Recently in 1930s Category

Tomatoes and Shakespeare and York County?

I recently wrote my York Sunday News column on the canning houses of York County, going back to the 1920s through the 1950s when the canneries dotted the county. Local farmers could easily haul their fresh vegetables just down the road to be canned and distributed all over the country.

The fanciful labels were lithographed in tempting color, usually depicting lush produce, but sometimes making you wonder why other designs were chosen. You can see the diversity in the photos shown here.

The Wel-Don bean labels above have a great story behind them.

Utz or Martin's--which is best?

York County potato chips manufacturers are in the news again. It looks like Utz has pulled out of the deal to merge with Snyder's of Hanover.

Before I wrap up my "potato chip series," I want to give a nod to Herr's snack foods, located not too far away in Nottingham. Their sour cream and onion ripple chips are second only to regular Utz in my book. Jim Herr bought a small Lancaster potato chip company in 1946, shortly before marrying wife Mim. They built the business up over the years, surviving a devastating plant fire in 1951. They now make over 340 snack foods and distribute them in 26 states and in Canada.

The chip manufacturers I have been researching had their beginnings in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. In a search for more early chip makers, I checked the Polk's city directories for York County. These directories were issued every two years and covered York city and "all boroughs located on the lines of York Railways Company" [the trolley lines]. York County Heritage Trust doesn't have quite a full run of directories, but I found more than I thought I would. (See below for a sampling of the results).

Who know how many more chipmakers there were out in the rural areas, like my mother and father. Even though my parents didn't stay in the potato chip business and become multi-millionaries, I would love to have one of the little wax paper bags with the imprint of Burk's Potato Chips. I remember some unused ones around the house from my childhood, long after they stopped making chips, but I guess they were eventually discarded. You just never know what might come up at a public sale or antique shop, so if anyone ever locates one, keep me in mind.

Some chipmakers listed in city directories:

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:

El-Ge/Eagle/Frito-Lay Plant on Gillespie Drive

When I started researching York County potato chips, I didn't realize how much I would find, and I'm still only scratching the surface. I haven't even gotten to my favorite yet, Utz. Previous posts covered Bon-Ton/Bickel's and Senft's.

Fellow blogger Jim McClure did address Martin's the other day. The other current York County chip makers, like Hanover Brands' Bickel's and Frito-Lay, have their fans, but most people I know are passionate about their Utz's or Martin's. Workplaces and families are divided into two camps by these chips, and rarely will you find someone who loves, or even tolerates, them both. (For all you fellow Utz fans that bemoaned along with me that you could only find Martin's at York's Central Market, I was excited today to find that a new pizza stand, Popi Joe's, on the Clark Avenue side of the market sells Utz's chips at a very reasonable price.)

This post concerns another York County brand of the past, El-Ge, and where they were and where they went.

A little while ago, in a post on York Fair horse racing, I mentioned that there were some motion pictures of racing at the fair on films recently digitized and preserved by the York County Heritage Trust Library/Archives, through a grant from the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.

Charles and Carrye Noss editing film. Note the movie camera at left.

Those images and many more were taken and shared with the community, by Charles H. Noss and his wife Carrye Neiman Noss. From 1923 to 1960 Mr. and Mrs. Noss filmed local parades and events, such as the York Fair and the construction of the 1930s Wrightsville-Columbia Veterans Memorial Bridge across the Susquehanna River, and shared them with the community. They also traveled around the country and recorded subjects from Pennsylvania Dutch customs to national parks.

The Nosses showed the movies free of charge to churches and civic groups. An admission or offering must have been collected for the groups to keep, because a November 12, 1946 Gazette and Daily newspaper article says that by then the Mr. and Mrs. Noss had shown the films to about 132,000 persons and raised nearly $100,000 for the organizations. Since they continued the showings until Mr. Noss died in 1962, they could have conceivable raised hundreds of thousands of dollars by then.

Local news has always been avidly read in York County newspapers. A sampling from September 10, 1938 from Glen Rock includes vandalism on one hand but civic good on the other.

The vandalism appears under the heading: "School Board Scolds Boys."

In my recent post on Jonathan Jessop and his York Imperial apple I mentioned that his son Edward raised a large family at Springwood farm. In 1930, one of those children, Little Rock, Arkansas businessman Alfred Jessop, wrote back to York to his brother Jonathan. He recounted his memory of Confederate soldiers visiting the farm in 1863.

Click here for previous Jessop post.

The letter reads in part:

Some of my recent posts have covered motion pictures and other forms of entertainment around York County in 1938. For a few hours local people could be distracted from the toll taken by the depression, which had dragged on for nine long years.

Click below for the previous posts.
Movies.
And more movies.
Music and dancing.

One Warrington Township farmer evidently found another way to forget the dark days. The September 15, 1938 York Gazette reports:

I had such a good time researching what movies local people were watching while they were just coming out of the Great Depression in 1938 that I neglected to check on the other forms of public entertainment available to them.

Click here for the posts about movies.

So I went back to the newspaper microfilm to check see what kind of live shows were happening on Labor Day weekend in 1938. Music of all kinds was a draw, whether for listening or dancing. You could fill the weekend and more.