1920s: October 2009 Archives

Lucky canning house, probably 1930s
My 96-year-old mother-in-law remembers picking string beans at farms in Chanceford Township when she was 10 or so in the 1920s. She says she picked beans during the day and then helped snip them at the Lucky canning house in the evening.

I purchased a Lucky canning house ledger covering September through November, 1943 at a yard sale a few years ago and donated it to the York County Heritage Trust Library/Archives. The ledger shows that they were canning corn and tomatoes then.
Wholesale customers for canned corn included Daugherty & Ward, Crisfield, Del.; Fulton, Mehring & Hauser, York; Oriental Paper & Bag Co.; District Wholesale Grocery Co. and Sprague, Warner, Kenny Co., all of Washington, D.C.; Maryland Gro. Co. Baltimore, Md. and Audment Bros., Lancaster, Pa. The U.S. Government purchased both 1,500 cases of corn and 3,750 cases of tomatoes, perhaps to feed World War II troops.

See below for my recent York Sunday News column on York County canners and vegetable pickers and also a photo of the Lucky cannery workers.

Utz new Carlisle Street plant in 1950

Here I was, all ready to resume my "potato chip series," working my way up to the biggies, including my favorite Utz chips, and what do I see when I pick this morning's paper of my porch? Utz is being sold! I breathed a little easier when I saw that Snyder's of Hanover is the tentative buyer. The maker of honey mustard pretzels can surely do no wrong. The article sounds like they don't plan to change the chips, just the owners. That's fine--just don't touch my chips!

Previous chip posts:
Bon-Ton /Bickel's.
Senft's.
El-Ge/Eagle Snacks/Frito-Lay.
Charles Chips.

The York Daily Record article has a nice little chronological history of each company gleaned from their websites: Utz and Snyder's The Utz info basically agrees with the information I found in the York County Heritage Trust file, recapped below: