Buying Fruit at Wrights: San Tomas Drying Company

It's still true: all we often know about the San Jose dried fruit packing houses is how their baseball team scored, and why they got sued.

Wagons line up at Wrights Station to load and unload from boxcars.

Today's lesson on that subject comes from the San Tomas Drying Company, another dried fruit packer who appeared in city directories between 1900 and 1910, but left few other traces. Heck, they didn't even have a baseball team, so we don't get to see how they stacked up against J.K. Armsby or the Guggenhime crew.

But, luckily, they got sued, and that suit hints a little at life at the San Tomas Drying Company, as well as the life of the plaintiff - an orchardist up in the Santa Cruz Mountains at the turn of the century. When you see that photo of the boxcars loaded at Wrights with the names of the buyers emblazoned across them, the suit explains how those prunes got to those boxcars.

The specific case is Morrell vs San Tomas Drying Company. J.B. Morrell ran a large ranch up along Summit Road at the crest of the Santa Cruz Mountains - an awfully long way out in the hills, but luckily convenient to the former South Pacific Coast railway line at Wrights Station. Early in the 1907 season, Morrell succumbed to the sweet pleading of the San Tomas fruit buyer, who offered to buy his whole crop for $70 a ton (around 3 cents/pound). That price assumed that the prunes would come in at 75 per pound; if they were larger or smaller, the price would be adjusted up or down.

For San Tomas Packing Company, Henry Booksin Jr., son of a famous San Jose orchardist, signed the contract. Booksin also noted that the crop was going to be sold to Balfour Guthrie, a large British food importer (who, twenty years later, was trying to buy the Virden Packing canneries when Charles Virden's empire collapsed, so Morrell's prunes were probably going for export to feed the children of Europe.

The contract's a little scattered about exactly where the prunes needed to be delivered. First, it says Wrights, then it says San Jose:

"[buying] the entire crop of dried Fr. [french] prunes, season 1907, and estimated at 100 tons, and grown and dried in the orchard known as Morrell Ranch - Wrights, f.o.b. [freight on board - Morrell was responsible for loading] cars Wrights, tested at Wrights… All fruit to be sound and merchantable and well dried, free from slab, of choice quality, and delivered f.o.b. packing house, situated on the Infirmatory Road, Santa Clara Co., California, packed in sacks furnished by the buyer, original condition as taken from the drying yard…
"San Tomas Drying and Packing Company agrees to pay balance of purchase money as soon as delivery is completed and sizes determined. Delivery to be made as directed, final delivery before November 30, 1907."

One obvious question is the location of Booksin's packing plant, for the city directories only say it was on "Infirmatory Road", now Bascom Ave. Booksin addressed the contract as "Moulton's Switch, Santa Clara County", and indicated that the fruit would need to be delivered there. Now, Moulton's Switch helps us place San Tomas Packing, for Stillman Moulton ran a dried fruit packing house on Infirmatory Road in the late 1890's on some land he had next to the South Pacific Coast narrow gauge tracks. (A September 1, 1890 San Jose Evening News gives us details of the operation.) Period USGS maps show the likely location as the triangular lot at 1400 South Bascom in San Jose; it's now the home of a dated 1950's strip mall, but the USGS maps show signs of buildings and industries around the turn of the century.

So when the buyer gave Morrell the contract, he also handed over $1 to seal the deal, and then everyone waited for the harvest. And it wasn't too bad a year; after the drying was done, Morrell grabbed a bunch of teamsters and hauled 134,000 pounds of dried prunes down to the Wrights train station, then loaded them on the equivalent of five or six railroad cars.

But Morrell had actually harvested and dried 172,000 pounds. San Tomas Drying Company, with its bins already packed, asked Mr. Morrell to hang on to the rest of the prunes for a while… They went up to the Morrell Ranch in December, inspected the prunes, and said all but a ton were in fine shape, but again asked to hold off on taking the prunes until May because their bins were still full. Finally, in April 1908, San Tomas dances around for a bit, and says they're not willing to take the last ton of prunes. Morrell, fed up, sells the remaining prunes at auction, then sues San Tomas for the difference in the promised price and what they got at auction.

San Tomas Drying Company lost the suit - they'd promised to buy the crop and they didn't. Considering the times, it's possible to guess why they were being so ornery. 1906 had been a bad year for dried fruit as the Great San Francisco Earthquake destroyed packing houses and disrupted travel. Even with that, the crop came in larger than expected, and prices dropped from an expected 3.5 cents/pound to 2 cents a pound.

