prefixes, then you'd read through that section in date order looking for any index entries referring to Higgins-Hyde. You'd then have a book and page for the actual document, and so you'd go to a separate database to actually see the deed. Finding the Higgins-Hyde documents in the 1932-1939 index required some back-and-forth to find the Hi-Hu section, then required scanning all fifty or hundred pages in the "Hi-Hu" section looking for mention of Higgins-Hyde.

  At least in the 1960's, the date-sorted by name prefix indexes are typed. Before then, you're getting into handwritten indices. The 1930's indexes can be clear or hard-to-read depending on the handwriting of the recorder. Luckily, the actual documents are typewritten so the legalese is easy to read. As you go earlier, you'll start finding cases where the legal documents are handwritten, and you'll find reading legal descriptions of properties to be a chore. Let's hope the folks who have been computerizing the census records might turn their handwriting skills to mortgages.

• Viewing documents can be very, very awkward. In some counties (such as Alameda County), all the non-modern records and indexes are on microfilm, requiring some work each time you need to change media. In Santa Clara county, the indexes and actual records are all on computer, but the user interfaces for viewing the documents can be clunky and often only allow a single window at a time.
• Common names or similar corporation names can make searching ten times worse. Trying to search for records involving a prolific real estate investor, a title company, or subdivision builder could result in a couple entries a day or hundreds over a year. The indexes often contain the "grantor" and "grantee", so you might get hints about which records might be interesting, but you'd then need to dash to the actual records to decide if the one you're looking for.

  I learned to do my searches on the least-common name in a grantor-grantee pair. To find more on the Lester's interactions with Higgins-Hyde, it might be easier to look through the "Le" section of the grantee index for Lester rather than the "Hi" section for Higgins-Hyde.

• Legal records are a big business, so prices are set for the legal and real estate folks searching records. Unofficial copies can be $10/document (plus a per-page charge) in Santa Clara County. Using a smart phone to capture screen images might be an easier way to save a bunch of interesting records.
• Tracing ownership can be tedious. Generally, tracing the ownership of a particular piece of land means finding when the current owner bought the land, then searching backwards through the years to find when the previous owner bought, and repeating. If you know that Joe bought the land in 1980 from Jim, you'd have to then search backwards from 1980 looking for all records on Jim to find his purchase. Knowing that Jim bought some time around 1960 avoids a lot of tedious searching. You might even be able to search from two directions, going forward from a first owner rather than back from a last owner.

It's worth mentioning I also used the visits to the Recorder's office for non-model-railroad purposes. I managed to track down all the owners of our otherwise commonplace house all the way back to its construction. It turns out every owner has had some connection to high-tech: first a former Hughes engineer at IBM, then a Lockheed aeronautical engineer, a GE nuclear engineer, Sun/IBM family, and our Apple/IBM/Google family. That almost explains the unsafe electrical splices we found buried in the roof when we re-roofed in 2000.

There's other interesting facts in the Recorder's dusty files - a strangely cheap purchase of a warehouse from the SP by Abinante and Nola, notice of the sale of the George Hyde cannery on the courthouse steps in 1932, and a full accounting of the assets of the Ainsley Cannery during a corporate reorganization. Those can all wait till another day.

[Photo: Recorder's Office, San Diego County, 1962. From San Diego History.

Hyde Cannery Takes A Bow

My favorite people in the world are the journalists who write puff pieces about businesses.

No, really. Some of the greatest source of facts about particular businesses comes from such "interview local captain of industry" articles. Each of these articles throws in some facts and detailed description of the business and also adds some personal color about the business. We saw it with the matter-of-fact Sewall Brown apricot pit plant article in the San Jose News. We got to imagine Henry Hiller and his partner laughing about their pile of prune pits in Edith Daley's columns on Pacific By-Products in the July 19 and 20, 1921 issues of the San Jose Evening News. We learned about the Horatio Alger story of Larson Ladder, as described under an anonymous by-line in the August 6, 1928 San Jose News.

Finding them, however, is another thing. The newspapers on Google's News Archive are easy to search and browse; the newspapers available through newspaperarchive.com (and also available through ancestry.com) aren't as easy to browse and require subscribing for access, but give access to another large set of local papers that can turn up the key tidbits.

Being persistent also helps, and doing additional searches sometimes turns up new material that's just appeared on line. A recent, repeated search for the Hyde Cannery turned up this multi-page article in Canning Age's August 1921 issue. It takes a certain bit of perseverance to make it through the article and their almost unnatural fixation on gravity conveyors (as well as their constant theme of how "modern" the cannery is), but it's still worth a read. The photos from the article might look familiar if you've been studying the history of the Santa Clara Valley; some of the photos are part of a collection in the Bancroft Library and available online. I'd always wondered about the origin of those photos; now I suspect they were photographed and then saved because of the magazine article.

