We All Scream for Location-Accurate Buildings

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream. Well, hopefully not, or the garage is going to be awfully loud.

I’ve slowly been filling out the Los Gatos scene. A few years ago, I added a shelf to cover the staging tracks, and used the space to add some much-needed houses along the railroad tracks in Los Gatos. I also had a bare spot immediately in front of the Hunt’s Cannery. Historically, the spot was some charming and quite pricey houses on University Avenue. However, expensive real estate wouldn't match the theme I'm trying to capture. I want to hint at the industrial side of town here, so the space deserved something utilitarian. My first cut was a low-slung warehouse made with board-and-batten siding. The warehouse never looked correct - too low, too plain.

I feel back to my usual tricks: look through old photos to see what was actually along the tracks. I knew there was a lumber yard along University Ave near the Old Town development which deserved a space. Looking at some of the 1940’s photos, I found what looked like a boxy cinderblock building with a strange contraption on the roof, just north of Elm Street. Captions mentioned this as the ice cream plant for Eatmore Ice Cream and Creamery at 46 N. Santa Cruz Ave. The building’s on the wrong side of the railroad tracks for me, but it’ll look fine on the University Ave. side.

The History

Eatmore Ice Cream was founded by Hans Nielsen in 1922, an immigrant from Denmark and new arrival in Los Gatos. Eatmore’s location was in the middle of downtown at 52 North Santa Cruz Ave. at Elm Street. Nielsen ran the place solo for many years, working “at night to make his ice cream and delivered it during the daytime.” The company must have done well; several of Nielsen’s helpers in the ice cream business turn up in the historic record. Eatmore also had several outposts, including a takeover of a San Jose manufacturer and an an ice cream factory in San Francisco at 1525 Union St. Eatmore lasted as an independent business for about twenty years. Nielsen finally got an offer he couldn’t refuse from Beatrice Foods in 1944 and sold out; he continued as manager for the newly rebranded Meadow Gold branded creamery. Newspaper articles describe the company as delivering 1100 gallons of ice cream a day through ice cream plants in Watsonville, Santa Cruz, San Jose, and Palo Alto. This sounds more like what Meadowgold (owned by Beatrice Foods) accomplished; census records show that Nielsen continued to live and work in Los Gatos after the takeover, so he sounds more like the small-town manager than the ice cream unicorn entrepreneur. Meadowgold lasted at least into the 1970’s, manufacturing ice cream right there in downtown Los Gatos.

The creamery on Santa Cruz Ave was a simple storefront on the main road through town. A photo from the 1930's shows a large "Eatmore" sign painted on the Elm Ave. wall of the building. (The photo also shows an Associated Gasoline station on the opposite corner - imagine trying to put a gas station on Santa Cruz Ave. today!) Sanborn maps show Eatmore sharing a building with a grocery next door. Although the creamery storefront was on Santa Cruz Ave., the ice cream manufacturing didn’t stay there for long. A cinder block building behind the creamery storefront shows up in the 1928 Sanborn map with 18’ ceilings, a two-story office at the front, and a boiler room at the rear.

The only photos I’ve found show the building from a distance; it looks blocky and unpretentious with only the cooling tower on top seeming out of the ordinary. Example photos include a 1950's shot from Charlie Givens in Arcadia Publishing's "Railroads of Los Gatos".

Meadowgold still shows up in 1950’s photos, and articles reminiscing about the old Los Gatos seem to mention Meadowgold and Eatmore more often than I’d expect.

Eatmore, 1944 Sanborn map

Manufaactured gas plant, 1930's SP Valuation Map. CSRM Collection.

The space wasn’t always an ice cream factory. Railroad valuation maps into the 1940’s still displayed the previous inhabitants - the manufactured gas plant for Los Gatos. Manufactured gas plants processed coal and oil to extract lighter-than-air hydrocarbons, and took the remaining coal tar and lampblack and either sold it or buried it out back for future generations to discover. The gas holder was at the front of the plot, facing Elm St., with a corrugated iron building at the back. PG&E shut down the plant in 1924 when a natural gas line from San Jose arrived. The ice cream plant seems to match the location and floor plan of the manufactured gas plant building; the two story office at the front appears to date from the ice cream era.

The Model

The model required a fair amount of guesswork. There were no good photos of the building, just distance shots showing a tiny featureless white box and dark cooling tower. The Sanborn map shows a bit more about heights and number of floors in the building, but I forgot to double-check the Sanborn map before I started construction. Instead, I looked at photos online for ideas about cinder block building from 1930’s. When those searches didn’t work out, I ended up searching for ice cream plants, and found some photos of Treat Ice Cream’s San Jose plant off Alum Rock Ave. Treat’s a local ice cream manufacturer that provides the store brand for our local grocery, and their plant is hidden at the back of a main street business on San Jose’s East Side. The cinderblock building and steel windows gave me the inspiration I needed.

The general construction was straightforward, but it’s definitely a 21st century project. I used styrene sheet for the walls and ceiling (using 1/16” styrene sheet from Tap Plastic - cheap and available in any size you want up to 4' x 8') and strip styrene for the front and side deck. The doors are Grandt Line parts. Rather than simulate concrete block, I fell back to a stucco look, and again used an acrylic gel with pumice from the art supply store to give the walls a slightly rough appearance.

I couldn’t find any windows I liked, so I instead fell back on the 3d printer. 3d printed windows never print as nicely as the commercial windows - tiny muntins just don’t print well. To avoid a trip to the store, I made the windows solid, with muntins and panes embossed into the solid casting. I painted the windows glossy black to simulate glass, then painted the window frames. I used a similar trick with baggage wagons in the past, making the wheels solid with raised spokes rather than trying to make spindly and open wheels.

The 3d cooling tower was another challenge. Some folks have modeled cooling towers for ice plants; Suydam’s cardboard kits have one example. The models always look a little rough, both because of the material and its toughness. Instead, I fell back on the 3d printer. I figured out my design from looking at previous HO models (such as Suydam's) and also checking old trade journals such as Refrigeration World for photos of past equipment. (For example, here's the Burhorn cooling tower.)

Although the design seems complex, it's geometric and pretty straightforward. The model's designed as two copies of the same part, each printing two sides. Real cooling towers appeared to use corrugated iron for the fins; I held off on adding that detail from impatience. If you want one of your own, the 3d model can be downloaded from Thingiverse.com.