1907 was better, with some of the highest prices in memory for fruit. But a sulfur scare caused France and Pennsylvania to ban sulfured fruits, and even though the prohibitions were loosened within a year, prices for the 1908 crop were unbearably low. For Booksin, with his packing house full of fruit that might have been selling slowly, picking up additional fruit must have been an awful risk, especially as the 1908 crop approached.

I like this story best for the details about what it took to ship hundreds of tons of prunes out of the mountains. The packing house had to send up sacks, which would have to be hauled to the orchard. Fruit would have needed to be harvested, dried, sacked, and stored. Multiple wagon loads would have needed to haul all the fruit down from the ranch and over to the station to fill a freight car. The fruit would have been hauled down to the packing house and placed in bins for storage until sale, then it would have been pulled out, cleaned, boxed, and shipped out again. All this work would have been manual, with the sacks handled multiple times. In these pre-automobile days, just hauling all that fruit around must have been costly and tiring.

And those teamsters at Wrights were only the first ones to get tired.

This story also states an important lesson: if the packing house asks you to hold onto the fruit for a while because their bins are full, start looking around for other buyers.

No matter how good their baseball team might be.

[Photo of wagons at Wrights Station from History Los Gatos.]

The Santa Clara Valley's Other Great Booms

As interesting as the Santa Clara Valley fruit industry can be, there have been other booms in the Santa Clara Valley, and their stories are as good or better. Here's a few great links to the history of Silicon Valley: as the source of computer chips, microwave tubes and defense companies, or software.

Steve Blank's Secret History of Silicon Valley, told often through his experiences in the defense industry of the 1960's and 1970's. Steve's also well-known for his other stories about the chip and internet industries, as well as his ideas about startups and entrepreneurial spirit.

Not Even Silicon Valley Escapes History, from the Atlantic magazine. It's mostly focused on the toxic contamination left over from the early chip companies.

The Atlantic also generated a map of Silicon Valley based on a 1977 directory. It shows the offices of all the companies that came and went. Not surprisingly for its era, most of the former cannery districts - along Fourth Street or Auzerais Street in San Jose, in Campbell, or on the north side of San Jose - show no signs of tech life.

Mountain Fruit II: More Questions About the Machado Ranch

(See Part One for more on the Machado ranch.)

A couple days ago, I gave the capsule history of my great-grandparents' ranch above Hayward. There's three last points I want to mention, one railroad and fruit industry-related, and the other two just for my own curiosity.

• First, where did Joe Machado sell his apricots?
• Second: does it look like there's any evidence that the orchard was run commercially after Joe died in 1939?
• Third: where exactly was the farmhouse on the property?

Where did Joe Machado sell his apricots? When asked about the fruit buyers, Carl Machado just remembers the buyers were big from big companies.

Interviewer: After the buyers bought them, would he come and pick them up, or did you take them to his warehouse?
Carl: We'd take them down to… I don't know where it was now, maybe the depot, ship them out.
Interviewer: And you'd take them there.
Carl: Yeah, we'd have to sack them up, buy sacks, burlap sacks, and sew 'em all up nicely and take them down to… the buyer, the warehouse, wherever it was. We had a team of horses at that time, and the last few years we had a team of horses bring them down in the wagon.

Now, the uncertainty about where the fruit went intrigued me. In San Jose, you couldn't throw a brick without hitting a dried fruit packer, so it wasn't hard to haul a wagonload of dried fruit a short distance to San Jose, or Campbell, or Los Gatos to the packer of your choice. The San Jose phone book, after all, had a separate section just for dried fruit packers. I'd also seen a comment about how the packers tried to keep receiving stations close to the farms so they were within a short wagon ride from the orchards.

Hayward didn't appear to have any dried fruit packing houses, and so when Carl mentioned hauling the fruit down to the depot, I imagined that perhaps they had to pay to ship the fruit to San Jose to one of the large buyers; taking the horse and wagon to San Leandro, Oakland, or San Jose would have been unbearable. We also know the fruit wasn't staying locally; the processors nearby were all canners, and we know Joe was drying his fruit.

I did a bit more searching, and found out there were two other ways that Hayward area farmers could get their crops to the packers.

