Freight Trains in the Sky

One of the bigger changes in model railroading since the 1970’s is whether we’re modeling a completely imaginary railroad, a plausible but invented railroad, or if we’re trying to model the real world as it was at a particular time. The “imagine everything” folks might build something that’s a caricature - think John Allen’s mountain-crossing Gorre and Daphetid — or that borrows some historic reality (“bridge route in Colorado”) Owners get all the freedom to choose what they’re building out of whole cloth, create cities along the railroad from any inspiration, and avoid all the pesky research and visits to actual sites. Folks building to a plausible reality might need to understand something about the economics, architecture, and industries of a specific place and time - modeling an agricultural short line in California, or a fictitious logging railroad in Washington state. However, they’ve also got the freedom to imagine new places using whatever constraints they choose. I’m on the other side - I choose to model actual locations, and try to accurately model what’s there. I enjoy the research, I think I get a more realistic whole, and I suspect that the research helps me fill in details I couldn’t imagine on my own.

Or, more bluntly, the real world is stranger than I might imagine, so modeling a real place from photos helps me fill in those details I couldn’t possibly invent.

How strange is the real world? How about “freight trains in the sky” strange?

Report on Steam Railroads of San Jose

I was poking around in San Jose Library’s California Room, the library’s local history collection. One item caught my attention: “Report on Steam Railroads of San Jose”. This report from 1925 described the current state of the different railroads in San Jose at the time, and suggested ways to improve both the profits of the railroads while improving quality of life for San Jose residents and businesses. Considering the author was a well-known urban planner from St. Louis (Harold Bartholomew, who apparently had an entire urban planning firm specializing in railroad rethinks), I think we can imagine we’re about to hear a bunch of crazy ideas from those Back East crazy consultants. And it doesn’t disappoint, with a crazy proposal that I couldn’t have imagined.

[ Partial version of Report on Steam Railroads of San Jose here. I didn’t bother to scan the fold-out profiles for railroad elevation for the three plans. Sorry! ]

The problems of San Jose in regard to its steam railroads are similar in every respect to those in other Cities of normal and rapid growth, where the expansion of industries, commercial enterprises, and residential sections has taken place with little or no regulation. Instead of well defined and segregated industrial districts, we find in San Jose clusters of factories, warehouses, coal and lumber yards and a great number of packing establishments located close up to the railroad tracks, often main lines, as they have always existed. The industries have closed in on the railroads, so to speak, thus hindering greatly both their own expansion and that of the railroads.”

As a reminder, San Jose in 1925 was different from the railroads we know today. In the 1920’s, the College Park yard straddling the Guadalupe river was the main SP yard. The “big old barn” of an Eastlake-style wooden station on Bassett Street was San Jose’s primary railroad station. The line to Los Angeles ran down the center of Fourth Street, past office buildings and San Jose State University. The old South Pacific Coast line broke off the SP mainline at the old Lentzen Street roundhouse, past the current Shark Tank and future site of Diridon Station, and then off towards Campbell and Los Gatos. Santa Clara’s Newhall Yard hadn’t yet been built. The old freight yards were congested, lots of downtown streets got blocked by trains around the clock, and the residents complained about the 19th century feel of the railroad facilities in town. Main roads crossed the railroad at ground level, so busy streets such as First Street, Polhemus (Taylor), San Pedro Street, and the Alameda were constantly blocked by trains coming and going.

What’s Wrong with the San Jose Railroads?

It was a very different San Jose than we know. The report highlighted many of the challenges: the passenger station and yards were overwhelmed, the freight station wasn’t modern, and the city wanted the SP off Fourth Street.

There were 100 passenger trains running through San Jose each day. 70 of the trains were the commute operations - nearly as busy as today. Most of those passenger operations went to the San Jose Market Street station - a two track station that was too tiny for the service, stuck in the middle of the city, and ill-equipped to turn commute trains and send steam engines to and from the roundhouse. There were also five trains to and from Oakland and Niles, six trains to and from Los Angeles and points east, and six trains to and from Monterey and the Salinas Valley. None of these were trains to Santa Cruz - the Santa Cruz trains all stopped at the former SPC station off the Alameda.

The yards and services were still based on 1870’s San Jose. Freight switching of College Park blocked Polhemus (Taylor) Street; San Pedro Street had six to twelve tracks to cross. The consultants were particularly dismissive of the old Southern Pacific freight depot on San Pedro Street. The freight station was a fine building, 600 feet long with two tracks holding 44 freight cars each (assuming temporary bridges could be placed between adjacent cars.) However, the freight station predated automobiles. There were no loading docks for trucks on the property, the station was reached by a narrow driveway, and the only exit along San Pedro Street required crossing eight active yard tracks.

“THE FOURTH STREET PROBLEM That a problem exists as to the proper disposition of the Southern Pacific track in Fourth Street, is granted by all, including the railroad itself which some twenty years ago anticipated the situation and purchased the necessary right of way for relocating its track to by-pass the city to the South. The detour was never built, however, and in the interim the city developed a rapid suburban growth to the South and west so that the proposed route is now fairly well surrounded by residential and potential residential areas and is intersected by some 20 improved streets. Naturally, a well established community such as this resents the intrusion of the railroad into its midst. On the other hand that part of the public along and in the vicinity of Fourth Street, and those utilizing its own streets have endured the presence of the railroad for about 50 years and now feel the need of relief. It is also the sentiment that the natural expansion of the business district eastward is hampered boy the operation of trains on Fourth Street.
The railroad without a doubt would prefer to remain in Fourth Street, operating at grade for the rest of its life, as the sight loss in time due to speed reduction through the city is inconsequential and any change it may make to materially better the situation will probably cost from one to five million dollars.”

The great thing about the report is that the consultants went into detail about how the Southern Pacific and Western Pacific ran their railroads. They noted a ton of operating details about the SP.

San Jose yard assembled trains going to San Francisco, Oakland, Niles, Tracy, Watsonville Junction, Redwood City, and Santa Cruz.

30 switch engines and crews were needed for yard and industrial switching during the fall season.

30-40 freight trains a day, and 1600-1800 cars per day came through San Jose. “This is not an extraordinary great volume for the facilities at hand but the great diversity of classifications necessitates quick handling.”

SP had four team tracks just west of North First Street and north of passenger depot, and two additional tracks west of San Pedro Street that had a loading platform and Gantry crane.

For Market Street station, the two tracks under the train shed and one track north of the train shed were used for loading and unloading passengers. Five tracks north of the station were used for storing passenger equipment.

WP cars were only interchanged on the south side of town near Fourth Street and Alma. This was also a point of contention in the report, and the authors stressed that better and faster ways of interchange were needed.

The consultants were also detailed, explaining exactly how cars for the Santa Cruz branch were handled. They stated that Santa Cruz branch trains were assembled in “a small yard in Senter Street prolonged” (aka the current main line between Lenten Ave and Diridon Station). Train crews didn’t have to do any additional re-blocking or organizing there; instead, trains could sort cars at “several tracks on the Santa Cruz division in the vicinity of San Carlos Street (called the South Yard)” This is some great detail that I’m not sure how I’d get any other way. From the point of view of my Vasona Branch model railroad, it would be quite accurate for crews to sort and shuffle cars near Plant 51 either for local work or in preparation for later work further down the line. Best of all, I now know to refer to this stretch of tracks as “South Yard” - a little detail that otherwise might never have been recorded.

So What Should We Do About It?

The Eastern Consultants made four proposals, two that made sense and one that was batshit crazy to my modern eyes.

A: Bypass around San Jose to the west.

B: Elevated tracks along Fourth Street

C: Reuse the Western Pacific right of way around San Jose.

D: Pass around the city to the east/north, and parallel the WP on the east side of town.

The consultants thought the bypass around the west side of San Jose was a non-starter. Although the SP had owned the land for twenty years, suburbia now surrounded the right of way, and the neighbors were unlikely to want trains coming through their nice neighborhood. (Two years later, the Willow Glen neighborhood incorporated as a city, primarily to block the Southern Pacific from coming through. They merged back into San Jose once the SP bypass was built to their east, avoiding the neighborhood.) The consultants also noted it was going to be pricey to raise the tracks around the Alameda and through Willow Glen, build bridges at the Alameda and San Carlos, and fight the neighbors. “It is therefore recommended that this plan be definitively abandoned.”

Plan B was their favorite - they assumed that the then-current mainline north of downtown and down Fourth Street could be raised 15 feet in the air, and the city streets in the vicinity could be dropped four feet. More importantly, they only suggest raising the through tracks to Los Angeles - the station would remain at ground level (though it would be “replaced by an efficient and modern station”), and San Francisco commute trains would continue to stop at ground level. This plan seems to assume the College Park yard must be decommissioned, for there would be no way for a train leaving the yard to reach the ramp to the elevated structure. They still note that “freight and passenger terminal reconstruction will be quite expensive as will also the elevated line of open type design” - an interesting admission when they discounted the bypass around Willow Glen because of the cost of routing and elevating the tracks there.

