Modeling the Weed-Infested Parts of the San Jose-Los Gatos Branch... With Photos!

W.P. Crossing, Los Gatos branch, 1940's?

Jack Burgess once explained how he started modeling the Yosemite Valley Railroad. “I went into the model train store, and they had two books on two California shorelines. I bought the Yosemite Valley one because it had more pictures.” That’s not an unusual way to start out modeling a specific railroad; usually when we start, we know only a bit about the specific railroad, don’t know where to turn for good photos, and don’t always have a good understanding of what the surroundings looked like or what trains ran there.

Luckily, we learn more over time. Jack ended up learning more about the YV than anyone else I can think of, and wrote a book about it. And me - well, I started out choosing the industries along the track based on which names sounded better, but every year I’ve learned a bit more about San Jose, the Los Gatos branch, and the canning industry.

And every year or so, I discover some picture that shows me a side of the railroad I’d never seen before. This photo, for example. I found this in a set of railroad photos on Flickr that were put online by the Barriger collection at the University of Missouri, shows the tracks in San Jose at the Western Pacific crossing. It’s a place that appears on my model railroad, so this photo gives me lots of details about what the area looked like, what the buildings looked like, and also what little details I ought to add to my model.

It's also a photo I thought I'd never find - an uninterrupted shot of some underused tracks cutting through the canneries and dried fruit packing houses on the edge of San Jose, showing more weeds than track. It's not a pretty shot, and it's not an action shot, but it shows a scene of San Jose that every distractible schoolboy saw on the way home from school - a photo few people would have ever taken. And it wasn't taken by a schoolboy, but a railroad executive.

Link to BIG VERSION of picture at Flickr.

The Industries:

Sack shed, Sunsweet Plant #6, Lincoln Ave.

It may not look like much, but this photo is filled with major industries. The corrugated iron fence and barbed wire top protects the Standard Oil depot. In the distance to the left, you see the roof of the large, wooden Sunsweet Plant #6 packing house on Lincoln Avenue - originally the George N. Herbert Packing Company. That little one story building in front of it? It’s listed on a 1950’s Sanborn map as “sack storage”, probably for Sunsweet. That packing house is the same era and the same rough construction as the J.S. Roberts packing house I’ve been building recently. The chimneys behind Sunsweet hint at the Contadina cannery, packing tomato paste.

1930 Sanborn Map, Lincoln Ave at Auzerais

On the right in the foreground is the sawtoothed former Virden Packing cannery; by this time, it may already be used for wine storage. It’s also got that loading dock on the side, also probably an SP siding. The masonry building on the other side of Lincoln Ave. would have been a cold storage building (I’d guess for pears for the canneries), and then in the far distance is the United States Products cannery, packing in glass for extra shelf appeal.

The Details:

Derail, WP Crossing

For detailing a scene, this is a beautiful photo. For example, the WP crossing was controlled by a switch tower through at least the 1930’s. That tower would have been just to the right of the scene You can see signs of its existence here - derails on both the left and right sidings / drill tracks to keep cars from rolling over the crossing and blocking the tracks. You can also see wood framing the ditch under the tracks which held the rods that controlled the derail.

If you look a bit further out, you’ll see cross bucks and a banjo crossing signal in the distance where Lincoln Ave. crosses the tracks. If I had any questions about appropriate signals for the busy Lincoln Ave. crossing, I now know. You’ll also see the searchlight signal a bit further out, indicating that the SP finally did put signals along the Los Gatos branch. There’s finally all the little details - hip-high weeds on the left side of the tracks, and fewer weeds on the right side. The tracks are set right in the dirt - all those lessons about raising main tracks to make them look better maintained is a lot of bunk, at least for San Jose. The railroad’s telephone poles and signal poles frame the shot, reminding me of another detail to add. Then there’s the random debris - posts sticking up out of the weeds, the canvas in a pile on the side of the tracks, the scrap wire just past the WP tracks.

Switchman's Shanty, Lincoln Ave., San Jose

And if you look past that signal in the middle foreground, you’ll see a little shack on the right side of the tracks - that switchman’s shanty that showed up on the Dome of Foam engineering plans.

And if I needed ideas about my buildings, there’s lots of great details that would apply, whether here or in another part of California: the corrugated iron fence around Standard Oil. The weathered low building for the empty prune sacks, with its big freight door and lots of windows high up. The packing shed with random gables and skylights poking out here and there.

Even the locomotive’s position gives me hints about how the tracks were used. None of the maps I had showed whether there was a track in that location, so I assumed there might be an interchange with the Western Pacific. Locomotive 1235 is sitting on a track in the right place; it might be an interchange track, or it might only be a spur for the Interurban railroad yards up on San Carlos Street. The photo also tells me I ought to be switching the industries along this track with a similar tiny 0-6-0.

Photos like these are waiting for you to find them. I couldn’t have imagined finding a photo like this when I started modeling the Vasona Branch, but I keep discovering photos like this. Each photo helps interpret the purpose of the different railroad tracks, identify the changes to the industries along the track over time, and hint at the set-dressing details that will make my models more realistic.

Your favorite railroad probably has photos like this - maybe you’ll see them in a book, or find some random photographer who snapped a photo of your favorite bit of track. (For example, if you model 1971-era Oakland, check out Nick deWolf’s photos of San Francisco and Oakland in the summer of 1971, which has some photos of local scrapyards and industries.)

The Barriger collection on Flickr is also huge, with a lot of very non-traditional photos of empty tracks, industries, and stations. Those photos also cover many railroads including the Western Pacific and Southern Pacific.

But I know there’s a bunch of photos out there that you’d love to find; just keep looking.

[Original photo from the Barriger collection at the University of Missouri; they're being quite generous to share the photos on Flickr, so go look at them and add comments explaining where these photos are. The Barriger collection is a set of photos taken by a railway exec in the 1930's and 1940's; check them out for some great discoveries.]

A. & C. Ham: Paging Mr. Ham!

As I've been tracking down canneries and packing houses, I'll occasionally encounter these random companies that are mentioned only in passing with little detail about their locations.  One of those firms was A. & C. Ham, a turn-of-the-century fruit packer in San Jose. I did a couple searches for Mister Ham, but never got any hits.

Well, it turns out Ham wasn't the owner; Ham was the product.

The company was actually Andrews and Coykendall Ham, founded in the 1870's as a pork wholesaler and packer.  I don't know who Andrews was, but Coykendall was Jonathan B. Coykendall, a New York transplant and '49er who came out for the mining and returned back east, but "couldn't forget sunny California" and returned to open a meat market and wholesale meat and grocery business in San Jose.  His store was at 3rd and San Fernando, but he had a warehouse and potentially packing plant at Senter and Cinnabar, along with the family house.  Senter is better known today as the "Caltrain tracks north of Diridon station", but in the 1870's, it was just an unimproved street that the South Pacific Coast Railroad used as a right-of-way.

But how did A. & C. Ham go from pork to prunes?  The family house was surrounded by the growing fruit industry.  The 1891 Sanborn maps at UCSC show the J. M. Dawson cannery a block up at Lenzen, along with the J. Z. Anderson fruit packing plant next door to it.  According to his obituary, Jonathan also "began the manufacture of prune coffee… that led him extensively into the handling of prunes, and the Coykendall Prune Company was formed when the ham business was abandoned." (And don't ask me what prune coffee is; I assume it's something like FigPrune, but I'll stick with old-fashioned coffee, thank you very much!)

The name of the business varies: there's references to A&C Ham as one of the collection sites for the California Cured Fruit Association in 1900 (with the site listed as "west side", suggesting that the San Jose plant wasn't being used, but instead they were collecting out at the family ranch perhaps.)  1903 news articles refer to "Coykendall and Sons",  while the obituary lists the "Coykendall Prune Company".

It's also hard to know when the hams stopped and the prunes began. The obituary makes it sound like one business ended and the other began, but the 1899 and 1902 city directories show the grocery store at 90 E. San Fernando, and the 1893 and 1900 city directories lists them as only in the ham business, even though we've got evidence they were doing fruit in 1900. A Silicon Valley history notes that the original ham packing plant burned in 1903, and I'd like to assume the burning of the packing house doomed the meat business, but I haven't found a record of that fire or any comments about what business was being done in the plant at that time.  UCSC's archives also show that one of the grocery business's customers was F.A. Hihn, who bought supplies as well as bacon and ham for his sawmill workers at Laurel, suggesting they were still in the meat business in 1903.  Their warehouse on the narrow gauge must've made it easy for them to deliver.

But they were doing mighty good, whatever they were selling.  I combed through the San Jose Evening News for 1903 looking for mention of a packing house fire, but only found mention of their success in the prune business.  The September 17, 1903 San Jose Evening News reported that Coykendall & Sons was  in the process of packing a hundred tons of prunes, already sold in Antwerp, and had shipped 225 tons of prunes to France that year already.

Another article in the same issue also reports how being a fruit drier wasn't always a safe occupation, as the local newsies reported on "Armed Men Guard A Fruit Dryer":

Excited orchardists who want pay for prunes sold to Costa Brothers.
There is a lot of prunes at what is known as the Costa drier on the Almaden Road, about three miles south of the city, that are being guarded by armed men.  It appears that Louis and George Costa bought prunes from a number of orchardists in the section referred to.  They then sold them to Coykendall & Sons, packers of prunes.  The Costa Brothers received an advance of $5,000 on the prunes, and the latter were taken possession of by the Coykendalls.  The new owners engaged in finishing the drying of the prunes.  Then the parties that had sold the prunes to the Costas came around and demanded that they be paid for the prunes, asserting that the Costas had not paid in full for the fruit.”

