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