To my eye, they’re being awfully optimistic about the plan:

“The principal advantages of plan B are as follows: (1) Property values along Fourth Street will not be depressed but should be favorably affected.” Honestly, I can’t imagine freight trains rolling by at second floor level would be pleasant, either for noise, shaking, or strange stuff dropping from the train. They also admit that “certain industries particularly in the vicinity of North First Street including in the Wye… will be unfavorably affected.” I think they’re primarily talking about the Golden Gate Packing Co on Fourth Street here - apparently, its sidings couldn’t be connected after all the work to raise the line.


The third option, Plan C, was to bypass San Jose to the west like Plan A, but avoid the challenges of forcing a new route through the Willow Glen suburbs. Bartholomew proposed having the SP move the main line to the former South Pacific line, build a new station at today’s Diridon Station, and build the necessary overpasses and underpasses along the way. When the tracks passed by the Western Pacific crossing, though, the mainline would follow the WP line through the Willow Glen neighborhood and onto open country. The consultants suggested that a jointly operated double track line could be created, or the SP could just parallel the WP immediately to the south. They claimed this approach would remove all the tracks on Fourth Street, “no important industries would be affected”, “no additional interlocking plants would be required with the WP.”, and a joint line would allow for a more convenient place for the railroads to exchange cars. They also admit that moving the SP’s passenger depot away from downtown is a drawback, “passengers will be carried through an industrial area largely and will not get a satisfactory impression of the city as a whole”, and requires acquiring a different set of land through Willow Glen.

Paralleling the WP might not be as easy. From modern eyes, the WP’s line through Willow Glen seems to weave its own way through suburbia on a narrow right of way. I’d imagine the neighbors would have complained just as loudly as they had to the SP’s bypass proposal. The consultants proposed a joint line with the WP, or at least a parallel line, and do note that these would be much more unsafe than the existing situation if the line continued to have street level grade crossings - drivers and pedestrians were too likely to start moving when one train passed, not realizing another was coming on the parallel track.

Plan D appeared to be a bonus proposal, provided mostly as an afterthought. Although they noted the SP could go around the east side of San Jose, they noted that the railroad would need to push a right-of-way through many blocks of existing neighborhoods, increasing the cost and the outcry.

How’d the Consultants Do?

All joking aside, I really love this document. Not only does it propose an alternate San Jose that I would never have imagined myself, but it also provides so many details that are helpful for my model railroad based on the real railroads they examined. I appreciate their fact gathering about the activity in San Jose: the number of trains and cars switched, the work done at the freight house and passenger depot, the switching practices, and the informal names for pieces of track. I can’t imagine anywhere else I might have learned that the tracks near the Del Monte cannery were referred to as the “South Yard”.

I love the document, but that doesn’t mean I love that alternate San Jose they propose. I don’t know how serious this plan was, but the elevated tracks through flat San Jose doesn’t match my image of California - elevated structures like this definitely sound like something we’d find “back east”, not here. However, the fact that someone proposed this definitely highlights that this could have happened, and I could imagine someone building an interesting “what-if” layout with freight trains flying by downtown San Jose at treetop level. If I were into modeling plausible railroads, it might be interesting to build a major mainline through downtown San Jose on an elevated structure. However, I suspect it would look awkward and out-of-place. If we’re building a plausible layout, that also means we want to avoid the stuff that might be accurate but that doesn’t match our viewers’ expectations much. Just because some fancy east coast consultants thought it’s possible doesn’t mean my next guest to see the model would think so.

I’m also not sure it would be a fun model railroad. The operational challenges - the long climb paralleling existing tracks, the new two level station at Market Street, the curve onto Fourth Street - make me wonder whether it would be good or bad as a model railroad - the elevated and ground level tracks seem like they’d remove some of the complexity and action we’d like in a model railroad.

The whole plan, though, highlights how strange the real world is, and how folks might have suggested plans for our hometown that might seem surprising or improbable to our eyes. Apparently, someone in City Hall or the Chamber of Commerce didn’t think it was so strange, and was willing to cut Mr. Bartholomew a large check to “think outside the box” and consider freight trains in the sky.

Bartholomew didn’t just try to rebuild San Jose’s railroads - urban planning was his business, and he did similar reports for many big cities from the 1920’s through the 1950’s. The archives of his company, Harland Bartholomew and Associates, are in Washington University’s library in St. Louis, and a listing of just some of their records show how broadly he consulted - the list shows Alameda, Oakland, San Francisco, Berkeley, and San Jose all having reports done, as well as many more cities across the U.S. If I had a couple days free in St. Louis, I’d likely stop by and check out Bartholomew’s other plans. I suspect I’ll find a bunch of “just put the freight trains on an elevated structure” ideas.

We’ve got a lot of choice when we’re building a model railroad - whether we’re building something imaginary, plausible, or historically accurate. I’ve always aimed to model real locations and times because I think I’ll create a more believable scene than I would have if I either had to imagine a place from whole cloth, or where I wasn’t doing research on what a real place was like. The Bartholomew report on San Jose shows highlights both how strange and unpredictable the real world might be, as well as the outlandish ideas that might have been seriously considered in the real world and might be reasonable choices for a plausible layout. Either way, searching through archives and building up knowledge can be a great boon for real or plausible layouts… even if it’ll tell us we ought to put freight trains in the sky.

Image generated by gemini.google.com, which refused to put a Daylight locomotive on the elevated structure regardless of how easy that would be.

Movie Night XXVIII: Things You Ought to Know About San Jose

History San Jose has apparently been busy. Their History San Jose channel on YouTube has a bunch of new videos and interviews. They also have a pair of promotional videos from the 'teens and twenties, one focused on San Jose and the other on Santa Clara County, both in the same YouTube movie. The first half - the Santa Clara County half - is the more interesting one, showing both the operations at the George Hyde packing house and cannery in Campbell, and an apricot plant pit which I suspect is >Sewall Brown's plant at Vasona. The George Hyde videos start around 11:50, there's a scene showing loading a sulfur house around 17:00. Processing apricot pits starts at 18:00. There's two men shoveling pits from a huge pile, which might explain why the Sewall Brown fire in 1958

At some point, I'm going to have to build that office at the Hyde Cannery; having the video, with the horse-drawn wagons crossing in front of, should be a great starting point.

Movie Night XXI: Drying Apricots at the Basuni Ranch

Just so we remember what summer's like, here's a great video from the Basuni family showing the work involved with drying apricots. Thank the California Pioneers of Santa Clara County for the work digitizing this and other videos!

The "Big Little Boss": Jennie Besana

Back in 1919, San Jose Evening News columnist Edith Daley spent a good part of her summer visiting the local canneries. In each, she pulled out her notebook and wrote a few facts on production, poetically described the magic she saw, and had kind words for the office staff that explained the business to her. When she visited the Contadina cannery on Race Street at Moorpark, she wrote:

F. Aiello is the owner and manager, but the office has a real “boss” in little Miss J. Besana. The way she juggles conversation about tomatoes and cans and hauling and open contracts and closed contracts is a joy! She has been with the Contadina since its opening and is a very valuable “office force.” She knows the machinery from scales to boiler, from copper coils in the big tomato puree cooker to the last can!
It is quite easy to get mixed up and call this clever secretary “the big little boss!”

("Contadina Co. Packs Many Love Apples": August 11, 1919 San Jose Evening News)

J. Besana was more than a secretary; she was a bookkeeper for the cannery, who managed the paperwork and sorted out the contracts with the growers. If you needed a reminder of how life in a cannery was awfully similar to life in a Silicon Valley startup, you only need to look at the "big little boss". Jennie Besana was just twenty-two years old at the time Edith met her, and she was already a seasoned bookkeeper who had worked for the local trolley line and a doctor in San Jose before keeping the books at Contadina. Even as she was living at home with parents, she was still holding a responsible position in the edgy and zany canning industry, which was probably as close as you can get in those days to working at Facebook or Yahoo.

Genevieve Besana was born in Novara, Italy, west of Milan. Her parents immigrated to the U.S. In 1898 when Jennie was two years old. She grew on Bishop Street, just off of Julian St. near the Alameda. (It’s now the stub end of North Morrison.) Her father, a laborer, worked at the Pratt-Low cannery in Santa Clara. Her brother, Melchior, pretty quickly went by the more American “Mickey”, and Genevieve always used her more informal “Jennie”.