First, there might not have been dried fruit packers in Hayward, but there was at least one in Niles, several miles away. An 1893 California Department of Horticulture report names the local farmer's cooperatives, and notes the existence of the "Niles Cooperative Fruit Association" at that time, with no co-ops further north. A August 23, 1913 California Fruit Grower magazine mentions that Ellsworth Packing in Niles had just shipped a carload of apricots to Hamburg, Germany, so perhaps some of Joe's apricots were in that boxcar. Ellsworth looks like they got swallowed up by the Schuckl cannery folks, for a 1918 Western Canner and Packer notes that Schuckl was leasing the Ellworth Packing Company's plant for use as a receiving station for California Prune and Apricot Growers (Sunsweet). Sunsweet's presence implies there may have been some Sunsweet growers in the Hayward area.

The other possibility is that the packers didn't have a permanent place, but did hang around Hayward when the fruit was coming in. Fremont's Tri-City Voice noted a 1891 newspaper article that explained:

Harvested fruit had to be marketed and shipped, so shipping depots were opened at the railroad station during the season by San Francisco firms. Ellsworth and Co. were the big shippers and handled most of the cherries.

Packers' representatives at Wrights station, 1893. From History Los Gatos.

If the California Packing Corporation or Rosenberg Brothers had bought fruit from farmers in the area, they may have just sent an agent out to the railroad depot where he could inspect and weigh the incoming fruit, and pay the farmer while shipping a carload back to the main warehouse. The well-known shot of boxcars on the siding at Wrights siding, each branded with the name of a separate packer, may have been displaying the temporary presence of each of the packers.

Was the orchard run commercially after Joe's death? All the stories I heard in childhood about the ranch made it sound like the orchard was in business right up until the suburbs intruded. I'd heard stories about how the trees were old, and keeping the orchard running would have meant replacing the trees, and I'd assumed that there had been serious thought of replacing the trees. I'd also heard plenty of stories about apricots on the ground, and assumed those were the ones that fell off before or after the harvest. However, Carl stated that they'd continued drying fruit for only a few years after Joe's death in 1939, but the kids lost interest in the work, and Carl didn't have the energy on his own to keep the business running.

Time lapse of changes on ranch in 1946, 1958, 1968, and 1979.

I asked family about this: did anyone remember the orchard actually running? All the stories I got back were that the trees were still there, but no one remembered commercial activity, just family and neighbors grabbing the occasional bucket of fruit.

Luckily, I do have a source to help get the truth: old aerial photos. Historic Aerials has photos of the ranch every ten years from around 1946. Looking at these (see the time-lapse photos to the right), I can see that the orchards were in good shape in 1946, but the trees disappeared or shrank by 1958, and many trees were gone completely by 1968, the year the orchard was sold for development. The last photo from 1979, ten years after the sale, shows nearly no trees remaining from the orchard. It sure looks like the ranch wasn't being run commercially by the 1950's. Our ranch wasn't unique; all the other orchards in the neighborhood disappeared at about the same rate. Dry-farming orchards in the East Bay Hills doesn't appear to have been a profitable post-war activity.

Where was the farmhouse?The only two photos I have of the house up at the ranch were the two in the last article, and there aren't many cues to figure out which way the photo was being taken. I always assumed the farmhouse was on the south end of the property, furthest from the road.

1946 aerial photo of ranch, with landmarks marked.

The aerial photos show I had that wrong - the farmhouse was on the west side of the property, shaded by eucalyptus lining the western end. This probably was a good arrangement in pre-air-conditioning days, with the farmhouse protected both from the hot afternoon sun and the winter winds. You can also see the dirt road winding up the hill from D Street / Quarry Road. The builders did a bunch of grading when they put the houses in; Google's satellite view shows large hillsides rising behind the homes on the west side of the property, so the correct location of my great-grandparents' farmhouse would be at about roof level of some of the houses halfway down the street.

Time to show the aerial photos to family, and see what memories they spur.

[Wrights Station photo from History Los Gatos. Aerial photos from Historic Aerials; captions are my own.]

Living History: Drying Some Apricots

And, of course, one of the drawbacks of researching the dried fruit industry is that at some point, you've got to try it yourself.

Exhibit A: a flat of drying apricots. Our friends Michelle and Jim have an extremely productive Blenheim apricot tree in their backyard. They kindly let me snag ten pounds of apricots, which got laid out on a homemade drying tray made of plastic pipe and plastic screen wire that was laying around. 24 hours in, the apricots are drying ok, but some clouds and cooler temperatures this evening had me watching the sky much as Joe Machado would have been doing on his drying yard a hundred years back.

Mountain Fruit: "I Don't Know How the Heck They Made A Living."

Folks who've been reading the blog know one of the reasons I model the 1930's: to understand the world my grandparents lived in. My great-grandfather, after all, had a ten acre apricot orchard in the hills above Hayward. I never heard many stories about the ranch and about the fruit industry from family, but the stories I've heard about Santa Clara Valley farms gives me some hints about what his life was like.

But, you know, if you do enough family history, you'll be amazed what stories you'll turn up.

I took some vacation time last week, and decided to spend a day looking through Alameda County deeds to learn more about the farm. I managed to find the original deed, which was a nice find, and a few other details about the property, but nothing that really told a human story. On the way back to the Valley of Heart's Delight, I stopped off at the Hayward Public Library, just in case they had something interesting. There wasn't much - a couple old city directories, and a shelf of local history books. One was a spiral-bound history of local agriculture with some decent stories, but again, nothing special. But leafing through, I saw a familiar last name, and found a couple pages on my great-uncle and his beekeeping. In between the bee stories, there were some quick details of his father's farm. Wow - where'd they get those? From an oral history interview they did with him back in 1983!

Back home, I sent off a note to the Hayward Area Historical Society asking if they had a transcript of that interview. They're in the middle of moving their collection, so I really was expecting either no answer, or a curt "sorry, can't get to that stuff, ask again in six months." Instead, I got an answer the next day from one of the archivists. "We don't have a transcript of the interview, but we do have the original reel-to-reel tape. It's not in the best shape, but it's listenable. Oh, and we're sending you a digital copy of the audio."

And that was it - I had the audio of my long-gone great uncle telling about the ranch, his father, and the apricot business. After all I've been learning about drying yards, dried fruit buyers, and small family farms, my family's story now seems much more real.

Joe and Mary Machado Azevedo, and two of their kids.

Joe Azevedo's Fruit Ranch: My great-grandfather, Joe Azevedo (Jose Machado de Azevedo), the son of a whaler, was born in 1857 on the island of Sao Jorge in the Azores. Joe's father, Antonio, had done pretty well in the whaling business, and had returned to the islands with enough money to build a new house on the hillside above the village. That earned Antonio the nickname "Casanova" (new house). The nickname stuck around for a century; my Uncle Carl was able to ask a cab driver in the '60's to take him to Tony Machado Casanova's house, and the cab driver went there as if he'd done it a hundred times.

Joe emigrated to California in the 1870's. He roamed around the State, working in a livery stable in San Francisco and also as a shepherd and sheep-shearer for the Miller and Lux company for several years. In 1884, he took his savings, plunked down a thousand dollars and change, and bought a ten acre farm at the top of the hill above Hayward. The property wasn't much; it was a dry and hilly farm, with the top end of a canyon dividing the property, but the right scale for a family farm. This was probably the best Joe could do; most of the good land had been claimed long before, so newer immigrants were often chased into the marginal land on the hills. The Piccheti family on Montebello Ridge near Cupertino's another example, as would be any of the families up in the hills behind Wrights Station.

Joe's new land had been part of Guillermo Castro's Rancho San Lorenzo. Guillermo's gambling habit cost him the land, sold on the courthouse steps in 1864 to Faxon Atherton, a San Francisco banker and land speculator. Faxon and partners had bought the land in hopes of encouraging small farms to feed San Francisco, and slowly sold off smaller lots. The land on the top of the hill didn't sell til Atherton's widow sold it to Frank Enos Garnier in 1879, who subdivided it further until Joe bought the acreage in 1884.

Joe planted an orchard and vineyard on his new land. He used the vineyard for home-made wine. Carl remembered his father pulling up the vineyard, perhaps as Prohibition came through in the late 'teens, with more apricot trees going in their place. Those apricots were the primary crop, with enough cherry trees to justify the occasional harvesting, and assorted other trees for family use. Carl remembers helping his father harvest cherries once for the canneries. Occasionally, Joe planted peas in between the rows of trees.

