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NOTE: This exhibit is CLOSED. For reference only. |
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Can
It! Join us this summer to learn more about peaches and canning. Can It: Canning in Delaware will open July 9 in the Atrium Gallery of the Research Library. The exhibit will feature photographs, account books from Richardson and Robbins, can labels, and tokens given to fruit pickers and cannery workers.
Today, locally grown peaches, corn, tomatoes, and other produce are part of summer’s bounty, a welcome but not essential change from the fresh, frozen, and canned fruits and vegetables we eat all year long. For many of our ancestors, however, those fruits and vegetables were serious business.Commercial farmers and canners, and the laborers who picked the crops and filled the cans, depended on summer’s produce for work and wages, profits and prosperity. This summer our programs will celebrate and appreciate this part of Delaware’s agricultural heritage.
From the mid 1830s through the early 1900s, many Delaware farmers placed their faith in peaches. Commercial peach production began in the Delaware City area in the mid 1830s. Its success inspired other farmers, who planted huge orchards with thousands of trees. Armies of workers—blacks and whites, male and female, picked the peaches. Peach wagons filled the roads to the railroad station or the cannery. Millions of baskets—8.7 million in the peak year of 1875—made their way to market. All went well for the farmer until an incurable disease called the yellows struck his orchard. As orchards fell to the disease, Delaware’s peach belt gradually moved south from Delaware City to Middletown by 1870, Smyrna by 1880, and Bridgeville and Seaford by 1890. While they lasted, peaches brought prosperity to many Delaware farmers.Peaches and other produce stimulated the growth of the canning industry in Delaware. Richardson and Robbins, the state’s first cannery, opened in Dover in 1856. Early canneries made their own cans and were often started by tinsmiths. The modern "sanitary can," still in use today, was introduced in 1898. Most Delaware canneries were in Kent and Sussex counties, as near as possible to the peaches and other crops. Some canneries were small, short-lived businesses, operating in simple buildings. Others, like Richardson and Robbins and Cannon’s in Bridgeville, were large, stable enterprises that continued for many years. |
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Can
It! Canning in Delaware |
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