Jennie went to school at St. Josephs (which I assume was associated with St. Joseph’s Basilica in downtown San Jose). Her walk to school would have taken her past Anderson Barngrover where they built all the machinery for the modern canneries. In 1915, she was in the school play as “Cora Brown, a spoiled child” in “The Rebellion of Mrs Barclay”. “Miss Besana is particularly pleasing in the scheme where she endeavors to assist Mr. Barclay in getting dinner, and succeeds only in making him go back on his principle that ___”. (That’s not my omission, but the reviewer trying not to spoil the ending. Go read one of the online copies to see how it ends.)

After high school, Jenny Besana worked as a bookkeeper, first at the Peninsular Interurban offices, then at a local doctor’s. All the while, she was living at home with her parents on Bishop St.

And some time around 1917, she heard about the new cannery being built by Italians from Back East, and joined in on the wild ride that was the tomato canning business in 1917. She worked at Contadina from its opening until the mid-1920’s, then walked across the street to the U.S. Products cannery for a similar job there.

In 1924, Jennie married Frank Maral. Frank was first-generation Portuguese; his father had bought a ranch out on White Road around 1900. Frank didn’t go into the orchard business, but was instead a millman at the Pacific Manufacturing Company in Santa Clara, and a charter member of the Alum Rock Athletic Club. Jennie and Frank moved into Frank’s house at 573 University Ave., currently located right in the middle of the Bellarmine campus.

In 1927, Jennie and Frank bought their own part of land, swapping the house for 5 acres on Blaney Ave. in Cupertino from Joseph D. Blabon. Blabon was a Cupertino rancher who had owned four hundred acres on the west side of the valley; the land he sold to Frank and Jennie had been bought from Ferdinand Blassey in 1905. Blabon still held significant acreage in prunes; a few years later in 1936, his hired help went on a rampage over low wages, “smashing windows and pulling fruit from trees”. (August 29, 1936 San Jose Mercury Herald, via Cecilia M. Tsu, “Garden of the World: Asian Immigrants and the Making of Agriculture in California”)

Frank and Jennie took a couple years to move (and perhaps to build a house), but by 1930, they were living out in the wilds of Cupertino. Jennie would have had an easy commute; just a quick walk up to Stevens Creek Road, and she could catch the interurban train all the way to Race Street.

I’d like to be able to say I’d heard more about Jennie from her grandchildren, but I can’t. She died in January 1935 at 37 years old; a cold or flu appears to have badly affected her heart thanks to a previous case of rheumatic fever. Before she died, she made Frank promise not to remarry. There were no kids. I couldn't even find a gravestone at the Santa Clara Mission Cemetery for Jennie.

January 12, 1935 San Jose Evening News: MARAL - In San Jose, Calif., January 11, 1935, Jennie Maral, beloved wife of Frank T. Maral, loving daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Besana of San Jose, sister of Melchior Besana of Cupertino and Mrs. Frances Isbeli of Berkeley Calif: daughter-in-law of Mrs. Agnes Maral of San Jose; a native of Novara, Italy, aged 36 years, 4 months, and 3 days. Funeral on Monday, January 14, 1935, at 9 a.m. thence to Holy Family Church, River and San Fernando Streets, where a requiem mass will be celebrated for the repose of her soul commencing at 9:30 a.m. thence to Santa Clara Catholic Cemetery.

Holy Family Church, at River St. and San Fernando, was a symbolic place for her funeral mass, for the church had been formed explicitly to serve the Italian immigrants of San Jose. Jennie probably attended the church as a child, and was married in that church as well. The church on River Street only lasted into the 1960's when it was torn down as part of urban renewal. The church re-formed on Pearl Ave. in South San Jose.

Frank continued to live on the property well into the 1960’s. He shared the house with his mother; his brother, Antone, lived in an apartment built into the former tank house with his wife Virginia - a small living room and kitchen on the ground floor, and bedroom above. The family raised turkeys on the ranch. In the late 50’s, Frank and Antone got out of the bird business, sold the ranch, and moved to a small adobe-style house on Stevens Creek Road. When the family moved out of that house in the 1960’s and into a modern tract house off of Wolfe, their old house became Cupertino’s Adobe Inn restaurant.

Frank lived on until 1969, and, true to his word, never remarried. He worked his entire career at Pacific Manufacturing, and lived his life in Cupertino. Frank’s relatives do remember that he was married to an Italian girl. The story of the dying wife demanding such a large promise did get passed down, but they’d forgotten that italian girl had been the “big little boss” of Contadina.

Now, Jennie wasn’t unique; my own grandmother kept the books for a vegetable packer in Hayward during the 1920’s. Like Jennie, my grandmother did the overall books, but she also handled the paperwork for outbound cars of peas with the railroad. One of the mementos my grandmother saved was her “cheat sheet” for car routing: cars for the Carbone Brothers in New York City went via the Western Pacific, Union Pacific, Chicago Burlington and Quincy, and finally Pennsylvania railroads. (Although the railroads could choose routings, shippers would often do it either for the control or to reward particular railroad salesmen.) She must have gotten a good grounding in railroad rates as well. When my dad started dating my mom, my grandmother was impressed enough by his background as a railroad rate clerk that she ignored the fact that he wasn’t Portuguese.

There’s lots of other stories about the paperwork in the offices of canneries being shuffled primarily by women who needed to understand the business, law, and human nature enough to deal with an irate farmer complaining about the prices on his contract. Other cannery visits by Edith Daley introduced Gertrude Carter as running the back office at Pyle Cannery (“Miss Carter finds this a unique season for the reason that the fruit is running almost too largely to high grade stuff. The pack is practically sold before it is canned, and this year the difficulty is in getting enough low grade fruit to fill orders.”) Filipina de Rosa and Mary Cribari were active at Bisceglia Brothers in 1919, though they had the advantage that they were also the owners. Tillie Lewis, in Stockton in the 1930’s, had the same benefit.

Edith’s articles came just after the end of World War I. The canning business had been going great guns ever since the World War started, creating both a demand for canned goods for the countries at war, and cutting off competing products from Europe. The U.S.’s entry into the war pulled men away from the cannery jobs. Edith Daley was seeing a world where women were not just working on the lines preparing fruit, but also running the canning machines at Alba Canning, and actually making the cans on the dangerous production lines at American Can. (“We haven’t lost any fingers this season.”) Edith probably had an easier time negotiating for her own by-line and column when men such as the Jack Wright, the future manager of the Evening News, was sent off to France. (Jack also wrote several “slightly fictional” columns about his wartime experience under the title "Private Prune’s Diary", which are worth a read.)

But in spite of the men being gone, all that probably didn’t mean that Jennie was going to be allowed to run the place. There were women in management at canneries. Clara Cribari could do it, but she owned Bisceglia Brothers. For other women there was a very firm glass ceiling: the women could do clerical work (and clerical in this case means both secretarial work and handling records - bookkeeping, filing, etc), but no more. I suspect management or customer-facing jobs were right out. Edith Daley’s article came at a time when the reader might have imagined times were changing… but weren’t going to change just then.

And even those clerical jobs weren’t particularly secure. Some companies wouldn’t hire married women at all, and would fire a woman who did marry. Jennie Besana’s affiliation change from Contadina’s bookkeeper to U.S. Products’ secretary happened at the same time that she took her married name.

On the other hand, if a war broke out and there weren’t men to hire, then why not hire sharp women? Twenty years later, during World War II, the June 27, 1945 San Jose News included the advertisement:

BOOKKEEPER, man or woman, for one of our clients in Gilroy, Calif. Must be competent and experienced. Steady, all-year employment. Five day week, salary $225 per month. Write giving full particulars. GIULI & GIULI, Public Accountants, Morgan Hill, Calif.

The same issue had Santa Clara Packing Co. looking for a bookkeeper as well. Jennie would have been a prime catch for either cannery.

---

Great thanks to Frank Maral's niece, Bonnie, for stories about the Maral family and for the stories she did have about Jennie Besana Maral. The review of "Miss Jennie Besana, "Spoiled Child" in Comedy, St. Joseph" appeared in the May 25, 1915 San Jose Mercury Herald.

The Tomato Paste Land Rush

When you search on canneries in San Jose, you'll find a sudden explosion in tomato canning starting around 1915, and lasting well into 1918 or 1919.  One cause was all the new Italian immigrants who considered tomatoes and tomato products to be essential for their dinner tables.  In previous years, those immigrants had been buying imported tomatoes from the old country, but World War I made those harder to get.

Actually, there's a fair amount more to the story, not only in terms of what happened to the imported tomatoes, but also in terms of what the American producers had to do in order to take that market. How those different canners attacked the the Great Tomato Paste Land Rush doesn’t sound that unlike things today in the Internet era.

The actual details come, of course, from a court case. (Scroll a third of the way through the PDF to hit the story of Pastene vs. Greco)  And it's a good one too - full of drama, and direct quotes, with a cast of canners stepping on the witness stand to support one side or another, horror stories from the engineer trying to make experimental machinery work, and arguments over a farmer’s size estimates for the “tomato crop that got away”.

Greco Canning Co. Ad from October 1921 Western Canner and Packer

Our two main characters are Victor Greco and P. Pastene of New York.  Greco was the Elon Musk of the Valley of Heart's Delight, continually was coming up with new ideas for products to can, and experimenting with the machines needed to make these.   In 1916, three years after he started the cannery, Greco figured out that he could make a fortune if he could figure out how to make tomato paste. Pastene was an east coast wholesaler looking desperately for a source of tomato paste.  And just like Silicon Valley, these two men ended up in court because sometimes plans don't go the way you want.

It's 1915; World War I is raging, and Austria and Italy are fighting toe-to-toe in the Alps.  In 1916, Italy realizes that food for its people is scarce, and places export restrictions on canned tomatoes.  France does the same. The U.S., with a huge Italian immigrant population (three million Italian immigrants arrived between 1900 and 1915), is now desperate for tomato paste. Prices double and triple to 10 cents a can, much more than the average immigrant can pay.

But Santa Clara Valley canners were already good at growing and canning tomatoes, and how hard could it be to evaporate a bit more water?  Victor Greco decides to see if he can make tomato paste; with a bit of work on the stovetop, he sees that the process of evaporating away the water is easy.

Greco and Pastene start trading letters in January, 1916, with Greco noting:

"Regarding Naples Tomato Sauce packed in small 6 oz. tins, in view of the present conditions in Europe which makes it almost impossible to receive any of this commodity from said country, we are contemplating to pack about 60,000 cases of the article above mentioned which will be sold as a substitute of the Imported.
As we are Italian and know what the Italian people must have and being very familiar with the method of manufacturing this article, you can rest assured it will be the equal of that imported from Italy..."
"P.S. We are located in the heart of the Santa Clara Valley where some of the finest tomatoes in the world are grown."

Pastene, on a visit to the West Coast in April, 1916, hears about the great plan, and signs a contract for 3,000 cases.

So now Greco Canning needs to scale up on the tomato paste project. Victor Greco goes to San Francisco, bringing drawings of the evaporators used by the finest canners in Naples. Greco convinces the Oscar Krenz Manufacturing Company, normally active in coppersmithing, to make some vacuum pan evaporators in the the Neapolitan style - no one else had tried making such equipment before in the U.S. Greco installs it in his cannery and gets to work making tomato paste, with engineers from Krenz helping get the machinery running smoothly.

But there’s risk here: there’s the usual questions about getting sufficient fruit, but Greco is also trying novel machinery to cook the tomato paste, a process that hasn't been tested at scale, smaller 6 oz cans to match the Italian style, and is even trying fiberboard boxes (instead of the traditional wooden boxes) to save weight. That’s very Silicon Valley - it’s a new product and a bit risky, but Greco thinks he can pull it off.

And they hit snags. Greco had chosen the vacuum pan approach (boiling the tomatoes at a lower temperature in a partial vacuum) because it concentrated the tomato flavor better with less heat. The Italians used to cook down tomato sauce in an open pot, but the better Italian canners have rejected that approach for the vacuum pan. Greco's variant on the machinery is a 750 gallon cooking vessel eight feet tall with one inch tubes to circulate the stuff being evaporated near the heat. Unfortunately, the prototype's narrow tubes - appropriate for reducing sugar solutions - are too small for the thick tomato pastes. The tomatoes keep sticking into the tubes and burning, forcing the repair crew to shut down the process and clean out the entire machine. Sometimes they need to use electric drills to remove the hardened paste, and once it took them five days to get the machinery back into action.

It didn’t help that it was a bad year for tomatoes. Late frosts in May killed off some seedlings, and early rains in October and November ruined the crops. The normally ten week season was a month shorter than usual, with many tomatoes failing to ripen. William Greer, farming on “Mr. Kell’s place” (probably along Almaden Road) delivered 3.5 tons per acre to the cannery, but six times that amount was left in the fields, spoiled. J. L. Mosher, a farmer and orchardist, testified to an equally bad year, delivering two tons per acre instead of 12. “I have not been in the tomato business since.”

And now there was a problem. Greco had sold 18,000 cases of tomato paste that season (down from the 60,000 case goal) for prices between $6.50 and $8.50; between the problems with the vacuum pans and lack of tomatoes, he managed 3,500. Pastene was unhappy from several angles. He didn’t get the tomato paste he’d ordered. He wasn’t happy with the quality (some of the tomato paste had a “consistency not much greater than water.”). He felt that Greco had tried out a risky project without warning him. To add insult to injury, when he did receive the tomato paste, the railroad had billed the shipment at the freight rate for tomato sauce, twice the shipping cost for catsup, canned tomatoes, and other tomato products. (Oh, the railroad tariffs were twisted in those days.)

And even with all that disappointment, Pastene closed his last letter to Greco asking about tomatoes. "We would like to treat with you for a purchase of next season's pack. What can you offer?"

When the lawsuit over the missing and substandard tomato paste made it to court in 1920, Greco testified. “It was a defect in the machinery.” The farmers came to the witness stand and lamented the horrible season where the rain and frost forced them to leave behind a good part of their crop. Several canners (including Elmer Chase for the Canner’s Assocation and Richmond Chase, R. W. Crary from the California Cooperative Canneries, and Charles E. Hume of the G. W. Hume company, defined a “short pack” and how equipment failure was a valid reason for a canner to not deliver product.

H.T. Rigg, the engineer hired away from San Jose Ice and Cold Storage to run the plant shared stories of drilling out blocked tubes and warning Greco that they weren’t going to meet deadlines:

“The first date is October 10th when I began [keeping a production diary]. That day I was delayed two hours and ten minutes on account of the pulper, that is, the machinery on the lower floor. Then we were delayed two hours cleaning the pans, No. 2 vacuum that same day. The delay of the pulper necessarily stopped the vacuum. There is a continuous feed from the pulper to the vacuum. There was a total stoppage on that day of four hours and ten minutes… And on the 11th we started at 6 a.m. in the morning and stopped at 9:20 in the evening and stopped two hours for the pulper again. Stopped another hour and 30 minutes for lunch. Then we stopped again to clean No. 2 vacuum pan. This was on the 11th. On the 12th No. 1 pan stopped 23 hours for cleaning. This 23 hours carried us into the night. We worked during the night cleaning the pans. Mr. Greco was there off and on around where I was working. I cleaned it out by using an electric drill. The product had so caked and burned inside of the tubes that it had to be drilled out by an electric drill…”

That went on for days: problems with the vacuum plans clogging, failures in the pulper, cans jamming in the sealer machinery. The rotary cooker broke. All-night repair sessions aren’t unique to modern-day Silicon Valley.

And just as things were working, a lack of tomatoes and nothing to work with.

For the other side, Charles Bentley, of the California Packing Corporation, declared that they’d had no problems finding tomatoes to pack in the 1916 season, and that it was truly a rare farm in the Santa Clara Valley that could manage 25 tons per acre. Charles Davis, the general manager for the California Conserving Company in Oakland, described that he’d had fine luck with the closed kettle style of tomato paste production in the 1916 season, and that he’d treated “salsa de pomidoro” as an experimental product in his first season. When the judge asked him about the Greco machinery, Davis sounded a bit mystified about why they were using such a complicated method.

Judge: “And the process involved a forcing of the material being treated through a set of tubes, instead of being boiled in pans…”
Davis: “No, that’s a new one on me.”
Judge: “Your method did not involve that?”
Davis: “No, nothing of the character.”


The lawsuit also contains many of the letters between Greco and Pastene, at first in the spring of 1916 with a an optimistic tone: "being very familiar with the method of manufacturing this article", then with Pastene hopeful in October: “We certainly trust that you will find that you have been over-conservative in making this (25% delivery) estimate. Greco responds stoically in October with what he can deliver. “Twenty per cent is about the very best that we are going to be able to fill. Regardless of this, so as to make up a minimum car[load] we have shipped you 665 cases for which enclosed find copy of invoice…. we are now planning for a new arrangement for next season and will install a different system of vacuum pans, and hope to be more fortunate in our pack.” And finally anger from Pastene in December 1916: “This is not a fair deal and one unworthy of yourselves and unjust to us who trusted you, and were one of the first to sign your order.”

