Editor's note: If you like this story, you might try your luck at the Tomato Fest’s “Remember When Tomato Trivia” contest at 9:30 a.m. Saturday at the Norman Activity Center, contestants must be 60-plus years old.



By Jane Purtle

Cherokee County Historical Commission

John Allen Templeton served as chairman of the Cherokee County Historical Commis-sion from 1981 to 2000. In August 1997, he talked with us about his memories of the tomato industry in the county.

He was first involved as an hourly worker on one of the packing sheds about 1927. He also worked as a messenger with Western Union for two or three summers. The telegraph office was open 24 hours a day, and the buyers bought and sold by telegram. The office had about 20 messengers. To qualify, a boy had to be over 14 years old and have his own bicycle.

Templeton was editor of the “Jacksonville Journal” from 1935 to 1938. He saw first-hand how crucial the tomato industry was to the life of the community.

The tomato experimental station laboratory, which opened in 1933, was an important factor in helping the industry develop as it did. During this early period, plant diseases had begun to cut into the tomato crop, and the industry was threatened.

The Jacksonville Chamber of Commence was instrumental in getting the laboratory established by the Texas Experiment Station in College Station. When the money was allocated, the Chamber bought five acres of land off what is now Highway 69, north of town. A residence for the director was built by the state, and Dr. Paul Young, a plant pathologist, managed the station. He came here from Washington State where he had done similar work with apple diseases.

On the site, Dr. Young grew crops and tested various disease-control methods. He also developed new varieties from which seeds were saved. Eventually, the supply of seeds was large enough for farmers to begin buying them. These new disease-resistant varieties reduced the risk of losing the entire crop in a given year.

Dr. Young supervised the work of laborers who grew the experimental varieties on the five acres. It took at least four seasons to establish a successful strain. Templeton remembers that a lot of the tomato farmers laughed that a professor was going to tell them how to raise tomatoes, but it wasn’t too many seasons before they began seeing the difference.

The station, officially called the Tomato Leaf Disease Laboratory of the Texas Experiment Station, closed around 1957. Templeton said that the tomato industry began to wane in the early 1950s and the laboratory was no longer needed.

At the time of our interview in 1997, Templeton reflected on the evidence of the heyday of the industry still visible in Jacksonville. Four packing shed buildings were still standing. These included the E.M. Shoemaker place on Bolton and the Dublin place on Main Street, and the Southern Pacific station on Commerce Street.

The tomato industry was big business for the railroads. The Southern Pacific had a division point here. During the tomato season it put on extra crews. They ran special trains — solid trainloads of tomatoes. The Missouri Pacific, which is now the Union Pacific, kept switching crews here around the clock. They parked the switch engines here with supplies and hostlers and worked day and night. They frequently ran solid trains of tomatoes out of Jacksonville also.

Templeton said, “You can move so much in a boxcar. The tomatoes were packed in lugs in the packing sheds and then went into the refrigerated cars either 4-40 or 7-40 and occasionally 720 lugs a car.” Most of the green wraps went without refrigeration, but the power company and ice plant had a long icing track, and all the railroads took cars over there to the icing track. Ice came out of the second story vaults on the ramp and went into the cars and down into the bunker. “I don’t know how many hundred pounds of ice it took to a car, but it took a lot. The amount of ice used depended on the destination.”

The icing plant was on Alabama Avenue In the later years of the trade, the power company developed a portable (on wheels) icer. It had a gasoline motor on it, and they drove the ice trucks, loaded with ice, close to the boxcars at the packing shed and put the ice right into the chute.

Tomatoes had to be inspected by the USDA, which maintained an office here throughout the tomato season. Inspectors were stationed on all the packing sheds. A marketing report was sent from here all around East Texas every day to the buyers in the area.

In the depth of the Great Depression, the government became the only buyer, and the market was at 1.5 cents or 2 cents a pound. In this period, some farmers couldn’t sell at any price, and they often dumped their load on the side of the road going home.

A really good price for tomatoes was 15 cents or 16 cents a pound wholesale. A good market day was 5 cents to 8 cents. If it was a good day, a farmer might not wait for his load to be graded but go directly back home to get another load and settle up at the end of the day on the price-per-pound.

The outlying areas of the county also had packing sheds, including Ironton, Hume’s Switch, Tecula, and Troup on what’s now the Union Pacific. On the Cotton Belt, there were sheds at Bullard, Mount Selman, Craft, Dialville, Rusk, Alto and Wells. On the Southern Pacific, sheds were at Turney, Gallatin, Reklaw, Cuney, and Reese.

Tomato growing and all the subsidiary industries connected to it really contributed to the economy of the city and county. As Templeton said, “The tomato business was a second Christmas for business here. When we had a good tomato season, people made money; and when the crop was bad, people lost money.”