Historic Hood River
Apples Abroad?
10-10-2011
Notes
Welcome to “Harvest Week” at Historic Hood River. The Museum has extensive photos covering every aspect of Hood River’s fruit industry. We’ll just scratch the surface this week with a quick sampler.
Wherever these apples were headed, rail transport probably wasn’t an option. I wish we had some more information about it, but all we know is that the Apple Growers Association provided the photo to the Hood River News for publication. If you know more about some of the far flung destinations of Hood River fruit, please share.
Jim Gray
Looks like from the forty’s, maybe for the was effort, looks like a log raft in the background/
Charlott
An entire different "era" than we know now in the fruit industry. A lot of fruit went out of Hood River via the railroad. I believe that those train loads went east to be put on ships going to Europe. Ones going to the Portland docks were in some respects sent to the Asian markets. Keep in mind that in those days places such as New Zealand, Chile and other countries who are now involved heavily in the fruit industry did not exist. I know that a lot of the little tiny Forelle pears were destined to England and the Montreal and Quebec area, as they used those heavily in their Christmas fireplace mantel arrangement and for door wreaths. I think a lot of the Forrells are still sent to those areas.
Keep in mind, everything was packed in wooden boxes, unlike the cardboard of today. Lots more manhandling of boxes. If you notice in the pictrure how they are only loading a small portion in their "sling" type apparatus, unlike today, an entire container is loaded and picked up and put on the ship by gigantic cranes.
Many more man hours were involved in the era of this picture than with all the modern equipment of this day and age.
spinsur
there’s a couple of hints if one wanted to put his sherlock holmes hat on. there’s a life ring w/ ship name and hailing port obscured by slats, and it appears to be a date stamp on the fruit boxes in the foreground.
Ranger
The date stamped on the boxes looks like "11-5-26" or "11-5-29" to me. It gets pretty fuzzy with magnification.
Arthur
spinsur, here’s what I can read: The crates say "B S-20 LON". The life ring says "?LU?STA?? LINE?" on top, and on the bottom maybe "?ND?N?" So I’ll take a huge leap and say "Blue Star Line– London". (This is like "Wheel of Fortune")
Amazingly such a shipping company did exist, with refrigerated cargo ships from the teens through the 1990’s. They did service the west coast, so this could be one of their ships. In any case there’s an interesting history at bluestarline.org.
Esther Smith
Early copies of the HR News have all kinds of articles about what was being shipped where, and how; one of these days I’ll put together some kind of record.