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.

"Experts Find Valuable Oils in 'Cot Pits"

For those of you planning to model Sewall Brown's apricot pit plant, you've got another source of photos and background. Check out the July 23, 1928 issue of the San Jose News for more details about what those apricot pits were used for, and for more history of the plant. There's also a nice picture from the railroad side of the plant, and words from Mr. Brown himself.

Fun details: apricot pits turned out to contain bitter almond oil, used in Europe for cooking, perfume, and other products. The apricot kernels themselves were also useful for salads and baking. In the early days, the pits were shipped to Europe for processing. However, World War I stopped the sale of the pits, so Sunsweet started to do the processing themselves. The oils produced must have been valuable; the pits themselves would be bought for $55 per ton. Most of that pit-crushing business in the U.S. was right there on Winchester Blvd., where Sewall Brown and Co. processed a large chunk of California's 10,000 tons of apricot pits.

We'd already noted that the plant started off as Gem City Packing, then became a Sunsweet plant, but the article explains why it switched ownership. Sewall Brown got into the business when the Sunsweet co-op decided not to continue with the side business, so Sewall and his partner Harold Scott (the plant chemist) took over the business. Scott died within a few months, but Brown ran it until his death.

And if all these stories of Sewall Brown encourages you to break into the pit-cracking business, note that peach pits aren't at all profitable; the kernels are too small and it's too much work to get them out. Stick with apricots.

The News bills the article as one of a series of special articles on Valley businesses, so poke around on other Mondays in 1928 for more stories of Valley entrepreneurship back in the fruit salad days. The Faultless Bakery article was a bit dry, but the World's Largest Orchard Ladder Factory deserves its large billing. The Monday, August 20 paper doesn't appear to have a "local business of the day", but there is an article on the death of Wayne, California, a small station between San Jose and Milpitas which the SP no longer wishes to serve. "The crops shipped from there are... highly seasonal, and consist mostly of peppers, walnuts, and nursery products."

Gem City Packing becomes Sunsweet Becomes Sewall Brown

The research for the Sunsweet #1 plant hinted at a pair of packing houses in Los Gatos: Curtis Packing and Gem City Packing. I didn't know anything about either, but I've been trying to fill in the holes in my fruit business knowledge in hopes of finding railroad-related details. Some judicious Google searches turned up more on Gem City.

Gem City Packing (whose name refers to an old nickname of Los Gatos) existed from before through 1918. There's not much about it; in the usual fashion, the few tidbits we get are from the crime pages. The packing house was built in 1902, according to a newspaper report on the fire that destroyed it. The plant's location can be guessed based on California Railroad Commission case debating whether San Jose Water Company or the Los Gatos Municipal Water should be building a half-mile line down the County Road (Winchester Ave.) to serve the plant.

Nice location, that - it's next to the main road, it's got a seven car siding on the Vasona branch (according to a 1931 SP industry list), and there's plenty of orchards nearby.

But when Sunsweet starts building up the core set of packing houses to serve as their initial plants, Gem City joins up:

The Prune and Apricot Growers Association will convert one of its packing house plants into an institution for cracking apricot pits and nothing else. The pits from other packing plants will be collected and shipped to the Gem City packing house at Vasona.

General Manager Mr Willes has numbered the packing houses as follows, each plant being called a “Sunsweet Plant”:

Campbell Farmers’ Union, Campbell, 1; Morgan Hill Farmers Union, Morgan Hill, 2; Gilroy Farmers’ Union, Gilroy, 3; O. A. Harlan & Co., San Jose, 4; Hemet Apricot Growers Association, Hemet,5; G. N. Herbert, San Jose, 6; Gem City Packing Company, Vasona, Campbell, 7; O. A. HArlan & Co., Mountain View, 8; Hollister Packing Company, Hollister, 9; G. Frank Fruit Company, San Jose, 10; A & C Ham Company, San Jose, 11; F. H. Holmes, San Jose, 12.

So in 1918, Gem City gets swallowed up by Sunsweet, the old name plate gets taken off over the door, and the employees get to work breaking large apricot pits into small apricot pits. Sewall Brown rolls into town with his Stanford diploma around 1921, and takes over as superintendent of the plant, and they keep breaking large apricot pits into smaller ones. By 1934, Sewall Brown buys the plant off Sunsweet. He christens the business Sewall Brown & Co and runs it for another twenty years until all four million pounds of apricot kernels on-site catches fire and destroys the plant in 1955.

The Los Gatos Times - Saratoga Observer reporter knew how to turn a phrase when describing the fire:

The three-story, red-painted main plant literally burst at the seams as the wooden siding gave way under the flames and apricot pits stacked 50-feet high in burlap sacks steamed in huge mounds from cracks and corners of the walls.