The article highlights that peaches were the key fruit packed by Hyde. Fruit was received both locally by truck and by railroad car, and outgoing product was shipped by train. Box shook arrived by train, and went directly to the second floor of the warehouse where the box making machinery was located. Hyde primarily used Berger and Carter products canning and processing equipment on the canning line, American Can Company machines for the canning, and Anderson Barngrover equipment on the dried fruit line. (So much for supporting the home-town favorite; Anderson Barngrover might have been closer with the head office in San Jose, but George Hyde still insisted on going all the way to San Francisco for the other equipment. I suspect it was the fault of those consultants/sales engineers at Mailler Searles in San Francisco who sandbagged the local guys.)

The article also focused on the syrup room as a key part of the cannery, located directly over the syrup machines. They detail the blending of the sugar and the sanitary nature of the room; other articles in Canning Age highlight how the syrup room is also important as a cost center. Sugar must have been costly, as a later column highlighted how easy it was to use too concentrated a syrup in the second-rate fruit, chasing profits away.

The article also mentioned how culled fruit (inappropriate for the regular canning line) went to the "pie foundry". Every time I read "pie foundry", I expect some strange steel mill-style cauldron of fire stamping out fruit cocktail. I can't tell if "pie foundry" was a reference to a different production line in the cannery, or if it's a reference to shipping the fruit out to a commercial pie-making bakery. There's at least one turn of the century article that uses the metaphor to describe one of Chicago's big pie factories, as well as a 1903-era "Autobiography of a Shopgirl" where the term seems to refer to an inexpensive diner. Later comments highlight that Hyde also did can cut fruit for pie filling, using a different line but the same canning and syruping machines. As the cans came out of the cookers, workers would have to sort the cans based on markings on the sides of the cans.

Also in the November issue of Canning Age: how to deal with itinerant cannery workers, which provides additional hints for detailing your scene. Because the canneries were never quite sure when they'd start running, workers would often start arriving in the area a week before canning actually started. Canneries needed to make sure that housing and food was available to keep the workers on-hand until the cannery opened. Some canneries gave out free food; in other cases, little tent cities would open up with multiple food sellers providing food for the waiting workers. The article highlights the importance of keeping the workers happy, both for the labor and to avoid antagonizing the neighbors. The "bread, coffee, and mulligan" line shows that the Grapes of Wrath wasn't just a 1930's phenomena.

And if that isn't enough details from the trade press, check out the articles on keeping workers safe, the popularity of American fruit in Scandinavia, and "when a buyer misrepresents himself". That last article might be useful if I need to detail my my figure of the Higgins-Hyde fruit buyer who thought he could buy ahead of the prune pool.

[Photo: Hyde Cannery syrup line. From Bancroft Library collection Geo. E. Hyde & Co, Canning Operations, 1915-1921.]

The Dark Story of Higgins-Hyde Packing

Oh, that poor little packing house across the tracks from the Del Monte Cannery. When I first built my layout, I saw that the building had been Pacific Fruit Products in 1915, and Abinante and Nola in 1950, so I declared my model would be Abinante and Nola because I liked the name better.

Then I discovered an old city directory, and found that J.S. Roberts occupied that big, rambling barn, at least between 1936 and 1949.

Then I found that photo of the J.S. Roberts plant, and it didn't look anything like my building.

Good thing I didn't start rebuilding my packing house model… or lettering a new model.

Ken Middlebrook, another local railfan, just sent along a 1931-era Southern Pacific list of sidings in the San Jose area, both with the name of the industry at each siding, its length, and the capacity of the plant or warehouse. It gives me a whole bunch of new data points about the businesses around Santa Clara County. More importantly, it tells me about the local fruit industry just as the Great Depression's about to completely shake up the industry. Up on Ryland St., the Chicago grocer J.B. Inderridden is still around, and Winchester Dried Fruit hasn't yet occupied the space.

When I got Ken's e-mail, I downloaded his scan of the document on my phone and went straight for the area around the Del Monte Cannery. And J.S. Roberts isn't there - in 1931, it looks like the building was occupied by Higgins-Hyde Packing, owners of the Sun-Glo brand.

There's not a lot about them out on the Internet. A couple of their prune crates are for sale on Ebay. There's even one Higgins-Hyde crate being used as a ballot box in Vermont, and hopefully is encouraging regular and productive voting.

