The Canneries
Near Modesto, California
For most of the twentieth century, the smell of summer in Modesto was the smell of fruit being cooked.
The canning industry grew alongside the orchards, because an orchard without a way to preserve its harvest is a problem solved only by proximity to market, and the markets for Central Valley peaches and apricots were not in Modesto. They were in Chicago, in New York, in the export trade with Europe and Asia. The canneries made the distance negotiable.
The California Packing Corporation, which became the Del Monte Corporation in nineteen sixty-seven when the company formalized the brand name it had been building for decades, operated plants throughout the Central Valley. Del Monte's presence in Modesto represented one of the largest seasonal employment systems the city ever supported: cannery workers, seasonal employees, many of them women and many of them recent migrants, processing hundreds of thousands of cases of peaches, apricots, and tomatoes each summer.
The canning floor was a particular kind of labor. It was fast, it was hot, and it ran around the clock during peak season because the fruit did not wait. Workers who came from Mexico and the Philippines and from the Dust Bowl states in the nineteen thirties brought families who settled in Modesto's neighborhoods, enrolled children in the schools, and stayed after the seasonal work ran out. The canneries shaped the city's demographics in ways that long outlasted the plants themselves.
Stanislaus County's peach acreage has declined from more than thirteen thousand acres in nineteen eighty to under four thousand in recent years, as almonds proved more profitable and less labor-intensive. The Del Monte Modesto cannery, which had been the largest tomato-processing plant in the United States at various points, faced closures and restructuring in the early twenty-first century. What the canneries built, in neighborhoods and community organizations and the demographic composition of the city, remains visible long after the production lines went quiet.