Jonathan died in February 1904, with a nice obituary in the February 8, 1904 Evening News.  The cause of death: injuries received when his horse was spooked by a steam roller and managed to overturn his carriage (November 18, 1903 Evening News).  Leafing through old newspapers, it seemed like there was a constant stream of injuries and deaths from runaway and spooked horses back in turn-of-the-century San Jose.

Frank and Horatio must've kept the business going, for the company was still visible with the Cinnabar Street plant til 1917.  The obituary had mentioned that the company's sales connections in Europe was one of its strengths.

A. and C. Ham's packing house on Cinnabar burned in May 1917; Western Canner and Packer noted the tragedy, and commented on the fact that the plant was empty because the season hadn't yet started.  (This is another reminder of the change before and after World War I - before, the packers sold immediately to speculative wholesalers, but after the war, they kept the stock on-hand to sell themselves.)

The California Fruit News, in contrast, reported on their planned rebirth.  Frank and H.G. noted that they'd gotten lucky; they'd just bought new machinery from the the recently bankrupt California Cured Fruit Exchange in Emeryville, but hadn't yet moved it to the Cinnabar plant when the fire struck.  Very little fruit was burned, and the family house next door was saved. However, the materials for shipping - the cotton and jute sacks (for those two hundred pound bags of fruit sent to Europe) and boxes and labels went up in flames. The Coykendall brothers promised to rebuild, and everything suggested that A. & C. Ham would continue to exist for a long time.

But it wasn't to be. A. & C. Ham disappeared, not because of business problems but because of business success.  Frank Coykendall was one of the organizers and the first general manager for the California Prune and Apricot Growers (Sunsweet). The July 27, 1918 California Fruit News remarks that because of the conflict of interest, A. & C. Ham would stop packing, and the California Prune and Apricot Growers were eager to buy their modern packing house, built on the ashes of the turn of the century plant. A. & C. Ham, along the Santa Cruz branch and eventually on the SP mainline, became Sunsweet's Plant #11.

Frank Coykendall led the California Prune and Apricot Growers from its founding in 1917 through 1923, when he was forced out in a public and very messy battle that I'm still not sure I understand, even after reading the chapter in The Sunsweet Story a few times. But I get the feeling he was one of those guys who would take charge and do whatever was needed, whether the rest of the world wanted his help or not. San Jose historian, Ralph Rambo, described Frank as "quite a prominent citizen and well known for his excitable nature", and took it upon himself after the Great Earthquake of 1906 to put up posters declaring looting to be a hanging offense:

WARNING
NOTICE IS GIVEN THAT ANY PERSON FOUND PILFERING, STEALING, ROBBING OR COMMITTING ANY ACT OF LAWLESS VIOLENCE WILL BE SUMMARILY HANGED!
THE VIGILANCE COMMITTEE
“It turned out that this was uncalled for.  The Sheriff had appointed many deputies.  We saw National Guardsmen patrolling the streets, later saw them pitching their tents in St. James Park.  And yet in retrospect we salute Frank for adding this bit of civic melodrama and we must remember that looting was very serious in San Francisco."

Frank was probably the right guy for starting the association, but might not have been the best fit when the political battles started after the horrible years of 1920 and 1921.

The former A. & C. Ham plant survived certainly into the 1960's, for Bob Morris captured some nice photos of the modern, concrete packing packing house and its warehouse, partially obscured by a badly-timed train getting into the shot. Packing houses get obscured in railfan photos so often that you'd almost believe these guys were *trying* to take pictures of the trains.

And, of course, A. & C. Ham isn't on the Vasona Branch, so I'm not building a model of it. I'll leave it to someone else to model the packing houses and canneries along the tracks up here.

[Photo of the A. & C. Ham packing house is from The Sunsweet Story by Robert Couchman. Coykendall house and packing plant maps from the Sanborn 1891, 1915, and 1950 maps.]

Go In Looking for Model Details, Come Out With Corporate Accounting Experience

So let's recap, shall we?

• Robert wants to build a model railroad with scenes that match places he likes in California, and wants realistic and busy levels of traffic so he can run lots of trains switching boxcars around the layout.
• Robert chooses the San Jose - Los Gatos branch because it has lots of busy canneries and dried fruit packing houses, so there will be lots of boxcars to move back and forth.
• Robert researches the individual canneries, like the Hyde Cannery in Campbell, to understand what to build, and because he's hoping he'll learn interesting historical tidbits that make for good stories about the models and the layout.
• Robert finds the Hyde Cannery was closed after 1928 or so - the era he models. Robert is annoyed.
• Robert, being curious, goes to the County Recorder's office to understand why the cannery was closed in what ought to have been a prosperous year.
• Robert finds documents describing strange mortgages and leases starting several years before the closure, making him wonder about financial difficulties.
• Robert becomes very fearful that his next step is to take some college coursework in forensic accounting… all to figure out how to build an HO model of a cannery.

Which leads straight to the question of the day. When I'd researched the Hyde Cannery's financial state a few weeks ago at the County Recorder's office, I'd turned up one interesting lease that I didn't understand:

At the same time, Hyde leased all the cannery's warehouse space to the Lawrence Warehouse Company for $1.00 on a month-by-month basis. (7/16/23, book 37 pg 368, as well as renewals in 1924) I don't know if this was a way to raise funds, or if there were legal reasons to have an official warehouse company handling those buildings, but overall feeling I get is that Hyde needed capital.

We also know that Higgins-Hyde did a similar leasing of their warehouse space to Lawrence Warehouse. So… leasing your warehouse, lock, stock, and barrel to another company: sign of desperation, or sign of having very clever accountants?

An interesting story in "The Sunsweet Story" by Robert Couchman actually explains why Hyde's lease of their warehouse might have actually been very smart. When the California Prune and Apricot Growers (Sunsweet) got started in 1917 as a grower co-operative, Sunsweet contracted with sixty-five dried fruit packing houses to receive the dried fruit from the Sunsweet-associated growers, and pack the incoming crop.

When Sunsweet got the 1917 crop packed, they found out working with someone else's packing companies wasn't good. First, they noticed that different packers had wildly different costs, often out of line with what packing the fruit should have cost. Worse, one packer (George N. Herbert Packing Company) refused to turn over $100,000 they'd collected for the crop. Sunsweet responded by putting liens against

"22 carloads of packed fruit, 200 tons of fruit in the firm's warehouse, and a large orchard owned by Herbert. By its prompt and energetic action, the association got its money back and avoided further trouble of this kind."

And Sunsweet learned their lesson: working with the individual packers sucked, sometimes in small ways, and sometimes in very big, not good, very bad ways. And they learned that slapping liens on property that someone cares about often gets their attention quickly.

But what to do instead? Now, they could have just opened their own Sunsweet-owned packing houses. But California law at the time put a nasty little restriction on companies: they couldn't borrow money against product in their own warehouses… but they could borrow money against unsold product if it was stored in someone else's public warehouse. (I suspect this was a way to make sure you weren't slipping the product out without paying off the lender.)

So Sunsweet issued another $750,000 in stock, and started buying packing houses. But they called their lawyer and accountant first, and made sure (and here's the trick) all the packing houses were bought in the name of the Growers' Packing and Warehousing Association (GP&WA), which was a company fully owned by Sunsweet. Sunsweet could now take dried fruit from the orchardists, box it in preparation for sale, and put it in the GP&WA warehouse. GP&WA would give them a receipt for whatever they'd stored in the warehouse, and Sunsweet would take the receipt to the bank and, if necessary, borrow money against the fruit now in the safe and protected hands of Growers' Packing.

This little accounting trick explains why Sunsweet Plant #8 in Mountain View had Growers' Packing and Warehousing Association painted across the building, but everyone really knew it was Sunsweet Plant #8 - it was there just so the folks in the warehouse remembered their paychecks were signed by Growers Packing, and not by Sunsweet.

Oh, and guess which packing house they bought first? Yep, George N. Herbert's plant on Lincoln Ave. in San Jose. I wouldn't have trusted him with the 1918 crop either.

And for George Hyde, it's now easy to understand that if he ever wanted to borrow money against the unsold canned fruit or dried fruit in his warehouse, he needed to get it out of his hands. For whatever reason, he decided against making his own company, and so instead called up the very-large Lawrence Warehouse Corporation up in San Francisco, and invited them over to run his warehouse. Hyde would roll his prunes and fruit cocktail into the warehouse, hand it to the Lawrence Warehouse folks, and give them some money for storage fees. He'd get back a warehouse receipt from the very upstanding and very detail-oriented Lawrence Warehouse staff. If he ever needed to borrow some money for the short term, he'd then take those warehouse receipts down to the bank, and walk out with some hard cash borrowed on reasonable terms that he could use to buy more prunes, more apricots, more cans, or more crates.

