“Crozet is, perhaps, the most active small town on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway in Virginia,” noted Richmond’s Times-Dispatch in August 1908. “The peach crop here is greater than anticipated.”
To a novice in the earlier decades of the 1900s, it could be enticing to invest one’s meager fortune and energies in peach rootstock during a productive season around Crozet and vicinity. All one had to do was read the day-to-day headlines: “Crozet Community In Frantic Rush of Peach Harvest. Fine Peaches… Albemarle Peaches—Splendid Crop… Crozet Ships Thousands of Unusual Quality… Fruit Crop is Large.”
Chesapeake and Ohio Railway trains were arranged by the Adams Express Company in 1917 to carry the abundance of peaches from Albemarle and Augusta Counties. Peach trains would run between Cincinnati and New York. These trains were “equipped with special refrigerator cars used during the berry season. The railcars are fitted with standard equipment including extra heavy wheels, and operate on fast mail train routes.”
When railways began to lose ground to improved highways and plentiful freight-hauling trucks, the atmosphere at village railheads during fruit season changed, too. “Heretofore, most of the peaches from [the Crozet] area were shipped by rail in refrigerator cars which were always hard to get,” noted the Times-Dispatch in August 1938. “This year only an occasional car is shipped by rail, but at one time more than a hundred huge trailer trucks were camped here waiting for peaches to transport to northern states. One evening this week there were trucks from 11 states parked in Crozet waiting for peaches.
“This influx of trucks and drivers strained the accommodations in Crozet to a point that ordinary rooms brought $8 to $10 a week—WITHOUT board, and the food supply was really hard put to meet the demands.
“Picking and packing moves forward at a rapid pace. Everyone in this area is getting a slice of the golden stream that is flowing with the peach crop.”
Ahhh, the good life. Baby needs a new pair of shoes, and just a few weeks of picking, packing, peach fuzz and cash wages will get ’em, and maybe some pretty little thing for Momma, too.
Waynesboro’s News-Virginian noted in August 1924, “Mr. and Mrs. Sidney F. Wood have returned home after a ten-days stay with the former’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Joe F. Wood, of Bellwood Fruit Farm [in Sugar Hollow].”
The timing of such extended visits by the Wood family and others was not coincidental when ripe fruit was bending the boughs in the family orchard. The economies of Albemarle, Augusta, Greene, Nelson, and Rockingham counties and the greater region were steeped in agriculture. Life moved at the pace required by ever-changing seasons, and it necessitated the labors of everyone who was able to work, regardless of age.
Along the way, however, fruit growers and keen-eyed, once-interested observers learned that the fruit business wasn’t all warm peach cobbler, hand-churned ice cream and new shoes. There were good market seasons and bad market seasons. Then there was the weather: late freezes, ill-timed spring frosts, too little rain, too much rain, no rain. Oh, and the latest-greatest chemical spray concoctions for controlling pests like codling moth, frogeye, scab, leaf roller, red bug and borers; plus rot, fungus, cankers, blights—and the fruit destroyers just kept on evolving and coming back for more.
Expenses included, well… everything: good land, good rootstock, good equipment, good laborers and plenty of them, and not just during picking season; good horses (or gasoline tractors); baskets, wooden boxes, crates, labels; fees for shipping agents and commission agents; iced box cars and trucks, large and small.
Everyone got paid upfront, sometimes daily, leaving the ever-hopeful orchardist wondering if he was going to be able to shoe baby’s pretty little foot when the season was done.
Then—the world changed. 1940-’41 was the end of the ample supply of local fruit pickers. Demands imposed by World War II took the able-bodied workers from the farms and forests, requiring labor-intensive industries like fruit production to make do, or do without.
Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) enrollees hired by the federal government for workfare projects during the Great Depression were quickly assimilated into the Armed Forces. Ironically, the forest camps which the CCC boys had built during the 1930s (including ones in Albemarle and Augusta Counties) were converted into prisoners-of-war camps to house foreign soldiers captured during the war. Those POWs, in turn, were put to work in the forests and on farms, replacing their American counterparts still fighting in the trenches overseas.
When fruit seasons rolled around, the war prisoners were put to that task as well. Joining them in the orchards was the Women’s Land Army, formed to supplement farm labor lost to the war effort. Additionally, tent camps were set up to house Bahamian fruit pickers contracted to bring in the crops that would otherwise be lost for wont of laborers. These additional organized efforts lasted from 1944 to 1947.
Nationwide, more than 400,000 able-bodied souls did not return home alive. Others returning from the battlefront but permanently disabled could not pick back up where they left off. Additionally, manufacturing facilities drew away many who had previously worked in agriculture.
More widespread competition in the fruit industry was yet another blow to the local fruit industry. Small producers faded away, some orchards were consolidated, and many others were bulldozed and used for other purposes. One more very special era, positioned just right for its time and place in history, had passed.
The next time you bite into a fresh locally grown peach, or partake of a spoonful of warm peach cobbler topped with hand-churned ice cream, whether in August or not, say thank you to the present-day generation of orchardists who continue to fight the good fight —for baby’s new shoes and for our good pleasure.
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