Whiff From the Past

Greetings family and friends!  Today's "Nostalgic Rambling" recall's warm evenings seven decades ago....Bill

A WHIFF FROM THE PAST

On warm summer evenings in the early 1950’s the only sounds you could hear from our house in Castro Valley was the pop-pop-pop back firing of trucks down-shifting as they made their way down steep Pergola Hill on highway 50, the distant barking of dogs talking to one another through the blackness, and the rustling of pigeons as they settled down for the night at the Mel and Peg’s ranch next door. On very still nights you could smell the faint aroma of tomatoes being processed at the Hunt’s Cannery in Hayward, over the hills and more than ten miles away. 

The Hunt Brothers, William and Joseph, moved their successful canning business from Sebastopol to Hayward in 1895 in order to construct a larger facility on B Street near the Southern Pacific depot and take advantage of the regions fine farmlands, mild climate, rail accessibility and abundant harvests of peaches, apricots, cherries and tomatoes. The company prospered through the years growing to more than ninety acres of enclosed processing space and becoming Hayward’s major employer with three canneries, a pickling factory and tin can and glass manufacturing operations producing up to twelve million pounds of tomato products daily during the seasonal peak.

As the regions rich agricultural land transitioned into suburbs and strip malls the once largest cannery in the world became dependent on produce from increasingly distant sources, and finally relocating to the Sacramento Valley in 1981. Little remains of Hunt’s expansive nearly century long Hayward operations except for the memory of the faint whiff of tomatoes on warm summer evenings seven decades ago.

-Bill  3/23