And if you want to build a model of the Sunsweet plant, or the Hyde Cannery, you don't really need to know about the rules about borrowing money against finished goods in warehouses, or whether the staff in the Hyde Cannery are wearing "Hyde Cannery" t-shirts or "Lawrence Warehouse" t-shirts. At all. It's completely irrelevant, and if you care, it means you've crossed over from a nice model railroad hobby into some strange history/accounting obsession that can't be healthy.

Which means I'm either really strange, or I've started on a path to a lucrative career in corporate forensic accounting. But if I ever had to build models of buildings in downtown San Jose, I know that the building holding George Hyde's accountants ought to be pretty swanky, for it sounds like they knew how to earn their fee.

[Additional information: The official term for opening a public warehouse at a business is called "field warehousing", and it can be done to borrow against both raw materials and finished product. The September 1922 Western Canner and Packer gives a bit of history on the company, and notes that Lawrence Warehouse was one of the early companies doing this business.

The President of the Lawrence Warehouse Company also wrote an article for the February 1923 Western Canner and Packer about the advantages of field warehousing. He raises the point that the system is helpful when railroad cars are scarce (as happened during the rail strikes during the summer of 1922), for it means that the canner isn't forced to immediately sell and ship the whole crop after canning to pay expenses. Instead, the canner can keep product in their warehouse and ship it as bought, borrowing against the warehouse's contents to pay the growers and other suppliers.

This justification also highlights the big change in the dried and canned fruit industry after 1918. Before the US entered World War I, canners and packers would often sell the crop ASAP to speculators who would hold the product and sell it over the year when prices were favorable. The canners didn't have to worry about warehousing space or shipping during the off-season, and also didn't care about price fluctuations.

Anti-profiteering rules during World War I discouraged the speculative wholesalers from holding product during the war. After the war ended, the wholesalers realized they liked not taking on the speculative risk, and instead bought from the canners and packers only as they needed product. The canners then started holding more stuff in warehouses during the off-season, had to staff the warehouse for shipments, and also had to pay more attention to prices. Now that the canners weren't immediately selling the crop, having ways to borrow against the slowly-selling pack became more important. Field warehousing appears to be one way the canners made sure they had access to cash as they slowly sold each year's crop.

There are specific rules about how a field warehouse is run; the Yale Law Journal in September 1960 cites that the items to be "warehoused" are segregated from the rest of the borrower's stock in an area leased for a nominal sum to the warehouse company, and demarcated with signs and physical barriers to warn folks that the contents have a lien against them. The warehouse company takes possession of the items when they enter the warehouse and issues a receipt that can be given to the bank in a loan, and is only supposed to release the products when the receipt is returned. Warehouse companies got a fee - usually a percentage of the value of the products stored - for being responsible for the stored items, and were on the hook for the value if the items weren't there when a creditor came calling. One of the larger court cases in field warehousing came when a public warehouse company controlling storage for a food oils company turned out never to have received the oil that they'd issued receipts for.

Although field warehouses were run as separate companies, they were often run by employees associated with the original business because of knowledge of how the business worked. Some considered this risky for the warehouse company because the employees might have a conflict of interest, but that's how just how things were run.]

Sunsweet Plant #1: More Progress

I rearranged the sidings at Campbell last year to open more switching possibilities, and one of the results of that work was space for California Prune and Apricot Growers (Sunsweet) Plant #1. It's an interesting building both it's a classic multi-story dried fruit packing house (with space to store the year's dried crop), and because the building still exists in downtown Campbell as office space.

My model of the packing house has been lingering for months, but I finally got around to putting a roof on it and adding a bit of detail, and it's worth sharing. There's a couple of spots of glue to remove. I also need to work on the paint on the fascia and getting rid of that smear of red under the eaves. Overall, though, it's coming along nicely.

And this was only one of the projects completed over Christmas. I'd explicitly decided to focus on some of the projects cluttering the workbench, and that resolution led to completion of the WP West San Jose tower, decaling two resin boxcars that had been sitting painted since February, and assembling a farm tractor that had been sitting in its Woodland Scenics bubble pack since... 2008?

I also was bad and started another project, and I'll need to show the beginnings of the San Jose Market Street train shed another day.

Lingering Projects

I'm taking some days off around Christmas, and I'm using the time to get through some lingering projects. The Western Pacific tower at West San Jose got glazing and some details, and it's prety much ready to go on the layout. Here's some current photos.

Note the bicycle against the wall. That came from the scrapbox; I don't even remember what plastic model kit it came from. It's pretty lame - just a flat injection molded piece - but with a bit of paint and Sharpie work to add color, it adds a bit of detail to make the building looked lived-in. Don't completely discount those cheap plastic kits!

Also getting some love and kindness is the Sunsweet Plant #1 in Campbell, which has been lingering half-built for at least a year. The roof went on this week, and as soon as some door castings are added, it'll be ready for some photos as well.