None of the trees were irrigated: as Carl puts it:

Interviewer: How did they irrigate those trees to start out?
Carl: Never did irrigate. Never put a bucket of water on any tree.
Interviewer: Is that right?
Carl: If it was today, I think I'd have put sprinklers on there.
Interviewer: Um hm.
Carl: Yeah, it would make a good, it would make a… but they had good apricots. Sure. We made good mountain fruit, you know?
Interviewer: Well, they're much sweeter when you don't irrigate them.
Carl: Yeah.
Interviewer: Then... Carl: Yeah, they were really good. Everyone knew. The buyer would know. The buyer would always come out to get dried apricots. They were looking for that!

The farm. Notice the drying flats laid out to the right of the house.

Those mountain-grown, unirrigated apricots might not have produced as heavily as the trees in the flat lands, but they made up for it in taste. Carl remembered that the dried fruit buyers would climb up the hill to the farm every year to convince Joe to sell his crop to them. "I'll give you six cents a pound today." "I don't know, I want to wait a couple more days." The buyer would troop back down the hill. Coming back closer to harvest, they'd offer an additional half-cent, and Joe would promise his apricots to the buyer's company. Carl just remembers the buyers were from the different big companies and didn't remember a particular company, making me suspect that Joe was selling to Guggenhime, Rosenberg, or California Packing Corporation rather than to the Sunsweet co-op. Unlike Vince Nola's stories about farmers selling to the same company every year, I suspect Joe was bouncing between packers depending on the price they could offer.

Joe Machado Azevedo, drying trays, and a dryyard cart.

When the apricots were ripe, Joe hired crews to harvest and dry the fruit. He ran a dryer on the property for the crop, with drying trays and dry yard carts to carry the full trays out to the closely-mowed drying yard, and a sulfur house for preserving the fruit. His wife, Mary, would have her hands full during the harvest cooking for the workers. Carl remembers spending every Fourth of July cutting apricots, and the other kids got drafted to help pick up deadfall fruit.

Joe also dried fruit for the neighbors with smaller orchards. He didn't charge for the drying as long as they cut the fruit. Once dry, the fruit was weighed in the scale just inside the fruit shed, bagged into burlap sacks, and hauled by horse and wagon down to the depot for shipping to the packer.

But making a living off ten acres of mountain fruit took a bunch of extra work. During the winter, Carl remembered his father assembling a crew for pruning the orchards of other land-owners. Even with that, money was tight. The family says that they never wanted for food - they raised hogs, quail, and chickens for meat, kept a cow for milk, and had all the fruits and vegetables they could eat, Cash was a different story, and always scarce when the doctor needed to be paid, or supplies needed to be bought. "I don't know how they lived… but it was pretty rough".

Joe, in 1938, with a full tray of apricots

Joe Azevedo died in 1939, 82 years old. The kids ran the orchard for a couple more years, but eventually gave up on working it commercially because of a lack of interest. Carl, always fond of the ranch and the business, would have liked to keep it going, but just wasn't up for doing it alone. It couldn't have been a money-maker, especially at that small scale.

And so the orchard sat idle for years, with family and friends hauling out buckets of fruit for their own use, but no major harvesting or drying. My mom remembers her two cousins, future golf pros, practicing their swings in the orchard with the fallen fruit.

And it eventually came to an end. Joe's kids, hit by taxes, assessments for a sewer extension, a lack of interest in the orchard, and the pressures of their own families, finally sold the land in the 1960's for development. It took the buyer a good ten years to build, but eventually the ten acres of Joe Azevedo's "fruit ranch" got planted in in a bumper crop of tract homes.

I doubt any of this story is unique; a hundred families in the Santa Clara Valley could tell the same. If you go hiking up behind the Pichetti Winery in Cupertino, you'll hike through the remains of some old pear orchards, another set of dry-farmed orchards that couldn't compete with the productive farms on the valley floor. If you wander through Sunnyvale, or San Jose, or Campbell, you'll see the tract houses that replaced the Johnson's orchard, or the Kirk orchard.

And when the trains on my layout stop at Alma, or at Campbell, or at Wrights, you might see a model of a horse and wagon unloading sacks of dried apricots from another small mountain orchard - maybe from a Portuguese farmer, or an Italian orchardist, or a Croatian rancher. That's also Joe Azevedo's fruit heading east on those boxcars.

See Part Two for more on the ranch, and how my great-grandfather sold his dried fruit.

