Historic Hood River
Hood River Cannery
Notes
This is a building we don’t see often in the archives. I believe this is the cannery building which we now know as Springhouse Cellars, as well as “The Ruins” next door. The wood fired boiler with a 30 foot chimney is described on the Sanborn map.
I did some research a while back for the owners of Springhouse. Here’s my history of the cannery:
The cannery building which is now Springhouse Cellars opened as the Cloud-Newton Company in the spring of 1914: see this ad for workers.
Here’s another great ad: “Girls Wanted at the Cannery”
This article explains the labor problem.
They closed in September 1914, then reopened and expanded their business in spring 1915 and changed the name to the Hood River Canning Company.
They were running full tilt in 1916, according to this article.
In researching this I learned that cherry stems were shipped to Europe for poison gas production in WWI.
The 1916 Sanborn insurance map shows the building. Note the road coming down from the cold storage facility on State Street to bring the fruit down for canning, entering through the rear. You can see the detail spec of the raised roof and the sidelights, as well as the basement warehouse (which confirms it was subsurface back then). Interesting that it was fueled by wood, though it had electric lights. The structure to the east was a powerhouse to generate steam— it has a 30 foot high chimney.
Note the ruins is not present in 1916. There is also an “incline roadway” down from Front Street. I haven’t yet found the construction date for The Ruins.
The cannery is greatly expanded in the 1928 map, including The Ruins building and their own rail spur, as well as cider presses to the west. We have a photo (courtesy of ODOT) which shows this entire operation. The photo is sometime after 1920 as it includes the bridge constructed in 1920.
Kenn
Thorough and very impressive research, I have often been curious about this structure.
Buzz
Interesting. Appears to be scrap wood from mills in the area. Better use than wigwam burners.
L.E.
Fascinating reading Arthur. Thank you for the research.
A note about the poison gas. I have family in Canada and when I visit, I enjoy reading history of the local area. Because of England, Canadian soldiers entered WWI much earlier than U.S. soldiers. You would be surprised at how many young Canadian men came home from that war with their health damaged from the poison gas. Most of them came back home to farm, but it was a struggle with their bad health, and it seems like many died fairly young.
We don’t read about it as much here, so I assume the U.S. soldiers were not in the trenches with the gas. Interesting that we helped contribute to it.
Arthur
A little more on cherry stems and poison gas, from a 1916 newspaper article: "The stems, from which cyanide of potassium is made, were formerly shipped in bales to Germany…"
Charlott
American soldiers were gassed. My mother’s uncle came home and was affected his entire short life from it.
DJW
It’s highly improbable that cherry stems were shipped to Germany in WW1. Britain had a naval blockade for the entire war. What is more probable is that cherry stems were shipped to Germany prior to the war as part of normal trade – Germany was the world leader in chemicals at the time and given the vast amounts of stems needed, would have probably found Oregon farmers more than eager to sell the byproducts of cherry growing. The use of poison gas was of course, horrible – however, if you read Richard Rhodes’ "The Making of the Atomic Bomb," he goes into the parallels of how those responsible for the decisions to develop poison gas and the atomic bomb used the argument that the weapons they were developing would be so devastating that it would end the war (in their favor, of course) and in the end would save lives on both sides. Well worth a read.
carl watson
My wife was born in Hood River and her mother worked in a cannery fruit packing place, it was suppose to be across the street from the house they lived in. The years would have been from 1935 to 1955 what canneries would have been there.