My final touch was milk pails, a combination of 3d printed and commercial (Tichy) cast parts. Photos of Eatmore's San Jose plant showed the classic tin milk pails all over the place. Although common in industry, tin milk pails aren't a common sight on railroads in California - I've seen little evidence for milk trains in the Santa Clara Valley. Pauline Correia Stonehill's Barrelful of Memories: Stories of My Azorean Family" described life in growing up on a Central Valley dairy. She remembered her father using a wagon to carry the day's milk to the Los Banos dairy. A combination of good roads and nearby processing plants may have made remarked how many dairies delivered milk via wagon and truck. There may have been milk trains elsewhere in the Bay Area; the Niles Depot website claims two or three milk trains a day through Fremont.

Tracking Down the Lost Cannery of Campbell

A while ago, we heard Edith Daley’s descriptions of the folks coming down to Campbell to work in the canneries. Thanks to David Pereira, we can put some faces next to those caricatures. David, you see, has quite the connection to Campbell canneries, with his great-grandfather, great-grandmother, grandmother, and grandfather all working for the least-known of the Campbell canneries.

That cannery, as all the serious Campbell historians know, is the California Canneries, located just north of the Ainsley cannery. California Canneries is often forgotten; it didn’t have a high-profile local owner like Ainsley or Hyde; it didn’t have the brand recognition of Sunsweet's dried apricot business. Its buildings didn’t survive. It didn’t host the Doobie Brothers like the Farmer's Union Packing house. California Canneries does have a Hindenburg connection, but that all happened Back East, a long way from Campbell.

[ NO PHOTO OF CANNERY AVAILABLE -
NO ONE KNOWS WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE...
YET]

California Canneries was a San Francisco-based canner, started before the turn of the century, but run during the 20th century by Isidor Jacobs. The cannery’s home office was in San Francisco, in a wooden cannery building at 18th and Minnesota. The original building survived up until last year, with the California Canneries sign still visible from the 18th St. overpass across the SP tracks. It finally lost out to UCSF’s new campus, and was torn down for student housing. There’s a couple mentions of a Napa outpost, but nothing definite. However, in the expansionist era just after World War I, Jacobs came down to Campbell to kick the tires on a cannery.

California Canneries, 18th and Minnesota, San Francisco. Torn down. (Google Street View)

The cannery that Jacobs was eyeing was the Orchard City Cannery, run by Perley Payne, son of James Payne (who Payne Ave. in San Jose is named for.) Perley had started a cannery just north of the Ainsley plant in 1910. Payne’s Orchard City Cannery suffered during World War I; while Ainsley was selling to London, Orchard City primarily sold to Germany, and all its customers were on the wrong side of trenches, barbed wire, and mustard gas... a bad way for a cannery to make a profit. So they didn't make a profit, and Payne ended up selling out to Jacobs in 1917; he ran the cannery for the new owner for a year, but washed his hands of the canning business and fell back to orchard labor. His son noted he had quite a gift for grafting walnut trees.

“Campbell, the Orchard City”, lightly notes that Perley Payne’s son played in the rafters of the cannery building “and [was] reprimanded for his escapades.” Perley Payne Jr., in his own words, told a much more realistic and bittersweet story. He highlighted the dark side of trying to hit it big in the canning business when he talked about how his father handled the business failure. Perley later attempted to organize the workers in the local canneries.

“You see, after he lost his cannery, he kind of felt he was disgraced. And I felt, and my wife too, we really felt bad about it, because, he kind of lived on his knees the rest of his life. He depended on his brothers and his sisters when he wasn’t - like one time I remember, we didn’t work for about two or three months it rained so much here that he had to ask them for money all the time to keep us going, you know. I remember he used to charge groceries at Field’s Store in Campbell and I was working and I would take my check to Field’s Store and cash it and pay so much to Fields on dad’s bill and take some down to the gas station and Fred, I forget his last name, anyway, the guy who owned the gas station - He had a charge there, and I’d pay him, too. And I had, outside of the sorry part here, my aunt and uncle, my uncle George and my aunt Aileen — after my uncle George had died, my aunt Aileen told me, "You know George and I were figuring on sending you to college, but we figured you were too irresponsible. And here I was taking all my money that I earned for five years — all of it went home, except for what I did spend to buy that Model T Ford. All of it went home to help my mother and dad with the grocery bills and whatever else they needed. The only thing I kept out was for a haircut and a little bit to go to a show once in a while, something like that. (Perley Payne, Jr.)

Jacobs, meanwhile, managed to do reasonably well with the property, running the cannery through the 1920s and early 1930’s. But the Great Depression was lethal for canners, and California Canneries declared bankruptcy in 1932. The Campbell property went to Fred Drew, who had just bought the Ainsley Cannery. The flagship San Francisco plant went to Jacob’s broker, Moritz Feibusch, who rebranded the company as Calbear Canneries. Feibusch died in the fire on the Hindenburg airship in 1937, putting an end to California Canneries.

The Place

There’s not much evidence of California Canneries. I’ve seen its name on Sanborn maps and on an SP track diagram, but I’ve never seen a photo of the cannery. There’s a corrugated iron warehouse just south of Fry’s on Salmar Ave that must have been built for the cannery, but a tin building with a linoleum dealer and an irrigation contractor is nowhere near as photogenic as Hyde Cannery’s brick buildings closer to downtown. (The Campbell Museum does have a photo of the warehouse along Salmar Ave., but we don't see the cannery in that photo.)

California Canneries, Campbell Ca. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, 1920

In the 1920 Sanborn map, Harrison St.is to the left and the railroad tracks cut across the page from southwest to northeast. Ainsley Cannery is on the bottom. Perley Payne grew up in the house on the corner of Harrison and Hopkins. Hopkins no longer exists; both canneries are now under a row of townhouses.

The 1920 map shows four structures: the cannery (one story, 15’ high, corrugated iron with a wood floor), a separate boiler house, a box nailing shed, and a 10,000 gallon water tank. Southern Pacific railroad valuation maps suggest the railroad spur was installed in 1919 as part of the Jacobs improvements, and extended further to the north in 1926. The railroad map also describes the cannery building as 83 x 138 feet, but doesn’t list the size of the warehouse.

Havens-Semaira Cannery, Campbell Ca. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, 1928-1935

On the 1928-1935 Sanborn map, we see Havens-Semaira Cannery running the cannery; they were founded in 1935 by John Havens of Oakland and S. J. Samaira of San Francisco. Havens had run the Sebatina Canning Company in Sonoma; S. J. Semaira had been importing dried fruits and nuts. The Sunburn map shows that the cannery expanded to take more of the lot, and the turf dealer warehouse appears to the north. The boiler house has moved, and there’s several more accessory buildings including the kindergarten, and garages. The building is still wood, and the loading platforms are now on the north side.