I'm glad for the blog if only to help me keep track of progress. I knew the Sunsweet building had been lingering, but I hadn't thought it had been that long!

Campbell Ave. and Wigwags on a Rainy 1970 Day

It's outside my era, but it's still a great photo. Check out Stan Praisewater's shot of an SP diesel at the Campbell Ave. crossing taken in 1970 - the photo's at Dan's Rail Pix site as part of a collection of wigwags; scroll halfway down to see the photo, and click on it to see an enlarged version.

Interesting details: even in 1970, the Campbell Ave. crossing is protected with wigwag signals and wooden crossbucks - very little protection for the errant driver. The Sunsweet packing plant is just visible behind the diesel, but the 1970's era downtown is fuzzy but present, as are the smaller crossbucks to warn the tiniest railfans to be careful around the crossing.

There's also a "Truck Route" sign just beyond the crossing; in the days of multiple canneries and packing plants, keeping the trucks from blocking the main drag must have been a high priority. Although the tracks and Campbell Ave. are still there, downtown Campbell's a much livelier place these days.

What's With Those Crazy Railroad Historians?

I suspect there's at least some readers out there who see the recent chain of articles on the history of the apricot and prune industry, and just don't get it. "Why bother to look at a bunch of dusty old books" (or, for that matter, dusty old PDFs.) "It's not helping you run trains."

Well, maybe... but where else am I going to find that perfect period Sunsweet logo for the side of Sunsweet Plant #1? The plant on Lincoln Ave. in San Jose had one painted prominently.

Luckily, a Sunsweet promotional book from the 1920's was kindly scanned in by the Library of Congress and made available to the public. With a few minutes of capturing the image from the PDF version of the book, I've got a logo, ready for trimming and photoshopping to turn it into a suitable decal.

The book also has a nice picture of the Hyde drying yard, looking north towards downtown Campbell. The original halftone image is rough, so it's hard to make out details. There's also some nice shots of prune grading machinery if you're looking to superdetail your dryer or packer scene. There's also a sample "Inspection Certificate" showing the documentation provided to a buyer. Note that the packer is the mythical A. & C. Ham I've seen mentioned, and the boxcar bound for Chicago had 1,500 twenty-five pounds boxes of prunes for a total of 37,500 pounds of prunes. We also see that the sale was in January of 1918, reminding us that the packers stored the fruit til the sales came in.

We also see that Iron Chef didn't originate in Japan, but in 1920's San Francisco. A "Prune and Apricot Battle" was waged by Victor Hirtzler, "maitre de cuisine of the Hotel St. Francis, San Francisco", who prepared a dinner using Sunsweet's apricots and prunes:

Prunes en Supreme
Chicken Soup
Salted Almonds
Filet of Sole with Sunsweet Prunes
Stuffed Squab Chicken with Sunsweet Apricots
Peas etudes, Potato Chateau
Prune and Apricot Salad
Pudding Glace Prune et Apricot
Assorted Cakes
Demi Tasse
Prune and Apricot Punch, Prune Bread, Apricot Rolls

One wonders how Iron Chef Morimoto would have responded to challenger Hirtzler.

Sunsweet declares that recipes will be furnished on request; I'm tempted to call them up and see if they're still honoring that offer.

I found the book "A Fact and Picture Story of the Prune and Apricot Industry" when doing a search on Amazon for Sunsweet-related books; the seller mentioned their $12 book was "a scan of a period document", and the lack of any photos of the book made me very suspicious that they, like some of the eBay photo sellers, were just doing cheap prints of material already available out on the Internet. If you see interesting historic documents out on eBay or Amazon, always do a quick search to see if they're available elsewhere for free.

Sunsweet Plant #1: Progress

Back in August, I mentioned how the SP valuation maps had convinced me I needed to redo the tracks in Campbell. I finally decided to fix two major flaws: to add a team track and move the Hyde Cannery down a foot so I'd have room for Sunsweet (California Prune and Apricot Growers) Plant #1.

The track changes were done within a couple weeks, but the Sunsweet packing house has been lingering for a few weeks. Here's some photos to show my progress.

But first, let's check out the prototype building!

Sunsweet Plant #1 started out as the Campbell Farmers Union Packing company. Farmers Union was a co-operative - a packing house owned by the local growers. The growers would promise to send their crops to the co-op, and the co-op would use its larger volume to better deal with the East Coast brokers. Co-ops were popular because the growers never trusted many of the independent packers, and the packers played enough shady games to deserve their reputation. The previous co-operative in town, the Campbell Fruit Growers Union, had started in 1892 and had initially done well, but slowly started losing the support of growers and eventually sold out to George Hyde in 1913. Farmers Union must have done okay; they built their own modern packing house along the railroad tracks in 1912, just south of Campbell Ave, just north of the separate Hyde Cannery.