But there's one place you'll find lots of mention of Higgins-Hyde Packing, and that's on the front pages of the San Jose News between mid-July and mid-August of 1932. That's one of the oddities of the Internet; the bits of history we discover are biased towards the news sources that have survived. For a typical fruit business, all I ever find are how their bowling team did (Abinante and Nola: very well!), and the court cases they got caught in (Winchester Dried Fruit blending offgrade fruit into their boxes in 1936: bad!).

But Higgins-Hyde - well, that's a bit special, so let's go through the story.

The depression hits the Santa Clara Valley in 1930 and 1931. The American economy is in horrible shape. Crops are huge. Packers are trying to sell dried fruit as soon as it comes in so they can get cash for the crop before prices drop further… and that makes prices drop even faster. Attempts by Sunsweet (California Prune and Apricot Growers) to control tonnage going into the market and increase marketing to consumers languishes over the winter of 1931-1932 and prices plummet. Finally, the independent growers and Sunsweet come to an agreement: together, they'll work to control 85% of the prune production, and they'll form a "United Prune Growers of California" stabilization pool in order to (1) regulate the amount of prunes going into the market, stabilize values, establish standard grades for fruit, and increase consumer demand. Most are for this because of the horrible prices of the last couple years. The San Jose Chamber of Commerce jumps in to help with management support, all the major growers and packers volunteer to be involved. Only four packers decide not to join the Prune Pool.

And in mid-July, it turns out one packer - Higgins-Hyde - has been silently soliciting growers to sign its contract and sell outside the program. Worse, it appears Higgins-Hyde was misrepresenting their position:

"With Regard to the Higgins-Hyde Pool, Mr. Boland reported he found definite misrepresentations had been made to growers, among them that the pool would enter the United Prune Growers; that the growers joining the pool would be exempt from the industry prune advertising charge; that united prune pool members could not hope to get all their money prior to from ten months to two years after delivery, while Higgins-Hyde members would receive 90 per cent of their money before January 1 of the following year and the balance not later than the April or May following. (San Jose News, July 28, 1932)

Oops.

A.A. Higgins didn't think his pool was a problem; he'd been running a prune pool for the last four years, but probably spreading less fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the competition in previous years. But the Prune Pool didn't appreciate his attempts to break the pool and send prices lower, so they argue against the remaining wildcat packers and demand an investigation of Higgins-Hyde claim.

And they win, and the world starts believing the California Prune Pool will cause prices to go up. By August 13, the price of prunes in London (yes, San Jose was affecting London!) went up 1/2 cent per pound (on a crop selling for 2-3 cents a pound) on the assumption that the Prune Pool would go through, and Fred Lester and Otto Van Dorsten walked away from their contracts with Higgins-Hyde. By August 23, Higgins-Hyde explicitly released the others who had signed contracts with them. With that, the Prune Pool controlled 160,000 tons of California prunes, with all the major packers - California Packing Corporation, Guggenhime, Libby, Richmond-Chase, Roseberg Brothers, Anchorage Farms, Hamlin Packing, Herbert Packing, Inderrieden, Napa Dried Fruit, Warren Dried Fruit, and Harter Packing… but no Higgins-Hyde.

The Prune Pool slowly foundered over the next couple years. They suffered from off-grade prunes getting sold on the market and dropping prices further. They argued with New Deal architects about whether advertising would help, or whether it would just steal demand from some other industry. Mostly, though, they suffered from supplies that exceeded demand so significantly that there was little chance that growers could make a profit. The 1935 crop was 256,000 tons. The Great Depression was just too big for the world to buy all those prunes.

And Higgins-Hyde disappears from the news. Maybe they were doing the pool in a last-ditch effort to make their own mortgage payments. Maybe they thought they could make more by selling ahead of the Prune Pool, and pissed off the rest of the industry and the Valley. Maybe they just got doomed by the lack of any market to sell what prunes they could get. For whatever reason, there's not a trace of A. A. Higgins or Higgins-Hyde in the 1936 San Jose city directory.

So for my model railroad set in Spring, 1932, Higgins-Hyde Packing ought to be in that building, and if I'm particularly snarky I'll make sure to include a model of the salesman who thought he could sneak one past the Prune Pool by signing some farmers with a slight bit of misinformation...

(If you're interested in the gory details of prune prices, growers associations, and the effect of the Great Depression in the Santa Clara Valley, search for a copy of "The Sunsweet Story" by Couchman which provides more dtails than you'd ever want.)