And A Photos Turns Up

That’s awfully dry. We know the size of the building, the materials, the size of the fuel oil tank, and the size of the kindergarten. But we don’t know anything else about the cannery and the people.

Luckily, David turned up with an employee photo from 1926. Many large companies had group panoramic photos taken during the 1920’s, and the cannery photos are particularly interesting because they give us an idea about both the number of folks working at a cannery, and the ethnic groups that made it up.

David has the photo because it contained four of his family - his great grandfather and great grandmother, his grandmother, and her future husband. His great grandfather was a carpenter; his great-grandmother and her two daughters worked at the canning tables. David was also told his grandfather is somewhere in the photo; he likely met his future wife working one summer.

1926 Employee Photo, California Canneries, Campbell. Courtesy David Pereira

View the photo in high resolution here (7 MB). Spot anything interesting? Mention it in the comments!

There’s a lot in this photo - more than 200 workers (48 men, 7 women who look like office workers, and 158 women from the canning tables.) There’s a shot of the tin building that held the cannery. There’s a box car, and houses.

The People

Let’s start with the people. We’ve got five sources to tell us something about the people in this photo: the 1920 census, a 1920 San Jose City Directory, David’s family story from 1919, Edith Daley’s article from the same summer, and Perley Payne’s stories of growing up in Campbell.

The People: The Census

Census data gives us a starting point about who was living in Campbell. The 1920 census had around 1300 people in Campbell township. Most were American; if we count the families where at least the head of the household was foreign born, we find about 25% of Campbell came from immigrant households. There were 59 Italians, 52 Portuguese, 44 English, 28 Swedes, 25 Canadians, 15 Danes, 12 Germans, 12 Austrians, 10 French, 9 Japanese, 7 Norwegians, 6 Spaniards, 5 Scots, 4 Swiss, two Finns, two Russians, and one Australian, one Irish, and one Pole.

These numbers seem a bit lower than I would have expected. By 1920, immigrants were huge part of cannery workforces in other places (as evidenced by Del Monte's employee newsletter having sections in multiple languages, and the size of the Italian and Portuguese communities in San Jose and Santa Clara.) However, the group photo shows more workers that look American than I expected. I could imagine Campbell wasn't as interesting a place for new immigrants. The land was probably expensive because it was good soil and well irrigated (compared to the east side); projects like the Kirk ditch brought water from Los Gatos Creek to orchards as far away as Willow Glen. The land had also been settled early. Lesser quality land - drier land, or hillside land - might have been all that the new immigrants could afford to work. Campbell also might have been a little less welcoming of new immigrants; a 1930 editorial cartoon in the Campbell Interurban Express sounded like they still weren't terribly pleased by the newcomers, ten years after the Johnson-Reed act in 1924 limited the number of immigrants from Southern Europe, and banned Asian immigration completely.

The ethnic makeup does match Perley Payne's memories:

Interviewer: “I know there were lots of Mexicans in Campbell.” “We had no Mexicans in high school at all - or grammar school. We had Italians, Portuguese, Yugoslav, two Japanese, and that was about it. The rest of us were just uh, people…. A bunch of [cannery workers] came out of Dos Palos every year [to work at Ainsley].

(Listen to the Perley Payne Jr. interview or read the transcript.)

About a hundred of the Campbell residents listed occupations related to canning. (See this spreadsheet for a list of all the cannery workers in the 1920 census.) Most were “laborer, canning factory", with the occasional owner, superintendent, or foreman or forewoman. Those numbers are a bit skewed; the census was taken in January, so it omits temporary help. The people willing to list occupations were likely also the workers with sufficient seniority or skill to stay around Campbell during the off-season. (Still, although there's a lot of older men declaring themselves to be cannery workers, there's also still some twenty-somethings declaring that canning is in their blood.) We also only see occupations for the men. Very few women listed cannery work as their occupation.

Generally, only the professional women show up in the occupations. Of the hundreds of women who must have worked at the cutting tables, only Mary King of Sunnyside Ave. listed her occupation as “pitter”. Four women declared themselves as forewomen: Alice V. Hutchins, 55 years old; Clara B. Baldwin, 42; Lulu V. Holmes, 34; and Minnie Lewis, 65; they were responsible for managing the cutting floor - choosing where people sat, handling discipline, ensuring quality. All the other women who spoke of their canning connection were clerical. Emma Swope, 52, was a bookkeeper at Ainsley (and listed as corporate secretary in the 1920 city directory.) Elizabeth B. Hall, 18, was a bookkeeper. Charlotte Thiltgen from Meridian Road, 17, listed her occupation as “saleswoman”. Mary Miller, 36, listed herself as manager of one of the cannery cafeterias. None were recent immigrants, or even children of recent immigrants.

We’ve got Perley Payne, builder of the Payne Cannery still listing himself as owner of a canning factory, while Solomon Jacobs, operating the cannery, listed his job as “manager, canning factory.” Warren Shelly, superintendent, will eventually be the Vice President of the Ainsley cannery in 1933.

On the men’s side, most of the cannery workers are British or American. Archibald Braydon, 32, born in England, lists himself as foreman at a canning factory. So does Leigh Sauders, 49, living at 26 Rincon Ave, and Thomas Mendel, 53. Braydon and Mendel explicitly list themselves as Ainsley employees in the city directory, and Saunders certainly seems a likely Ainsley employee. (If this was modern day, I could imagine salesmen from the London office spending a year working at the cannery so they can better extol the virtues of Santa Clara valley fruit in England and Scotland.) George Sloat, 57; Claude Gard, 42; Clarence Whitney, 54 all show up as foremen. There’s a couple night watchmen; Dudley Chaffee, 61, is boarding with Solomon Jacobs, so we can guess he’s working at California Canneries; Edward P. Green, 60, from Wisconsin, is also serving as night watchman for one of the other canneries. Harry Bloom, 49, and Arthur Cramer, 48, list their occupation as stationary engineers, running the steam boilers. There’s also some hints about which occupations might be more prestigious. Frank Peterbaugh, 19, lists himself as weigher, which I assume required literacy and a certain amount of responsibility. John F. Cooper, a Scotsman living at 27 Campbell Ave., declares himself a shipping clerk. William E. Spreegle, 29, of 21 Everett Street (where’s that?) is a box maker.