[All photos from our family's collection. Great, heartfelt thanks to the Hayward Area Historical Society, not only for sharing the tape, but sending me a copy during the one week where I'd have the time to listen, transcribe, and research its contents.]

Crowdsourcing Railroad History

One of the great things about the Internet is how so much you can learn from the various mailing lists, Internet forums, and personal sites. That's a big change from traditional academic history where finding sources other than published books required moving to the place you were studying and spending a few months interviewing everyone you could.

Getting all the folks interested in particular places - professional historians, local historians, and railfans - together could help open up tons of new data for all communities. I've been chatting with folks from Stanford Spacial History Lab's Living with Railroads project about their new project to crowdsource railroad and western history by helping local historians, railfans, and academics share, collaborate, and build off each other's work. Watch later this year for more on their project, focused on western railroads and specifically the Southern Pacific.

An Experiment: Can You Help? Til then, you can help them understand what each group can contribute via a quick experiment. They've put up a set of Southern Pacific-related photos, and they want to know what you see in the photos. Can you identify the locations? Do you know the context? Can you see specific details that others might miss or might not understand?

To participate, visit their blog, check out the photos, and share what you know in the comments section for each photo.

Click here to comment on the photos at railfanphotos.blogspot.com.

Progress, 2013 Edition

For the last couple of years, I've been writing down a list of my big project plan, and then checking at the end of the year how I did. (See 2012 or 2011 for the past lists.) I've used these lists both so I can see my progress and so I can keep a list of bigger projects to start when I'm feeling ambitious. I've been slow to reflect on last year's progress, but let's take a look now, shall we?

• Host for 2012 Prorail in San Jose. Done. Also had operating sessions as part of the 2012 and 2013 Layout Design and Operations meet, my favorite local model railroad event, and for a couple other events.
• Finish the buildings and scenery at the south end of Campbell. (Station area, Hyde cannery, Sunsweet). I built the model of the Sunsweet building, but did no work on either the Hyde Cannery or the larger scene. I did add tht
• Mock up and redo the Abinante and Nola scene), terrain, and add Los Gatos Creek. Started, but no photos shown, and still plenty to be done.
• Back-date the layout to 1928, and replace the West San Jose depot scene with the building supply warehouse that existed before Diridon station. No work, and unsure exactly which year I want to model now.
• Buildings and scenery at Del Monte cannery. No work, but I did find that great panorama photo of the Del Monte plant in 1934, looking very Dickensian and unlike anything I expected.
• Extend lower staging another foot so 11-12 car trains will fit comfortably. No work, and still awfully necessary.
• Mine or oil pumping at Alma. The Moody Gulch scene went in and a few folks have even switched boxcars up there, but it's a challenging place when the only runaround is off in Alma, and is on a steep grade.
• Redo track around Glenwood that gets more than its fair share of derailments. No work, though I did rip up and replace similarly misbehaving switches in Los Gatos and on the spur leading to Plant 51. Maybe this year.
• Redo switches at the west end of Campbell. Done, though I don't really remember when I did this.
• Improve the rough scenery on the Santa Cruz staging, and cover gaps in the benchwork. No work.
• Ballast everywhere to help keep track from moving. Done along the San Jose to Campbell curve, but plenty more still to do.
• More trees for Wrights, and perhaps carve out space for the prototype water tank. No work.
• Reprogram some flaws in the ABS signals. Don't remember, but I'll bet I haven't.
• Patch holes and gaps in the scenery and fascia. Done for Prorail.

Whew.. that was a lot for the last year and a half, and I forgot that half that work was done so recently. I guess this means the list really did help me.

2013 Resolutions (six months too late)

So time to do the same thing for the remainder of 2013. What's my remaining to-do list?

• Complete the half the Campbell scene. Build the Hyde Cannery buildings, and add scenery around the station. For bonus points, include the abandoned tracks for the Interurban line on the far side of the station.
• Add scenery at Moody Gulch.
• Complete the San Carlos Street scene, with a complete overpass, creek bed, and new building for the Higgins-Hyde packing house.
• Lengthen the lower staging so we can store longer trains.
• Complete the Virden Packing cannery, and add a spur to serve it. There's no room for the prototypical spur, but there's room off the WP interchange track.

That's a fair list of work for the next six months. Check back in January to hear how I did!