The processing shed, a well-known landmark, dates back to 1902 when the original building was constructed by the late Sewall Brown, who died three years ago...

I'll trust the "Three story, red painted main building" quote, and the "bags of apricot pits fifty feet high" gives an idea of what sort of volume of apricot pits you need to get four million pounds. We do know Sewall Brown didn't build it, but I'll be generous and let the inaccuracy slide.

And (long) after the fire, Netflix put their offices on the site, and if you take a good whiff of your Netflix envelope, you might just smell the faint tang of burned apricot pits left over from the fire.

There's at least three packing houses listed there I'm clueless about: A & C Ham, G. Frank, and F & H Holmes. Those of you getting tired of packing house talk might check out cute pictures of cats for a little while...

Places I Won't Model: Sewall Brown Co.

[Title borrowed from Derek Lowe's "Things I Won't Work With" series from his "In the Pipeline" blog. Worth reading, especially to hint at why you might not want to be a chemist.]

I knew when I started building my Vasona Branch layout that I can't fit every possible scene on the San Jose-Santa Cruz branch into the available space. Sometimes that meant hard decisions about leaving out representative scenes, and sometimes it meant having no problem taking the mental pruning shears to my ideas.

The Sewall Brown Co. was one of those easy-to-prune ideas. [Horrible pun completely unintended, I swear.] Sewall Brown collected apricot kernels from the local farmers, drying yards, and canneries; they were processed and sent to Europe for sweets and baking. Others were in the same game; even Del Monte Plant #3 had a portion of the plant to handle this valuable by-product. Brown's warehouse was on the Winchester Road just north of Vasona Junction - about where Highway 85 and the Netflix offices are now located. One of the Vasona Junction photos in Railroads of Los Gatos shows the buildings in the far distance.

It's also a well-known location because of some photos of trains serving the site, and because of the attached painting which I've seen in a few places. It's an interesting industry, both because it's located in an otherwise empty stretch of track, has the huge billboard sign on the wall, and is an unusual industry that modern-day audiences may never have thought possible.

From a model railroad standpoint, it's less of a draw. The industry location was in a stretch between towns, so it either needs to take the conceptual space of a full town, or needs to be shoehorned in between Campbell and Vasona Junction, and removes some of the distance and emptiness along the route. Sewall Brown is also probably a low-traffic industry; I can imagine it having a hard time filling one car a month, let alone one car a day. For an operating model railroad, an empty spur is at best scenery, and wasting a few feet of layout on that scenery might not always be appropriate. (I find it interesting the painting shows two cars being retrieved on a rainy winter day - would that have ever really happened?)

So Sewall Brown was struck from the layout. Every now and then, I think about adding it back into the area around Vasona Junction, but that stretch from Campbell to Los Gatos really needs to be wall-to-wall orchards, so the apricot pit processor loses.

I was doing some searches on Sewall Brown tonight hoping to find some photos of the Vasona Junction area, and found Mr. Brown's biography transcribed online. One of the interesting facts in that article is the tidbit:

Sewall S. Brown attended the grammar and high schools of San Jose and afterward became a student at Stanford University. After completing his education he became connected with the San Jose Water Works and then secured a position as field representative with the California Seed Growers' Association, with which he remained until June 1, 1921, when he came to Los Gatos as superintendent of plant No. 7 of the California Prune & Apricot Growers' Association. He has a comprehensive understanding of the work in which he is engaged and is seeking in every way possible to advance the interests of his employers, who thoroughly appreciate his services.

California Prune and Apricot Growers' Association is better known to you frequent readers of the blog as Sunsweet, which also had operations in downtown Campbell, on Lincoln Avenue in San Jose, and elsewhere in the Valley. I hadn't heard of a Sunsweet packing house in Los Gatos, but the
list of Sunsweet packers in 1920 I presented back in December showed that there was a Los Gatos/Vasona packing house at that time.

I'd bet that the Sewall Brown Co. warehouse at Vasona Junction was actually the Sunsweet packing house, and Mr. Brown took over the property when Sunsweet realized that having two packing plants within a couple miles of each other was inefficient. I can't find any mention of the Vasona packing house in The Sunsweet Story, so proving that Sewall Brown had been yet-another-Sunsweet packing house will require a bit of rummaging in city directories.

Off to ancestry.com and the San Jose Library to poke through musty city directories!

(Additional note: The Santa Clara County Fire Department collection of historical photos says that the Sewall Brown plant burned down in September, 1955.)

[Both images from History Los Gatos. I think the painting was done by Michael Kotowski, and appears in Bruce MacGregor's "South Pacific Coast: A Centennial", and I seem to remember seeing it in an Orchard Supply catalog at least a decade ago as well.]