The majority of laborers are Americans. Out of 58 laborers, there’s 14 that are either foreign or children of recent immigrants: 5 Portuguese, three Italian, two Irish, two Canadian, and one Russian.

The other big surprise is that most of the fruit-related processing jobs were canning. There were exactly two workers in all of Campbell who said they worked in packing houses: Frank Pererbaugh (19, weigher), and Fred Griggle (34, laborer).

The People: David's Family

So let's compare that with David's family stories.

Anton

We think of the Santa Clara Valley as primarily settlers from the rest of the U.S., with new arrivals in the 1880-1920 time range coming from Italy or Portugal. The census data suggests that Campbell was still predominantly native-born. Anton, David’s great-grandfather, wasn’t; he was born in the Ukraine. He’d been a machinist in Portland, Oregon, but he became a carpenter in the Santa Clara valley, perhaps working in box-making, or perhaps on maintenance of the cannery. His wife, Lena, was from Hungary. The family lived on Harmon Ave in San Jose (Meridian Ave. near Auzerais), just on this side of the Del Monte cannery. Lena and her daughters were working the cannery line; all three were seated in the front row for the photo. From the census data, they were a bit of outliers; there weren't a lot of chances to talk in German (which David said was their primary language.)

Lena and her daughters

David’s grandfather, a Portuguese kid, was somewhere in the crowd according to the family story; he might have been one of the overexposed faces on the right side of the photo - a mix of young and old men who might have been ferrying the fruit into the canning machines. Some of those men would have been the laborers showing up in the census (though I imagine many of the folks we see in the photo are summer workers who didn't show up in the census records at all.) Perley Payne Jr. would have had jobs like this, too.

The Laborers

 We also get a bit of story from Perley Payne, Jr. He worked in the canneries when he was a teenager, always waiting until he was 18 when he could work more than 8 hours and make 40c an hour like the men. Although Perley's father had been a business owner, Perley went straight to the socialists, organizing for the cannery unions and eventually leaving for the Spanish Civil War to fight with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. His oral history not only documents his time as a labor organizer, but hints at who lived in Campbell and who worked in Campbell’s cannery.

(Listen to the Perley Payne Jr. interview or read the transcript.)

Mostly it was Italians and Portuguese women that worked in the cannery. My grandmother worked there. My mother worked in the cannery. My sisters all worked in the cannery…
[Most of the Cannery workers] lived in Campbell, and they knew Mr. Ainsley. They knew the man who owns it. They knew who he was and he had a restaurant for them for lunch. He had a camp where people would come and stay from Dos Palos and other parts of the Valley, they could come and stay during the summer. Of course, us young guys were always down there looking for girlfriends, you know.

Perley's story definitely matches the census records. The two Japanese families, the Makadas and Jios, lived over on Leigh Ave. Wakichi Jio and Suyezo Makada were farmworkers. Portuguese and Italian families both were farmworkers and farm owners; the women of the families represent a lot of the faces in David's photo, even if they didn't explicitly refer to their work in the canneries. Perley's mother also didn't include cannery work as her occupation, but she also had four kids under the age of 7 in 1920.

The older, no-nonsense women in the front row might have been Perley's family, and perhaps floor ladies, managing the women at the cannery. Minnie Lewis or Alice Hutchins might be one of the older women in the front row.

The Floor Ladies

The Women Perley Tried to Date

The young women workers might have been the ones he was chasing after work, or might have been some of the folks from the Central Valley who came to work in the cooler Campbell climate.

Edith Daley, meanwhile, talked about the iconic and stereotypical. There was the city girl who was in Campbell for spending money. The girl with the gingham and the bow, perhaps, and the oh-so modern haircut? Or was she working in the office?



"The City Girl"



"The '80's Material Girls"

The two girls who wouldn’t have looked out of place in a 1980’s new wave club looks like they’re having a good summer. 

There was the San Francisco family, here as much for the change of pace as the pay. Their tent might have been the one with the Victrola.

"The City Family"

There was the little Italian girl, the hardest worker of the lot, who would make sure she’d hit 5 or 6 dollars a day. She was a new immigrant, and she was getting money to live on.

"Edith Daley's Hardest Working Italian Girl"

There were also the bookkeepers and clerks running the office, much like Jennie Besana would have been doing this season down at the Contadina cannery in San Jose. The woman with the upturned hair and the long necklace is a giveaway - that's the last thing she would have had around the fruit side of the cannery because of all the exposed machinery. Any of these women could have been the bookkeeper or saleswomen we saw in the census data.



"The Bookkeeper"



"Management"

I’m torn whether this stern looking woman is a floor lady, or a woman from the business or sales side of California Canneries. The pearls are a much safer choice for cannery jewelry, and the haircut’s quite a modern length. Or perhaps this is Mary Miller, the no-nonsense queen of a cannery cafeteria?

For a final photo, here's a close up of the men on the left hand side of the photo. The leftmost kid has what appears to be a holster; at first I thought he had shears, but didn't see any other men with similar equipment. Then I remember my dad's summer job - he worked at Hunt's in Hayward one summer, and was responsible for punching a worker's ticket when she completed packing a tray of cans. I suspect this is the kid responsible for doing the punching at California Canneries that summer.

The Punch Kid

The Plant

Meanwhile, the machinery didn’t stop humming. Newspaper articles mentioned that Jacobs overhauled the plant in 1919, the peak year for many canneries. He started construction on May 13, but they were shipping apricots by July 9. The photo of the building shows the corrugated iron and simple posts for the cannery; it’s definitely designed for quick construction. For us model railroaders, the corrugated-iron buildings are very familiar; one of the long-time kit manufacturers, Campbell Scale Models, had a bunch of building kits that duplicated these sorts of structures. Campbell got most of their inspiration from the Los Angeles, area, but the California Canneries photo highlights that quick-and-dirty corrugated iron buildings were popular up here in Northern California, too.



The photo takes place on the angled loading dock along Hopkins Ave., a dead-end street paralleling Campbell Ave. that started at Harrison Ave., passed between California Canneries and the Ainsley Cannery, and quickly crossed the SP tracks to end at the cannery housing for the Ainsley cannery. Perley Payne grew up in the house at Hopkins and Harrison, hidden in the trees in the photo. Perley’s father must have hated the traffic from the cars coming to his former cannery. There's a bunch of cars all parked along Hopkins there; the cannery must have generated quite a bit of traffic and parking problems for Campbell.