Victor Greco’s 1916 dash into the tomato paste market may have ended awkwardly, but he managed to fix the line in future years. Halfway through the 1917 season, he junked the old vacuum pans and tried a new design that clogged much less often. Two years later, at the beginning of the 1919 season, Edith Daley visited Greco Canning. Toma-Butter Soon To Appear on Every Table”, the piece started, as Edith explained how Victor Greco would introduce tomato paste to the American home. She also hinted at the complexity of the machinery:




The “heart” of this equipment is a 500 horse power boiler, 55 feet high and containing 200 four inch tubes each 24 feet long. This tremendous energy producer is exhibited with pride by Mr. V. V. Greco who tells you that it is the “Biggest boiler on the Pacific Coast”. This leviathan of boilerdom is manufactured by the Wikes Boiler Company of Saginaw, Michigan. It looks big enough to “boil” Lake Michigan, Saginaw included!… Two immense storage tanks furnish food for a battery of twelve vacuum evaporators with a capacity of 1500 gallons each.”

After all he’d been through in 1916, Greco certainly would have shown off the new machinery with pride. With twelve vacuum pans and twice the capacity each, he could produce a thousand cases of tomato paste a day, and could have filled the fateful order from Pastene with a couple days work.

But Greco probably had competition now. Even Victor's brother, Anthony, got into the act, leaving Greco Canning to start his own "Anthony Greco Cannery", producing $105,000 in tomato paste in the 1917 season. Upstarts like Contadina and Salsina Canning both started canning tomato paste in San Jose in 1917. Gus Lambrosa, one of the founders of Salsina, explained his vision to the Evening News: '“This country sends every year about seven million dollars to Italy for tomato paste, which is used in macaroni”, said Lambrosa today. “There is no reason why this money should not be kept in this country.”'

Lambrosa got his wish. Contadina was canning 150,000 cases of tomato paste a season by 1922, and Americans (immigrant and non-immigrant) got their tomato paste from California fields.

As for the lawsuit, which finally got settled in the early 1920's, I'd probably agree with the verdict: Victor Greco took a chance on moving into tomato paste, but hadn't completely worked out the process and the machines he'd need to do the job. Pastene was right to demand payment.

"During the year 1916, the peeled tomato and hot sauce departments of our canning plant were operated during the daytime while the Salsa De Pomidoro department was operating day and night. We would have made more profit out of the Salsa De Pomidoro. It was our interest to run the Salsa De Pomidoro plant at full capacity. We ran it to the fullest capacity that we possibly could. In other words, while running it, we had considerable interruptions, and, therefore, the capacity was reduced, owing to those interruptions." -- Victor Greco, from his testimony.

On the other hand, it's a very Silicon Valley story. Victor Greco's started a cannery; he's been running it for a few years, and he sees a big market opportunity. Grabbing for that - rushing to make tomato paste, and assuming that he'd work through any bugs - seems like the right choice for someone trying to make a big splash. All the other stories: toma-butter branded tomato paste, Grepo grape syrup, the Bottled Pure Juice Company making tomato and artichoke-based drinks - all suggests that Victor Greco was going to try for the big score. I think he'd fit right in to the modern Silicon Valley.

---

(P. Pastene & Co., Inc. vs Greco Canning Co, case #16076, Southern Division of U.S. District Court for Northern District of California, Second Division, August 30, 1920. We get to see all the letters and testimony thanks to Greco's appeal of the initial ruling.) Scroll about a third of the way through the PDF to find the Pastene vs. Greco material.

Previous versions of this article declared that Victor Greco had made artichoke-based drinks and ran salt ponds. We were mistaken; the crazy inventor in the family seems to have been Victor's brother Anthony, who broke away from Greco Canning to make his own tomato paste cannery, fought his brother for a string bean canning tool, and believed that the quickest way to dispose of a debt was to tear the note up and flee to Oregon.

I'm Un-Friending Burrito Justice

Normally, I'm a big fan of Burrito Justice, a San Francisco blogger who spends equal time talking about burritos, fog, Sutro Tower, Mission District happenings, and San Francisco history. His posts on the SP's route through the Mission are definitely worth a read. But then his big-city parochialism appears. In the latest article on the stringing of the first telegraph line from San Francisco to San Jose, he makes the sarcastic comment:

Another way of looking at it — the people of San Francisco were so isolated they actually got excited about talking to people IN SAN JOSE. I mean, that’s pretty isolated.

I could make a smart-ass comment about that's just the sort of comment you'd get from folks who live in fog and don't eat enough prunes, but that would just be sinking to his level.

Morgan Hill, As Seen From Shipping Receipts: Prunes, Wine, and Stove Pipes

Receipt for prunes shipped by E&J Bender from Morgan Hill to San Jose, 1896

I've had a couple articles here about how the dried apricots and prunes made it to the packing house; we learned about the San Tomas Drying Company and the trains coming down from Wrights, and we've heard about the packers having agents ready with train cars at Niles in the season. But were there other ways?

Through another EBay find, I've got some more details. Someone was selling a bundle of old shipping receipts from Morgan Hill in the 1890's; I've, of course, scanned them all and put them on Flickr. And in those receipts, we get a few answers about how orchardists got their prunes to the packers and eventually to the East Coast and Europe.

For example, E. and John Bender, local orchardists, had a pretty good season in 1896, with four loads of prunes being shipped from Morgan Hill in October. First,they shipped 456 sacks - 48,000 pounds of prunes on October 2, 1896, shipped on Central Pacific boxcar 19678 as inferred from a quick scribble. Then, 40,000 pounds of prunes on the 3rd in 600 boxes. On the fifth, 540 boxes of boxed and dried prunes for another 34,000 pounds on SP 1750. And finally, on October 7, they shipped 560 sacks of prunes - 53,500 pounds of prunes - out on SP 38626.

I didn't have an Official Railway Equipment Register to track down all these cars, but SP 38626 was a 33 foot ventilated boxcar with a 50,000 pound load limit. That car managed to survive until 1913 according to the 1913 ORER, but the rest of the cars didn't survive the additional fifteen years for us to identify.

So over four days, the Benders shipped around 200,000 pounds of prunes. That may seem like a lot, but if you poke around on the internet, you'll find that modern prune orchards can produce around 4 tons per acre. California currently averages around 2 tons of dried prunes per acre of prune orchard. With such numbers, the Benders would only have needed 50 acres worth of prunes to produce four freight cars worth of fruit.

For my grandfather's ten acres in Hayward, that means that every harvest season would produce around 40,000 pounds of apricots, and that's not including fruit dried at his yard but produced by neighbors. That would have been a lot of fruit to haul to the station in a horse-drawn wagon... and he was doing so in the 1920's.

All Bender's Morgan Hill prunes were going straight to Porter Brothers on Julian at Bassett Street, just west of the San Jose Depot. Porter Brothers was a Chicago-based wholesaler. The Binders must have been pretty happy clients of Porter Brothers, but hopefully they weren't selling fruit in 1903 when the company surprised Valley fruit men with a surprise bankruptcy.

There's occasional other details in those old receipts. The Binders also sold wine to Paul Masson in San Jose in 1896, though the receipts list them as puns. I'll leave it as a puzzle to you, the reader, to figure out what a pun is. There's also a bunch of household goods being shipped around, some to a George V. Herbert who doesn't appear to be the same as San Jose's own George N. Herbert. I'm also surprised at the number of tents and camping gear that appear in the shipping receipts; I suspect mid-September was a good time for vacationers returning from resorts like Sveadal, the Swedish society's campground in the hills.

Another cute detail are a few receipts from the Bisceglia Brothers for boxes of tomatoes - usually less than a thousand pounds - going to San Francisco and the California Canneries plant at Fourth and Townsend. The four Bisceglia brothers - Joseph, Alphonse, Bruno, and Pasquale - came to the U.S. in 1885 and, at least from the receipts, must have been farming by 1898. Like many immigrants, though, they worked their way up, starting their own cannery in Morgan Hill in 1903, and then moving the business to San Jose by 1913. The receipts not only catch them on their rise, but also highlight that the San Francisco (and probably San Jose canneries) were attracting fruit from many miles away. Importing fruit by railcar isn't that crazy an idea on my model railroad.

For my modeling, the receipts highlight just how much freight even a small depot like Morgan Hill would handle. If I ever wondered why railroad stations had such big freight depots, the idea of Bender's sacks of prunes and barrels of wine certainly explain the purpose. On my model railroad, I disregard the freight depot at Campbell, partially to avoid blocking a passing siding and partially because I didn't think there would be enough freight traffic to deserve blocking the siding with a boxcar. If I want to be able to load Bender's prunes, spotting the occasional boxcar against the depot might be worthwhile.

Check out the full set of receipts and see what you can learn about Morgan Hill at the turn of the century, and add your comments to the scans there. And if you figure out what a 'pun' is, throw your guess in the comments here.

San Jose depot train shed almost done!

As we approach the 78th anniversary of the closing of San Jose's Market Street station, I'm proud to show off the model I'd intended to build ten years ago when I started the Market Street shelf layout: the train shed. After about a year of on-again, off-again work (mostly off), the roof's on, the model's painted, and the detail trim is in place. There's still some additional detailing and paint touch-up, but it's great to see the model in place.

The completed train shed

Here's a close-up of the completed train shed. Pay no attention to the poor collapsed gardener in the foreground; he's probably suffering from alcoholism. Or cholera. Or he'd bought too many shares of Transamerica back in '28.

Movie Night XVII: The Great Flood of March 7, 1911

The folks at the Sourisseau Academy, the local historical archive at San Jose State, have been putting together videos with some of the photos and memorabilia in their collection. With the help of the videographers at WMS Media, they've put together some interesting shows. Poke through WMS Media's videos at Vimeo for the full list, or check out the Great Flood of 1911 video below. No canning content, but hopefully you got all canned out from the last few videos.

The Great Flood of March 7, 1911 - San Jose from WMS media Inc. on Vimeo.

The video's been sponsored by the folks at the Orchestria Palm Court, a early 20th century restaurant in downtown San Jose providing food and fountain drinks as well as entertainment from their collection of player pianos, coin-operated phonographs, and other early 20th century musical instruments. I'm a little disturbed by their lack of prunes and apricots, but it still looks like it's worth a stop!

Now That's A Fire!

“If you want to find a dried fruit packing house, just look for the fire.” I wrote that a few months back, and it becomes a more accurate statement each time I look. I just found another newspaper archive site, and as is usual, started off with a search on ‘“packing house” fire’, and immediately got another hundred articles to look at. Two of them were particularly cool and worth sharing; today's will be the famous Rosenberg Brothers November 1906 fire.

In 1906, Rosenberg Brothers had a dried fruit packing house on the north side of the San Jose yard along Ryland Street. Their packing house was closest to the river, with Inderridden and Warren Dried Fruit in warehouses further east along Ryland Street. That plant burned spectacularly in November 1906; I previously reported on the fire back in May, and while the San Jose Mercury's article lines up factually with the San Jose Evening News article I cited before, the Mercury's reporter did a much better job of setting the scene. Better yet, the Mercury was printing photos in their paper back in 1906.

And, oh, was it ever a fire, with the San Jose Mercury describing it as the most damaging fire in San Jose history. The fire not only destroyed Rosenberg Brothers, but threatened Inderridden’s packing house as well as all the freight cars in the yard.

Rosenberg Brothers was a block in length, three floors high, with a wooden frame and corrugated iron roof. It also had fifteen hundred tons of prunes, and two hundred fifty tons more in freight cars against the loading dock. Rosenberg didn’t own the building; it was instead owned by Mrs. J.C. Webber of Chicago, probably the heiress of the C. M. Webber and Company who formerly used the plant.

The Mercury did a great job of describing the scene:

“At 1:30 o’clock yesterday morning a switching crew on the night shift in the railroad yards saw flames in the boiler-room of the Rosenberg packing house. The engineer at once sent out the railroad fire call, four long drawn blasts, in succession. Another engine at work in the east end of the yards heard the warning whistle and repeated it. Then another took it up and further spread the alarm. Someone living across the street called the fire department by telephone…. but in the meantime the flames had spread in the long warehouse from end to end, roof to basement. It was aflame… the Rosenberg packing house was provided with an underground tank where a car load of crude oil used as fuel could be stored. There were probably 5000 gallons of oil in the tank last night.”

One of the first goals for the railroad crews was to try to rescue nearby freight cars:

"While the department was endeavoring to keep the fire from spreading to the packing house of the J. B. Inderrieden Company adjoining the Rosenberg property, a large force of railroad men were working to save the crowded yards from destruction.
Three or four switch engines and crews were called into service. The burning cars were coupled to locomotives and pulled to empty tracks where they could burn without causing further damage to neighboring cars. But in spite of all that, fourteen cars were destroyed, seven of them only until the trucks protruded from the ashes, and seven more damaged almost beyond repair..."
By six o'clock the Southern Pacific had about 100 Japanese laborers on the scene to clear away the wreckage of the cars. At that hour all that was left of the building owned and occupied by Rosenberg Brothers was a long heap of glowing prunes and ashes from the center of which, high on its brick foundation, the wreck of the boiler protruded.

I'm a bit surprised at the Japanese laborers, for I hadn't thought of Japanese immigrants as likely section hands. But the SP was hiring Japanese in those days.

The photo accompanying the article shows the skeletal boxcars clearly, along with the firewall and Inderridden warehouse visible through the smoke. The reporter was also kind enough to report on those freight cars for those of us interested in the freight cars that would make it to San Jose: one Armour refrigerator car, and thirteen boxcars, three from the Santa Fe, two from the Chicago North Western, one from the Rock Island, and the remaining eight from the “Harriman System” (aka Southern Pacific and Union Pacific). That's not too surprising a mix if the fruit was headed to Chicago, but perhaps a bit midwest-focused if the crop was going to New York.

One last discovery from this article was the dangers of prunes; I'd never thought of them as incendiary, but obviously I was just being naive:

"The fruit was processed and highly inflammable, radiant heat so intense that for hours streams of water were played constantly upon the twelve or fifteen houses on the opposite side of the street to prevent them taking fire.... Prunes burn much like soft coal full of gases, giving forth a blue blaze and holding fire for an incredibly long time. Chief Tonkin said it did practically no good to turn water on burning fruit. A cloud of steam arose, hung overhead for a time, and in a few minutes the prunes were burning as fiercely as ever."

It's a wonder we aren't heating our houses with prunes, but I'll bet the firewood lobby had something to do with it.

More SP Engineering Drawings... From the Dome of Foam!

Last year, I told you about going on eBay and buying a 170 SP engineering drawings from the 1940's, then scanning them all and putting them up on Flickr. I don't think I mentioned that I'd also bid on a couple other sets, but managed to get outbid.

Well, luckily, one of those high bidders was E.O. Gibson, Caltrain engineer, train order instructor, and owner of the Dome of Foam, one of my favorite railroad (and San Jose-related) web sites. (Haven't read the Dome of Foam yet? Go do it now! Shoo!) E.O. just scanned his set of drawings, and put them up on the web.

Dome of Foam Southern Pacific Engineering Drawings

There's some cool details for both San Jose modelers and SP fans whose interests run a bit further from the main office. For us San Jose fans, there's a great plan of the tracks around the United States Products and Contadina cannery off of Race St. The plan shows way more spurs branching off the Los Gatos branch than either the SPINS books or Sanborn maps show. There's also some nice plans of tracks near Bassett St. and Ryland St. up by the Market Street station. Another drawing hints at the location of the Drew Canning Company, formerly in the Ainsley cannery, now off of Lafayette Street in Santa Clara.

Going further afield shows additional cool drawings, such as a great sketch of the buildings at the Surf depot near Lompoc, and another showing all the packing houses along the tracks in Winters.

Go check both sets out and see what bits of history you discover. If you check out my Flickr set of drawings, add comments right on the pictures; if you see something interesting on the Dome of Foam drawings, drop a note to E.O. with your discovery!

Question TimeAnd here's a question for all you smart folks out there: why would SP build a switchman's shanty and bathroom off at Race Street and Moorpark in San Jose, when they're so close to Cahill St. Station?

[Drawing of Race Street switchman's shanty and toilet from the Southern Pacific Coast / Western Divisions Engineering Drawings on wx4.org / the Dome of Foam. Great thanks to E.O. for sharing them!]

Making Money the Old-Fashioned Way: Selling Nice Things

Reading through the perils of cannery owners, sometimes it looks like the typical canner was behaving a lot more like a Silicon Valley startup. Production volume was the big goal, margins didn't seem so great, competition was tough, and the cost of raw materials went all over the place. Sometimes, it looked like their model was that oh-so-modern "I'll lose money on every product, but I'll make it up in volume!" I didn't hear about any canneries actively giving away product, but I may not have been looking in the right magazines.

But then you come across Elton Shaw's Shaw Family Cannery, and you find out that some of the canneries focused on making a beautiful product, and seemed to do okay. Even better, their story includes the drama of the lone entrepreneur, and the multi-national that bought them, and the sale to another mega-corporation, and that scrappy entrepreneur buying the company back to make fruit by-products the way he thought it should be done.

The Shaw Family Cannery was special because they didn't just do canned fruit - they also were a maker of fine jam. As Edith Daley breathlessly described during her visit in August, 1919 (quoted in the August 5, 1919 San Jose Evening News):

"From the ripening of the first cherry until the last ruddy apple turns into deliciously old-fashioned "back-east" apple butter, this place of "fine jams and preserves" offers a diversified program with every act a top-liner. Jellies of all fruit flavors and attractive colors; jam that makes you hungry for hot biscuit-and jam; preserves that you can "see through" they are so clear; orange marmalade; apricot marmalade; spiced peaches and pears, and apricots. Melba pack means only three or four perfect peaches or pears in each glass jar."

Edith wasn't the only fan; the March 1915 Coffee and Tea Industries and the Flavor Fields Magazine also thought highly of their fruit:

The Hyde-Shaw Co., under the able direction of Mr. Shaw, has attained a foremost position among canning plants, specializing in putting fruits into attractive glass packages. Hyde-Shaw goods, grown and packed in the wonderful Santa Clara Valley, have been sold largely under private labels. The Hyde-Shaw pack is hand-peeled and comprises the full list of California fruits, in a wide variety of preserved and packed forms; is double German-processed, and presents a most attractive appearance in the sanitary glass jars."

The Cannery History: The cannery started off as the Hyde-Shaw cannery in 1907, run by William H. Hyde, Jr. (unrelated to the Campbell Hydes) and Elton Randall Shaw. Elton was either an extremely interesting character, or else there were a lot of kids with his name running around California. There's signs in old census and voting records that he was a farmer in Berryessa in 1884; a miner in Enterprise, Butte County, in 1896; an engineer for the "Electric Laundry" in San Francisco in 1899; and the sales manager for the Economy Jar Company before 1907.

I've found less on Hyde; he was born in California in 1865; his father was a former 49'er, house mover, and contractor who appeared to have been quite successful. Hyde himself turns up as a clerk and bookkeeper at different points in his life; through 1903, all our sightings of him are in San Francisco; then, in 1907, he turns up as half of the Hyde-Shaw company and living in beautiful San Jose. That "just jump to conclusions!" part of me immediately guesses that he came to The Valley Of Heart's Delight as a San Francisco earthquake refugee, who then moseyed on back up to Berkeley once he cashed out.

First Independent, Then Bought By the Hawaiians: Around 1907, Mr. Shaw teamed up with Mr. Hyde and formed Hyde-Shaw to can fruit in attractive glass jars. And then, of course, as you might expect in the Santa Clara Valley, they got an offer they couldn't refuse, as the Hawaiian Pineapple Company wanted a way to sell their pineapple juice on the mainland, and a local canner seemed like just the ticket. The May 30, 1910 Hawaiian Star notes that as part of the new company direction (led by the company's president, James D. Dole), they were buying the entire Hyde-Shaw Company, and bringing Mr. Shaw on staff. Hyde, instead got a handy $15,000 and a handshake for his half of the company, and moseyed back up to spend the rest of his days in Berkeley, sometimes being less entrepreneurial as he did bookkeeping for a bank and similar jobs, but at least he'd grabbed for his gold ring.

Bought By the Delawareans: Dole's plan was to let Hyde-Shaw run for a couple years in its current configuration, then start working on the pineapple juice business with Shaw's help. But it wasn't to be; after five years, Hyde-Shaw was sold again, this time to Richardson and Robbins, a Delaware-based canner looking for a west coast connection and a source for fancy California fruit. The March 13, 1915 California Fruit News notes that Shaw will direct both the San Jose plant and Richardson and Robbins's existing Dover, Delaware plant, where he'd be continuing their production of canned plum pudding, boned chicken, and Delware peaches and pears. Richardson and Robbins, like Dole, had grand plans to extend the business in the future.

Buying His Own Company Back: And in a very Silicon Valley, dot-com story, Richardson and Robbins didn't keep their purchase long, but sold the company back to Elton Shaw in 1918, where the founder would be able to run the company right. And he did that, as Edith's full article explains. "This is no affair of the preserving kettle and a long-handled spoon! No heart here skips a beat for fear the bubbling stuff won't "jell". They never have to set it on the windowsill in the sun and pray over it! In most families, jam and jelly are a gamble. With the Shaw Family incorporated, Fourth and Virginia streets, it is a Science." Edith also notes that Shaw Family fruit is of such great quality that it's served on Pennsylvania and New York Central dining cars. She also waxes rhapsodic on the orange marmalade processing, and the beautiful views from the third floor of the plant.

But nothing goes forever, whether in dot-com land or in the jam business, and neither did the Shaw Family Cannery. In 1928, a large fire destroyed their warehouse and product. To recapitalize, Elton went, hat in hand, to the people of San Jose, and offered shares in the company to help them rebuild; the offering appeared in a full-page ad in the October 30, 1928 San Jose Evening News. The money-raising must have worked, for the cannery continued to turn up in city directories until 1940, with the last entry listing the company as "fruit juice makers", with A.G. Moore president, A.A. Hapgood, vice-president, and E.S. Shaw as secretary and manager. An old issue of the Almaden Resident from 2005 hints that Elton Shaw was running a cannery out at his ranch on McKean Road in the Almaden Valley, which may hint that Elton continued to moonlight in the cannery business.

Dole, of course, ended up back on that corner years later when they bought the Barron-Gray cannery across the street from Hyde-Shaw, and ensured that their pineapple would be filling America's fruit salad bowls.

[Shaw's Fine Jams ad from a December 10, 1920 San Jose Evening News. Building layout from a 1915 Sanborn map, showing the Shaw Family Cannery on the west side of Fourth at Virginia. Note Sunsweet #17 (former O.A. Harlan packing house) one block up at Martha.]

"Packing Houses of Santa Clara County": Encyclopedia of Prune-related Knowledge

Genealogists have it easy. When you're trying to track down a person, their name is your key; their government records, and brushes with fame in the newspaper all appear with their name attached, so searches are often easy.

When I've been trying to track down the businesses along the railroad tracks in San Jose, it hasn't been as easy. Companies might have leased buildings or land, leaving little trace in permanent records. No single source exists to tell when a business was operating at a given location. Heck, there's often little to tell what that business did, or when it ceased to operate, or when they sold out to the big corporation.

As I've been researching San Jose canneries and dried fruit packing houses, I've been keeping my own notes, either as articles in this blog (such as the article on the occupants of the warehouses around the Market Street depot), in a big online document thanks to Google Docs, or on scraps of paper. None are perfect for searching or sharing.

Luckily, there's other ways to share that data.

I've put my San Jose cannery and packing house notes together into a website called:

Packing Houses of Santa Clara County
It's also a Wiki, so you're also welcome to help out - adding information about new industries, correcting mistakes in the data, or just reading about all the businesses that have existed along Bassett Street next to the old Market Street depot, or businesses related to the Salsina Canning Company on Lincoln Ave, or the capsule biography of Edith Daley, the canner's favorite newspaper woman. There are entries for 160 local industries so far, with addresses, owners, and history for each. I suspect I'm still missing many memorable businesses and interesting stories.

Many of the canneries and dried fruit packers of the Santa Clara Valley were also active in other parts of the state, so there's also information on Hunt Brothers in Santa Rosa, or the list of packers in Fresno. Feel free to add information on canneries and packing houses in your favorite part of California as well.

I'm hoping this data will be useful to others, and that you all can help fill your particular canning- or San Jose-related knowledge. I'll continue to post interesting stories here; Packing Houses of Santa Clara County will be the place to find the stories I haven't written about, or find links to further information. Check it out, and let me know what you think!

Note to Self: Never Ask A Canner His Age

Here's another wonderful article by the Queen of Letters for the Evening News, Edith Daley, as she uses up the paper's supply of exclamation points again.

The cynics reading this July 14, 1919 San Jose Evening News article back in the day probably sneered at the puff-piece journalism, but if we wondered what these places - and people - were like, Edith Daley tells us more than any other source.

Chase Plant Magnificent Says E. Daley
"How long have I been engaged in the fruit canning industry? Must I tell that?" asked E. E. Chase with a smile. "That is almost as bad as asking a woman to tell her age! " However, he did tell - that he came to the Golden Gate Packing company [4th Street between Julian and Washington] when he was a youngster, more than 40 years ago. "I was just a roustabout", he explained, with a reminiscent smile. Forty years of honest effort - rarely successful effort - of untiring zeal and irreproachable methods! E.N. Richmond adds to that his more than twenty years of like integrity and ability in the dried fruit industry, and together these successful business men blend experience and strong personalities into the "dream come true" that lies back of the gold-lettered sign.

"Elmer and Ed. We heard them call each other that. It was refreshing in the midst of a business camouflage of dignity that often seems afraid of upsetting! It visioned business as a great game that men play with much the same zeal with which they play ball on the corner lot or flew kites in their knee-trouser days."

Read the full article for details about the cannery on Stockton Street and the former Castle Brothers plant on Montgomery. Mr. Chase, who took particular interest in the cannery, notes that the plans for the new building took a back seat to keeping the trees along the Stockton St. side. The SP drawing for the Richmond-Chase spur, or a group photo of workers at the Stockton Ave plant for some ideas about the trees they were unwilling to cut down. Also check out the stock cars bringing fruit to the plant one busy year.