(If I was modeling a few years later than my chosen 1932, I wouldn't need separate buildings for Hyde and Sunsweet; Hyde sold out to Sunsweet in 1937, and the Hyde Cannery became the Campbell Cooperative Dryer. That site was famous for a forty-eight tunnel dehydrator that could process 480 tons of fruit a day.)

By 1917, after several co-operative collapses, speculator binges, and arguing, the rest of the prune and apricot growers were thinking that joining a single, large co-op might help them. Those growers, as well as forty five packing houses in California, signed up to join this single, new co-operative - the California Prune and Apricot Growers. The list of initial packers included all the big names I've been seeing in my research: A & C Ham, George Herbert, J.W. Chilton, O. A. Harlan, Warren Dried Fruit, Pacific Fruit Products, Inderrieden (all in San Jose), George Hyde and Farmers Union in Campbell, Gem City Packing Company and Curtis Fruit Company in Los Gatos, and a scattering of other packing houses from Red Bluff to Santa Paula. The co-op had the production and storage capacity, and had enough of the market to get decent prices for their crops. The Campbell plant, for some reason, got labeled Plant #1.

And Sunsweet did well - well enough that it still exists, and still controls two-thirds of the world's prune supply. It had its drama - Couchman's The Sunsweet Story is filled with the troubles facing the industry and the co-operative. Reading it's a bit like reading the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, with all sorts of names, ancient battles, grand monuments (like Plant #7 on the south side of San Jose) and cunning ploys, but in between, it's scattered with enough facts to help me with my modeling.

Plant #1, however, only did well as long as there was fruit in the area to dry and pack.As suburbs ate the remaining orchards, Sunsweet closed the Campbell plant in 1971. The building was converted to office space, and still sits next to the railroad tracks that processed just south of Campbell Ave.

Regular readers can guess at what the plant looked like. The fruit was driven in by truck from the drying yard, and a scale at the plant weighed the incoming fruit. It would have been hauled upstairs to the top floor for grading, and dumped into bins by size. When the fruit was ready for sale (perhaps months later), it would be taken out of the bins by wheelbarrow, washed and hydrated, inspected, and boxed for sale. The John C. Gordon photos shows what the inside of the Campbell facility probably looked like with modern equipment and hordes of men and women packing the Sunsweet prunes into attractive Sunsweet boxes. A 20,000 fuel oil tank in the ground ran the boiler for the steam and hot water.

It must not have been a fun place if you were a truck driver. The plant is squashed tight against the Campbell Ave. businesses on the north, and has a remarkably small lot on the south end which must have been a pain for maneuvering trucks. Some photos from the 1960's hint show forklifts and crates littering Central Ave.

Finally, here's my model as it currently exists. I've placed the windows on the front walls based on the 1915-era photos of the plant because I haven't found any good photos from later times. Construction is straightforward - 1/16" styrene sheet with 1/2" strip styrene to fight warping, and Campbell corrugated siding on all the walls. The loading docks are scratchbuilt from strip and sheet styrene. As usual, I'm scratchbuilding my own freight doors from scribed sheet and tiny (1x3) strip styrene for the various bracing.

Unfortunately, it's a cramped space, so I'm not planning on building any of the building extensions seen on the Campbell map, and I'll hold off on any of the accessory buildings until I've figured out what will fit in the allotted space.

Sunsweet Plant #1 has been a bit going slow; first, I had problems with warping because of the solvent in the contact cement, then held off on building the platforms until I restocked my double stick tape from the local art supply store. I'll need to work to get the freight doors and loading docks painted before I can start assembling the model. It's amazing how those little hiccups can slow down a model.


Next step: painting, assembling, and detailing.

Tweaking the Campbell Track Plan

Scenery building is moving west; after the work at Vasona Junction, the next target is beautiful Campbell, California. Although I've built some of the buildings for Campbell Avenue, the two major canneries in town are still cardboard mockups. That's a shame, as Campbell is one of the more active locations on the layout thanks to the multiple industries and handy passing siding. My crews deserve something nicer to look at.

Campbell doesn't always live up to my expectations, though. Campbell had three or four major canning and fruit packing industries along the tracks, and the simple track arrangements let crews finish too quickly. Although the town could support a team track, I never saw one on the Sanborn maps of town, so I ask crews to spot cars on the station track… which blocks the passing siding and causes all sorts of crises when too many trains try to move on the layout at the same time.