The Sanborn map shows three houses along Hopkins that might have been annoyed by the traffic. The westernmost house was 80 Harrison, at the corner of Harrison and Hopkins. The Paynes still lived there in 1920, even though the records hint they no longer owned the cannery. 25 Hopkins Ave was next; George Sprague and his extended family were living there; George declared himself a cannery laborer. I'd guess he was a California Canneries employee, and he's probably one of the fifty-something men in the photo. His son-in-law, George Archibald, had the easier job; he was a salesman at a (presumably not-self-service) grocery store. The house closest to the cannery, 35 Hopkins Ave., apparently went with the cannery, for Solomon Jacobs, the manager, lived there in 1920. Dudley Chaffee, the night watchman, boarded with him.



Left side of photo towards Harrison Ave.

The location for California Canneries must have been sweet; I've heard from children of packing house owners that dealing with the line of trucks waiting to drop off fruit in season can be quite a chore; having their own dead-end street must have given California Canneries a bit more wiggle room when the trucks backed up.

By the time Havens-Semaira was running the cannery in 1935, the loading dock where this photo was taken was long gone; the cannery had built out to the edge of the street right-of-way, and the loading dock was now around back in the middle of the lot. For the houses that bordered the property along Harrison, they must have had a lot more problems with trucks idling and noisy unloading.

So now we know what California Canneries looked like. We know why Perley Payne was bitter about losing his cannery. We've got an idea about the ethnic make-up of Campbell in 1920. (I wonder how much things change in 1930?) And finally, we've also got some faces and names to put next to all those workers who canned the Santa Clara Valley's apricots in the summer of 1926. David's family stories, Edith Daley's observations, Perley Payne's memories, and the census data all give us some hints about those folks in David's photo.

---

Great thanks to David Pereira for sharing the photo and allowing me to include it here. The Perley Payne interview was recorded in 1999 by San Francisco State University's Labor Archives and Research Center. Census data came from ancestry.com, though I could have avoided a ton of typing if all the data was available in a processed way.

Spot anything interesting in the photo? Talk about it in the comments!

Edith Daley Visits Campbell

One of my favorite finds for Santa Clara county history has been Edith Daley’s cannery stories. Daley was a writer for the San Jose Evening News in the ‘teens and early twenties. During a slow news summer in 1919, she spent a few weeks visiting the canneries around San Jose and writing about the people and sights in the cannery. Through her booster-ish writing, we learned about the modern, clean concrete floors and nursery at Del Monte’s Japantown cannery, Elmer Chase’s prohibition on asking canners how long they’d been in the business, Jenny Besana’s knowledge of fruit contracts at Contadina, or the size of Greco Canning’s tomato paste boiler. Daley had a large collection of non-cannery writings; she also wrote poetry and a history of World War I from San Jose eyes. However, the San Jose articles tell stories about the fruit business that we couldn’t get anywhere else.

I’ve been disappointed because Daley’s articles only focused on San Jose canneries - no dried fruit packers, and no plants outside San Jose (except for a quick visit to Pratt-Low in Santa Clara.) I’d always assumed this was local paper provincialism. However, a while back, I followed one of the classic tricks of library research - poke around at newspaper issues before and after the interesting articles, and see what turns up. (Full disclosure: I first used this research trick as a ten year old when I figured out that if I found a model railroad book at a particular place on the shelf, I ought to look at other books on the same shelf in case they were interesting.)

Pay dirt.

There’s no signs of articles by Edith Daley, but there were a pair of uncredited articles about the mood in Campbell as the fruit came in. Both articles have Daley’s voice, and read like rehearsals for the articles to come in subsequent weeks. They also match Daley’s interest in worker and child welfare which appeared in many of her articles. The first, “Many Types on Campbell Sts. as ‘Cots Start” on July 10, 1919, highlights the crowds coming to Campbell to work in the canneries. The second, “Better Living Conditions for Fruit Workers” in the July 11, 1919 issue, highlight both housing for cannery workers and conditions inside the cannery.

Daley had plenty of industry and workers to visit in Campbell. 1919 was the middle of a cannery boom in the Santa Clara valley as technology, demand, and the end of World War I coincided. Edith remarked on three canneries in Campbell: California Canneries (a new outpost for a San Francisco canner, with a new building ready for canning within two months of construction), “J. C. Ainslee” (sic), and the George E. Hyde Company. The Hyde Cannery still exists as the Water Tower Plaza office complex near downtown. The Ainsley cannery, just north of Campbell Ave., is currently townhouses. California Cannery’s sawtooth warehouses still sit just south of Fry’s Electronics.

All three were going great guns during her visit. California Canneries, like Ainsley, exported canned apricots to England, and has just announced it had sent its first 1400 cases to Liverpool. Summer heat affected the ripening; the previous day, the canneries were able to handle all their fruit by mid-afternoon “but if the hot spell had continued they soon would have been working triple time.” Speed of ripening was a huge issue in those days; “one prominent fruit man” claimed we could have lost a million dollars in fruit if the hot weather had continued for four days, for the fruit couldn’t have been canned quickly enough.

Daley commented significantly on how the canneries and the fruit rush required many more people than could be gotten from Santa Clara county, and relied on attracting temporary workers. Now, a huge influx of workers isn’t always seen as positive. There’s stories about the pea harvests in Alameda County in the 1930’s attracting harvesters before the crop started; the locals weren’t always happy with the itinerant labor turning up, especially if they didn’t have cash to live on. Daley suggests that the gathering hordes in Campbell were more welcomed.

“They say that the population of Campbell has more than doubled overnight - in less than a week at any rate - and one can well believe it as one walks around the streets of the little orchard city.

“And what a variety of them there are! There is the city girl, who takes it all as a lark, and, it is feared, is a little more afraid of spoiling her hands than the efficient worker should be. She is not averse to earning a few dollars for fall hats during the summer months, however.

“Then there is the black-eyed little Italian girl - the most efficient worker in the game. It is a matter of dollars and cents with her and she clears $5 or $6 a day without half trying when the 'cots are running good.

“There are the ex-tired businessmen of the bay cities who want to spend a few days away from the pavements and who have brought their wives and kiddies with them to enjoy the celebrated Santa Clara valley. And kiddies! There are scores of them,, of assorted sizes, shapes, and colors. All with little sunburned noses and knees, and a universally happy expression of health and pleasure.”

The idea of city folks coming to help out isn’t new; there are stories of school teachers moonlighting at Contadina in the 1940’s, and judges acting as fruit buyers in the Central Valley, but Daley makes it sound as if pulling in temporary workers from San Francisco was commonplace. It’s almost as if Apple drew ten thousand temps from around California each summer to assemble the new new iPhone.