[Employee photo from the San Jose State University special collections, as part of a photo album of Richmond Chase memories.]

Danger Stalks the Railroad Tracks

Going through old newspapers definitely gives you an idea about what the dangers of the time were. The 1930's Campbell newspapers were filled with harrowing stories of car crashes and cars getting hit by trains. When I was searching the 1903 Evening News articles for any mention of a fire at A. & C. Ham Packing, there were lots of stories of injuries, deaths, and near-deaths from spooked horses and trains. Needless to say, I was a bit more interested in the train stories, and was surprised how many stories were about injuries or near-injuries to the workers in the railroad yards.

The breathless "locomotive kills railroad worker" stories, apart from hinting at the danger of railroading at the turn of the century, are also interesting for hints about how trains operated back then.

Narrow Gauge and Standard Gauge Train Nearly Collide in Los Gatos For example, the Monday, June 22, 1903 San Jose Evening News mentions a near-collision between a broad-gauge and narrow-gauge train. In this case, a standard-gauge train coming from the picnic grounds at Sunset Park (high up in Los Gatos Canyon beyond the summit tunnel at Wrights) left Los Gatos headed downhill at the same time that the narrow-gauge train to Santa Cruz left Campbell. Luckily, the two trains saw each other and were able to stop before colliding.

Part of the problem might have been the recent completion of the standard gauge track to Wrights - that is, taking the existing narrow gauge tracks with rails three feet apart, and adding an additional rail 56.5 inches away so both narrow and standard gauge trains could use the tracks. The April 14, 1903 Evening News had reported two months before that the conversion was almost complete to Wrights. It had been a substantial job - widening cuts, strengthening bridges, and daylighting a tunnel in Los Gatos Canyon two miles above Los Gatos. The crews were probably still getting used to the idea of checking both the standard and narrow gauge timetables for conflicting trains.

Standard-gauging the whole railroad from San Jose to Santa Cruz would take a few more years; the cutover was planned for April 18, 1906, but the Great San Francisco Earthquake destroyed the summit tunnel and delayed standard gauging for another three years.

Track Worker Falls Under Train, Killed Later that same evening, a track worker fell underneath railroad cars at Campbell when the car he was sitting on was recoupled to the train. Nicola Caravello was a new immigrant from Italy who'd only been in the United States for two years. Caravello's death made it to the front page, and because of the local interest was featured high on the front page, well above an update on Saturday's wreck in Marin County at Point Reyes Station on the North Shore / North Pacific Coast railroad. That wreck, which one of the books on the North Pacific Coast, labels the worst accident on the road, injured 29 and killed two when a funeral train going too fast left the tracks on a sharp curve.

One possible reason for the gravel train might have been for work on the San Francisco-San Jose main line. A May 22, 1903 Evening News article notes that progress on double-tracking the San Francisco to San Jose main line is going well:

Five gravel trains now play between here [San Jose] and Palo Alto with ballast for the double track which is fast approaching San Jose. Men are being constantly added to the gangs and the work of completion is being rushed.

The gravel pits along Los Gatos Creek south of San Jose would have been a good source of gravel for the new line, and Caravello's death would fit with lots of new employees and rushed work.

Commute Train Engine Falls Over at Narrow Gauge Depot The May 22, 1903 Evening News reported on the Friday afternoon San Francisco to Los Gatos passenger train's locomotive derailing and falling over on its side. The rather embarrassing accident occurred just as the train reached the old narrow gauge station where Diridon station now sits. It was also a very public and visible wreck, entertaining hundreds of witnesses at the station and on nearby streets. A rider on the Santa Clara St. streetcar reported:

Our car had just stopped at the crossing [on the Alameda] to allow the Los Gatos train to pass. It was nearly half past one when the train pulled into view around the bend from San Francisco. Just as the engine pulled past the ice plant [at Julian St., one block up] within plain sight of where we were standing it jumped the track and commenced bumping along the ties in a cloud of dust and debris. After running a short distance the engine toppled slowly over on its side burrowing its nose into the loose dirt and snorting and hissing a last gasp.

Obviously folks were a lot more jaded then, for this article was buried on page 5. If a Caltrain engine flopped over on its side within sight of Diridon station today, we'd have news helicopters circling endlessly and declaring the immense danger of commuting by rail. The San Jose Evening News of the time thought the following stories more important than a locomotive falling over:

• Balloon (oops, "airship") exhibition at Longchamps, France.
• Child in Illinois may lose his tongue after licking ammonia pipe at new ice plant.
• Local horse and buggy thief captured in Monterey.
• San Francisco Chronicle declares that prune crop looks good.
• Washington D.C.: Experimental subjects testing preserved and adulterated meat go on strike because of too much borax'ed meat.
• Girl in Indiana shot by jealous lover.
• Boy burglars captured after several robberies in San Jose, and caught at the broad gauge depot.
• Hogs in Dixon, California eat suicide. 

• ...and several other stories that obviously were more interesting than a railroad locomotive flipping over on its side right there in the middle of town.

I was surprised by the idea of a mid-afternoon Los Gatos train - most of the timetables I saw showed only a single Los Gatos commute train from San Francisco, but the SP's handy timetable in the day's paper showed five trains to Los Gatos at 9:48 am, 10:20 am, 1:35 pm, 4:21 pm, and 6:20pm, with a train to Campbell and New Almaden at 4:45 pm only. Switching Campbell on my layout would be a lot more interesting if the crews had to get out of the way of passenger trains that often.

Trouble at the Market Street Station Some of the stories hint at how the railroad was was operated. For example, the old Market Street station north of downtown had tracks which crossed several busy downtown streets. There was also a sharp curve where the tracks joined Fourth Street so the mainline to Los Angeles could run down the middle of the street past San Jose State. Some of the switching movements - such as assembling the commute trains for San Francisco - would have requires a switch engine to pull cars along that Fourth Street curve. But that sharp curve and the street running would have made all the crews especially vigilant, right?

Uh, no.

Engines in a Collision: Smashup at Second Street Crossing This Morning The Evening News on July 9, 1903 leads with the breathless "Engineer and Firemen Jump for their Lives" article:

A fast manifest freight from Gilroy crashed into a switch engine at the Second Street crossing of the Southern Pacific at 5:40 this morning and a serious wreck resulted. The freight was pulling into the station at a high rate of speed concealed from view by the sharp curve at Second Street. The switch engine was upon the same track and proceeding slowly in the opposite direction.
Suddenly the freight pulled into view and bore down upon the switch engine with a speed which made the avoidance of a collision an impossibility. The trainmen realized their danger and after reversing their engines jumped to the ground.
The locomotives came together with a resounding crash which nearly demolished the light engine and severely damaged the other… the crippled engines were towed to the roundhouse and the broken wood and other evidences of the accident were removed.

So why was the switch engine pulling cars so far east? I haven't seen any good maps of the San Jose yards as of 1905, but the 1915 Sanborn map shows that most of the freight yards were west of San Pedro St., while a small passenger yard existed right behind the depot between San Pedro and First Street. Now, a 5:40 am train crew might have been switching boxcars from the east end of the yard or from the packing houses along the tracks, or they could have been putting together the first commute trains of the day. My first guess would be they were a crew with passenger cars, but another story from a year later suggests both are possible.

Trains Crash Together At The Broad Gauge Depot The November 3, 1904 Evening News again buries a story on page three when a switch engine crew blocked the main line in front of the station just as a freight train arrives from Salinas in the late afternoon. We know the switch engine was pulling from the east end because both engines touched in the crash.

Owing to the carelessness of an engineer in charge of a switch engine which was making up a train of freight cars at the broad cage depot last evening a collision took place with the way freight from Salinas. The freight train had the right of way and the engineer of the switch engine whose name was Tescheran had orders to run his cars on another track. Owing to his slowness the freight bore down and the engines crashed together… The wreck was cleared away in about an hour and a half and caused no interruption of regular traffic. The accident took place at about 4:30 p.m. None of the trainmen was hurt.

New Buildings at Market Street The awkwardness which might have caused the first near-miss at Los Gatos might have encouraged some of the problems at the Market Street Depot. A October 11, 1902 article describes more work needed for the double-tracking as workers moved telegraph poles away from the depot and built an additional track at the station. There's also rumors of a new building for Wells Fargo and a dining room for tourists which as far as I know was never built.

There were other stories - railroad men pinned between trains or hit by a moving freight car in the yard, but all the stories hinted that the railroads were a lot faster and looser with operations at the turn of the century than in the 1930's. With each of those accidents and news reports, we learn a bit more about how the trains were operating in the last century.