I'd had thoughts about adding extra tracks around Campbell to increase the amount of work at the station, but those ideas never got anywhere. After seeing the SP Valuation Map for Campbell, I found there really was a team track in town. That's one of the few omissions I've found on the Sanborn maps. The team track was certainly visible on 1960's era switching diagrams for the SP crews, but that era had the team track pointing in the opposite direction! The valuation map doesn't say when the team track went in, but comparing the numbers for the GMO (general manager orders) for the team track and other track changes on the map with dates suggests the team track went in around 1924 or so, and was lengthened to 320 feet by the 1930's.

Wow - I can put in that team track! Once I was thinking about trackage changes, I also started thinking about lengthening the sidings and perhaps adding the California Prune and Apricot Growers (aka Sunsweet) plant into the scene as well. I wanted an extra siding, but I wanted the track to still match the prototype - how was I going to do it?

Here's a rough schematic of the track in Campbell around the 1930's (as far as I can figure). This is based off the Sanborn and SP valuation maps. Up is west; right heads towards San Jose and left heads towards Los Gatos. Campbell Avenue cuts across the tracks in the center of the drawing. Sunsweet's siding was small - maybe four cars - but the Hyde cannery had multiple warehouses and multiple doors for spotting. The Ainsley/Drew cannery (it was sold to Drew at the end of 1932) had two sidings, the left one for the main cannery building, and the right for access to additional warehouses. Ainsley also owned the warehouse on the other side of the tracks according to the valuation map, but the Sanborn maps just list it as a "box factory." Occasionally, I'll treat the box factory like a long-term warehouse, and direct boxcars there to pick up cans of fruit.

Here's the plan as it appears on my layout today. Note that Ainsley only gets one siding, not two, but the box factory still appears. Also note that Sunsweet is completely missing, as is the team track. Now the Hyde Cannery end of the siding is only three cars, so there's really not room for an extra siding (or even spaces for Sunsweet.) Lengthening the town is also impossible as both sides of town end in sharp curves that lead into the rural, in-between scenes. So what can I do to make more room for the canneries and Sunsweet packing house?

Here's the current plan, and I just started yanking up track to make this happen. I'm planning on moving the Hyde Cannery buildings another two feet to the left, and putting them on their own spur. Sunsweet will get the former three spaces taken by Hyde, giving me room to display their large tin-sheathed frame building. To avoid extending the town, the Hyde Cannery will be on its own spur; crews won't be able to switch Hyde from either end of town, but the other two industries can be worked either from the uphill or downhill side.

It's not a perfect track plan, but I'm satisfied it'll capture some of the feel of the original track arrangement, but still provide fun operation.

My first step is to rip out the old track, put in the needed switches, and lay the track. In the next few months, I'll be building the Hyde and Sunsweet packing houses, and then I'll be able to start putting in some reasonable scenery all around. Stay tuned!

In the Year 2001, Ray Bradbury Says...

And for a bit of California Prune and Apricot Growers (aka Sunsweet) content (and some hints about what life in the 21st century might be like), check out Ray Bradbury's Predictions for the Year 2001:

Spoiler: we still haven't gotten the wrinkles out of prunes.

Inside the Packing Houses

The packing house model's taking shape - I'm currently painting the basic model to get the weathered warehouse look.

Meanwhile, it's worth changing the focus from the outside of the packing house and warehouses to the inside.  What happened in a dried fruit packing house?

Luckily, the San Jose Public Library and San Jose State library can tell us.  Here's some photos from the John C. Gordon collection.  All three of these photos appear to be from the same packing house, and the last photo shows that it's a Sunsweet co-op associated plant from the box labels.

First, a photo of the prunes being boxed.  Many of the packing houses were multi-story, and the Sanborn maps note that the fruit bins and grading were done on the upper floors.  This photo shows why - the chutes from the upper floor drop the fruit into the packing machinery where it's all boxed.  Note that the women doing the packing are actually weighing each individual package as prunes are dropped in--automation hasn't gotten rid of the boxing jobs y as she drops prunes into it - automation isn't being used here.

Second, here's another photo of the women packing.  Another chute's visible at the back right of the photo, and this photo shows the simple interior well--wooden posts, exposed rafters, simple lights. Note the metal sash windows at the back; they're a nice touch, and probably catch at least a bit of a breeze so the plant floor isn't so hot.

Finally, here's the end of the production line with the boxes being labelled and packed in crates.

I'm not sure which Sunsweet plant is pictured in the photos.The metal U's between the posts and beams is an easy spotting feature for noting photos taken in the same packing house.  The Arcadia photo book for Campbell borrows one of these photos, but the horizontal, tipping steel sash windows don't match either the photos of the Campbell packing house next to downtown, or the Lincoln Ave. downtown; both had wooden sash windows.  However, the photos do explain all the work that's needed before those boxes of fruit make it into my railroad cars.