Daley’s “little Italian girl” is an interesting counterpoint with the likely-anglo workers from the city. 1919 was at the tail end of a huge wave of Italian immigration to the U.S. between 1900 and 1920. Although the little Italian girl was likely born in the U.S., she was still a bit alien to Daley’s eyes… and like most new immigrants much more focused on earning money for the summer than the city folks out on a lark. Daley’s newspaper articles for other canneries usually comment on workers in two ways - either the longevity of the (anglo) crew (“many have been here for twenty years”) or the many languages being spoken. Daley seemed bemused and interested in the newcomers; when she visited Contadina, she commented on packing cardoni (artichoke variant cultivated for the stems), she noted the new foods being introduced. “Our every day salt-and-pepper-and-butter with an occasional bit-of-onion palates are finding new satisfactions in Italian flavorings. Maybe before long we'll find Cardoni on every menu!” I suspect Daley wouldn’t mind that her children and grandchildren are eating pizza and burrata.

It’s a bit surprising that Campbell in 1919 was still using primarily anglo workers, and that the Italian girl stood out enough to get Edith’s attention, for new immigrants were awfully common in the fruit industry. A 1919 Del Monte Lug Box newsletter included sections in Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, hinting at the numbers of new southern European immigrants filling its canneries. Edith’s later visit to Bisceglia Brothers mentioned workers from Oregon, Nevada, Watsonville, Calaveras, and Napa and Sonoma Counties - many Italian, though Daley mentioned several languages being spoken. Bisceglia Brothers rounded up their workers with letters in the spring offering work and “free rent” in their cannery village.

Daley highlighted how the crush of workers drained Campbell’s housing. Daley’s guess that Campbell’s population doubled wasn’t too far off - Campbell only had 2,000 residents in 1939, so for 1919, a few hundred workers per cannery would certainly double the population. Workers pitched tents wherever they could - army tents, pup tents, and pieces of canvas stretched around poles. Some brought camping trailers. Edith noted that California Canneries had a canning village of wood and canvas cottages (with cot, table, stove, and running water); Ainsley’s canning village exploded in size in 1919, with “little red cottages nested among the rows of cot trees with the branches bruising against the windows”, and the dirt roads along the orchard lined with more cars than “First Street on a Saturday afternoon”. (That’s First Street in San Jose, the main shopping street, not some sort of rush for margaritas at the future site of Aqui in Campbell.) Ainsley’s cottages rented for $2.50 a month, and Daley claimed she could hear Victrolas playing “Over There” from within.

That $2.50 a month wasn’t free, but it was awfully cheap. Wages averaged $3.50 a day (unless you were the extremely productive little Italian girl.) Getting fed cost 25 cents a meal at the company cafeteria. Children under fourteen went to the cannery kindergartens to be minded. The working conditions weren’t too bad either, with Ainsley installing fans driven by belt to cool the cannery.

And, in typical Edith Daley fashion, the cannery was described as a fruit slaughterhouse where an apricot entering would not be long for this world.

“Cookers, syrups, all the machines are arranged a la Ford factory, with the fruit received at the receiving door at one end of the plant and issuing into the warehouse at the other end in the form of cases of cans of 'cots - extra fine. A cot never retraces its steps after it reaches the fatal doorway. It might as well abandon hope as it enters, for its doom is sealed and it is only a few minutes before it is pitted, sorted, syruped, exhausted, cooked, canned, its lid sealed on, labelled, and stored away until some bally Britisher orders it for his breakfast and it must start its long jaunt across America and the Atlantic towards its final resting place.”

So thank you again, Edith, for the local color. I’ll be pitching a bunch of tents in my HO scale orchards, and make sure the Campbell downtown streets are packed. I’ll make sure to add the little Italian girl to the Campbell street scene. She’d be twenty years older than when Edith saw her, and might have her children in tow for a month of canning ‘cots. But just like in Edith’s day, Ainsley’s kindergarten would still be operating in 1930’s Campbell, and Campbell’s city streets would still be filled during fruit season.

Coupon-Cutting Thursday I: Ainsley Dessert Fruits On Sale!

And now for the inaugural episode of what hopefully will be a regular feature: Coupon-Cutting Thursday, with newspaper ads related to Santa Clara Valley industry. No guarantees given that the vendors listed will honor these prices.

Apr 27, 1912 St. Andrews Citizen.

March 19, 1926 Kent and Sussex Courier

It's always a bit surprising to me how the Santa Clara valley fruit industry really was international, even as far back as the turn of the century. Vince Nola told me stories about playing on the burlap sacks to ship prunes to Germany. The San Jose Evening News in 1903 remarked on 200,000 pounds of A&C Ham Company's prunes sold in Antwerp in 1903. The U.S. Products cannery, run by the Dutch Vlessing company, exported canned fruit back to Europe.

But the most memorable for me is John Colpitts Ainsley's Ainsley Cannery in Campbell. Ainsley, an immigrant from Britain, worked with family back home to export fruit from the 1890's through the late 1930's. Ainsley was also known for its fruit packed quite attractively in glass jars. Although the most successful of the Campbell canneries, the plant itself is long gone; it's former location, north of the railroad tracks along Harrison Ave., is now townhouses.

April 20, 1928 Sevenoaks Chronicle

I'll admit I was always a bit curious about exporting fruit to England. I'd heard that each European country had its own preferences on fruit - prunes to Germany, apricots to England. But I didn't know much about what fruit they got, or how they used it. Luckily, with all the old newspapers scanned and put on the Internet, we've got a chance to see.

These three ads came from the 'teens and twenties. Ainsley was primarily known for its dessert fruits, at least according to the 1920's ads, advertising peaches, pears and apricots from the Valley to the Brits as they escaped the long winter. Ainsley also apparently did fruit salad and pineapple slices as well. The first sight to my modern eyes is the sheer size of the packaging - 2/12 lb apricots, peaches, and pears in cans, or glass-packed fruit for twice the price.

The earlier ad - from 1912 - highlights how folks were using canned fruit differently than how I grew up. I think of canned fruit as an old-fashioned and handy dessert source, but Ainsley was instead selling "Californian Apricot Pulp" for jam and marmalade making in seven pound tins. They even include the handy instructions for making jam at home - just add sugar and bitter almonds.

Possible Wired article intro sent back in time that inspired the St. Andrew's Citizen's typesetter.

I'll also highlight the sheer number of typefaces used in that St. Andrews newspaper advertisement, with at least eight typefaces appearing in the same ad - not just mainstays like a roman font and sans-serif font, but a stencil font *and* an Old Western typeface, all sitting there together. I might guess that a copy of Wired's Style Guide got sent back in time to land on the typesetter's desk, though it's a shame he couldn't also print the ad in several different contrasting colors.

I found these ads in the British Newspaper Archive, which also turned up a reporter's visit to San Jose in 1850:

"The valley of San Jose has quite won us by its extremely fine balmy climate and quietness... to us one of the pleasantest attractions of the place were the fine old orchards and vineyards attached to some of the old residences of the native Californians. Spacious and extensive, they are filled with sturdy and thrifty pear, apple quince, and other fruit trees, literally breaking down from the weight of the luscious burdens they bear...
We were quite surprised at the extent to which cultivation has been carried in the vicinity of San Jose, within two or three miles, quite a number of Americans have brought under cultivation large tracts of land, and with the greatest success. The labour has been mostly performed by Indians, who have been paid five to six dollars a week, we are informed. We heard of one gentleman having one patch of potatoes covering upwards of 60 acres. (October 24, 1850 Fife Herald)."

I never would have expected the Fife Herald to be featuring an article on San Jose agriculture (and a trip to the Almaden mines) just a couple years after the discovery of Gold, but we were certainly interesting enough to fill some column inches on a slow Thursday.

Before the Cannery, the Winery

One of the big themes in the Santa Clara Valley has been the changes in industry, both in the recent and distant past. If you’re looking at modern Silicon Valley, you’ll find that the seeds of Google and Apple were planted back in the 1920’s when vacuum tube makers located out here to get far away from the patent holders on the east coast. Vacuum tubes led to high-power radio and microwave; high power radio’s material scientists had all the skills to make semiconductors, semiconductors led to microprocessors, which led to personal computers, software, and eventually to hipster chicken day care. (Making Silicon Valley gives a nice overview of Silicon Valley's early history, if you're curious.)

For the agricultural Santa Clara Valley, we see a similar progression. The cattle ranches of the Mexican-era ranchos became wheat fields as the anglo farmers exported huge amounts of wheat to Europe. The wheat fields turned into vineyards. Various setbacks turned the vineyards into orchards; the orchards brought the canneries, which in turn replaced the orchards with manufacturing, can-making, and other industry. If you wander around, you’ll find signs of that past, whether a cannery now holding a microbrewery in San Jose, a grain shed in an empty field in Tres Pinos , or a remnant of a former winery in the middle of suburban Sunnyvale. Each economic or technical change created a new set of successful businesses, but caused hardship for the folks stuck on whatever was the previous boom.

I also run across those reminders of change in historical research. When I was tracking down the history of the Hunt Brothers cannery in Los Gatos, I found a reference that the new cannery was using buildings left over from the “Delpech Winery”. The name was new, but some research turned up two familiar stories: an immgrant making wine just like in the Old Country, and the fall of the wine industry and rising of the fruit industry in the Santa Clara Valley.

Amedee and Germaine Delpech

The immigrant in question was Amedee Delpech, an immigrant from Lot in southern France. Amedee came to California in 1876. It's unclear what Delpech did upon arriving, but I can suspect the common story: he worked for several years, saved up a bank-roll, then either bought or leased land for his own farm. All the good land in the Valley was already taken, so Delpech, like the new Italian, Portuguese, or Yugoslav immigrants, was pushed up into the marginal foothill lands. In Delpech’s case, he landed on a small amount of acreage at Patchen, at the summit of the hill between Los Gatos and Santa Cruz. Hints from land sales suggest his farm was on Summit Road, just west of the current Highway 17.

Amedee planted his land in grapes, and quickly set to work making wines and brandies. In 1888, Delpech presented his wines at the 6th Annual Viticultural Convention in San Francisco, offering up a Sauvignon Vert, White Pinot, as well as mission and peach brandies, all from the 1886 and 1887 vintage. (His nearby neighbor, E. Meyer in Wrights, was meanwhile making some lighter red wines -Carignan, Ploussard, and a Zinfandel-Mataro blend.) For the 1892 and 1896 voter registration, he listed his occupation quite solidly as winemaker. By 1903, he'd moved up in the world; a city directory listed him as a “Wine Manufacturer.”

Possible location of the Delpech vineyard at 22231 Summit Road. Perhaps that's even the Delpech barn?

It was an odd time to be in the wine business; although Santa Clara County had been a center for wine-growing, the trade had been in decline since the 1880s thanks to a glut of wine on the market and the plague of phylloxera. The disease hit the Santa Clara Valley just before Delpech decided on the Los Gatos expansion. Cupertino, for example, had been a center for vineyards. (Vineyards were preferred over fruit because it only took three years, rather than five, to start getting marketable crops.) Between 1895 and 1905, phylloxera hit Cupertino and decimated the vines. By the end, half the vineyards were gone, often replaced with fruit trees. The effect was also seen in the wineries. The California Wine Company along the narrow gauge railroad at San Fernando Street became Griffin and Skelley's dried fruit plant in the early 20th century. Zicovich’s Winery, a competitor in the wine and brandy trade, burned down in 1899 during the Great San Carlos Street Just West of the Railroad Tracks fire. There's no indication it was rebuilt.

The boom-and-bust of wineries can be seen ins the statistics. Wine grapes occupied less than 1,500 acres in 1876, but took 12,000 acres in the 1890's and at the turn of the century. Phyloxxera cut grapes to 6,000 acres in 1904, and although it recovered a bit, there were only 7,500 acres of grapes in Santa Clara County through the 1940's. (Ernest P. Peninou, A Statistical History of Wine Grape Acreage in California, 1856-1992).

Gustav Hueter's Mountain Springs Ranch. See if you can spot the rolling tree stumps! From Los Gatos Public Library, Linda Ward collection.

Delpech also apparently continued to expand his vineyards. In 1899, he managed to annoy his downhill neighbor by rolling tree stumps onto his property. The neighbor, Gustav Hueter, the San Francisco varnish king, appeared to be a bit high-strung, suing his downhill neighbors over water rights in Sheppard Gulch creek, and spending more on the lawsuit against Delpech than he claimed in damages. Delpech, in his defense, declared that his workers brought the errant stumps back:

In the Superior Court defendant Delpesch contended that although some of the rolling stumps had invaded the premises of Heuter they had done no harm except to bend over two madrone and three tanbark trees, and furthermore it was claimed that when a hired man of Delpesch had learned that some of the stumps had gone beyond their legitimate moorings they hitched onto them and hauled them up the hill again where they were blocked up to prevent their rolling tendencies.

If you ever thought the early landowner's life in the Santa Cruz Mountains was easy, just imagine trying to haul a bunch of huge redwood tree stumps back up a hill before your cranky downhill neighbor got annoyed. Almost makes wrestling a bear sound fun.

Hueter turns up in a couple other news stories, including one about some drunken yahoos shooting up the stuffed bear he placed at the entrance to his property on the Old Santa Cruz Highway. Then, in 1905, 65 year old Hueter was shot and killed by his thirty-three year old wife after he threatened her during a fight. The grand jury discovered that Kate Hueter had been overly friendly with the Los Gatos doctor which had spurred the row. Hueter had been in the process of contracting for oil drilling on his property to see if the Moody Gulch oil strikes might be repeated on his land. Hueter's land is now the Redwood Estates development.

By 1898, Amedee, was beginning to appear quite successful. His wife Germaine, and daughter Marguerite, had moved to San Jose, living in the Liberte Hotel (San Pedro and Post), then at 312 El Dorado (now Post) St - just about the time his daughter, Margaret, would have been starting school. They also had a small lot near the railroad tracks in Alma, bought in 1900, and another lot in San Jose downtown. Amedee was also active in politics, serving as a delegate for James G. Maguire for governor in the 1898 State Democratic Convention.

1900 was also the time for Amedee to try to grab at the gold ring of business. That year, he started building a winery in Los Gatos, at the intersection of the Saratoga Road and Santa Cruz Ave, with Jacob Lenzen and son designing the building, and Z. O. Field building the structure. The winery itself was incorporated in early 1903 as the “Los Gatos Winery”, with A. Berryman, P. J. Arnerich, J. J. Stanfield, and J. Bazus as directors - all proud burghers of Los Gatos business.

But even as the winery was built, its future fell into doubt. Amedee Delpech died suddenly in August, 1903:

"Amedee Delpech the well known winemaker of Los Gatos died at his home in that city on Wednesday from an attack of pneumonia.  The remains were forwarded to San Francisco today and the funeral will take place in that city on Friday at 2 o'clock under the auspices of the I. O. O. F. of which he was a member.  He was a native of France and was 52 years of age."

His friends in the Franco-American Lodge of the I.O.O.F. described him more explicitly in an obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Prominent Vineyardist Dead
Amedee Delpech, one of the best-known vineyardists and wine men of this county, died at his home near Los Gatos today. He was a native of France, aged 52 years. The funeral will be held in San Francisco tomorrow under the auspices of the Franco-American Lodge, I. O. O. F., of which he was a member.

His wife, Germaine, had the task of settling the estate; a sequence of real estate sales showed up in newspapers for the next couple years, selling the property at Patchen to Joseph McKiernan in 1904, and selling the downtown San Jose land in 1906. She later moved to San Francisco, “four children and one child still living.” Germaine ran a candy store for a bit, worked as a dress maker, and held a couple other jobs. In 1928, she lived in the Marina district.

The new winery itself spent a few years in limbo. At first, there was talk about the Los Gatos Cannery using the building for dried fruit packing in the 1906 season. The Los Gatos Fruit Growers’ Union, associated with George Hooke, claimed to have secured a lease for the 100 x 150 foot building, “half of which will be floored immediately and a model packing house will be arranged. Whether the union will pack its own fruit or not will depend on the prices offered in the bins by packers.” (August 27, 1906 San Jose Mercury News.) Another article claimed that quite substantial work was already in progress. After that, little can be found on the Los Gatos Fruit Grower’s Union.

That same year, George Hooke, the owner of the Los Gatos Canneries, decided he didn’t have enough excitement in his life, and decided growing a new cannery would be more fun than running the old one. Hooke sold the Los Gatos Canneries to the Hunt Brothers Packing Company, and left to manage new canneries in Watsonville and Sunnyvale. The Hunt Brothers needed to modernize the very victorian plant in the middle of Los Gatos’s downtown; by the next spring, Hunt decided that the best solution would be to build a modern plant, and saw the Delpech cannery as the perfect location - a huge space, easy rail access, and an existing building ready for reuse. Hunts also brought in their own people; Hooke had claimed Hunts would keep the existing management in place, but the manager and other staff were replaced within a year by Hunt veterans.

Hunt Brothers Making Extensive Improvements for New Canning Plant” - April 16, 1907 San Jose Mercury News.
“Very few people realize the vastness of the improvements that are underway at the Hunt Brothers big cannery at the corner of Santa Cruz Avenue and the Saratoga Road. The immense winery building that was erected by the late A. Delpech has been ceiled overhead, and a floor three feet above the ground, and ventilator and light shafts installed at convenient distances. At the north of the main building boilers are being installed, and when that is completed a suitable building will enclose it. The southwest corner of the lot has been covered with a high one story building that will be used as a receiving room, and as the fruit is processed it will finally be placed in the large warehouse alongside the track, the foundations of which are already laid. This building will be eighty feet wide by a length of two hundred and twenty five feet, and on the east side of it for the whole length is the spur track adjoining the main track of the Southern Pacific Company... Their superintendent C. C. Van Eaton has made his home here permanently. All the operations of moving from the old plant, which they purchased from the Los Gatos Canneries, has been made under his personal supervision. He brings with him skillful assistants in several departments who have been with him a number of years."

And with that, Delpech’s dream of a winery in Los Gatos instead helped the canning industry expand - the industry that chased the vineyards out of the Santa Clara Valley. Delpech’s would eventually see wine again; after Hunt Brothers closed their doors in the early 1930’s, the building was sold to Paul Masson (then owned by Seagrams), who used the former cannery for storage.

Delpech's winery and the Hunt buildings were torn down in the late 1950s; a strip mall took over the land in the late 1960's. If you go to the site of the old Delpech winery today, you’ll find a rather nice little wine-bar where you can enjoy some very good wines, and wonder what Amedee Delpech would have thought.

Amedee Delpech's story isn't that uncommon. There are shades of it in my great-grandfather's own story - immigrant comes to the United States, buys his own (marginal) land, and makes a home, vineyard, and farm. Delpech's story also matches Paul Masson, another French immigrant. Masson, who came to work for Charles LeFranc in his Almaden vineyards, later created his own winery that became world famous - probably just the ending Amedee Delpech was hoping for.

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Photo of Amedee and Germaine Delpech courtesy of Sandy Herve. Mountain Springs Ranch photo from Los Gatos Public Library; they have several other photos of the Heuter property.

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.

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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.