Commercial Corn Cannery in the Cove

A half century before the world was available through a touch to a keyboard, someone, somewhere heard that farmers in Morrisons Cove where pretty good at using their prime farmland to grow topnotch sweet, juicy corn, opening the door to a commercial cannery that helped feed the nation.

A Giant corn op

The Blue Mountain Cannery, a division of Green Giant foods, processed its first season of Cove corn in 1937 just as the United States was emerging from the Great Depression. For the next 20 years the seasonal processing facility provided revenue to area farmers and part-time work to as many as 400, mostly woman, who used the late-summer earnings to buy school clothes and coal for the winter ahead.

“We raised the corn and they hired boys and girls from Woodbury to pick the sweet corn,” Byron Over, a retired farmer now living along Woodbury Pike, said. “I remember I was a crew boss one year.”

The plan was simple. Green Giant developed the cannery facility in North Woodbury Township near Ritchey’s Dairy and contracted with farmers primarily in Martinsburg, Roaring Spring and Woodbury areas to crow the crop using seed provided by the vegetable giant.

The Blue Mountain facility was one of 24 canneries in eight states and Canada and the only one in Pennsylvania, according to a Martinsburg centennial book published in 1957.

How Green Giant learned of Morrisons Cove was never really known with some suggesting D.M. Bare of the Roaring Spring Paper mill had far reaching influence and lobbied for the plant.

Others, including Lou Lehman Kensinger of Martinsburg, heard that a well-to-do person with a touch of influence visited the area and the concept grew from there.

However, the cannery seed was planted, and members of the Martinsburg Rotary got personally involved when it looked like the idea would fail.

Initially farmers were suspicious of the deal proposed by the corporate giant and would not sign contracts promising to plant a designed number of acres for the processing plant.

“The company was ready to withdraw when rotary members visited farmers and in one day landed deals for the growing of 1,200 acres of corn,” the Altoona Mirror reported back in the day.

Corn processing

John Over, 96, of Woodbury has fond memories of the operation, which he estimated lasted about 60 days from mid- to late summer.

Each large truck would have a crew of about 12 kids, spread out around the sides and rear of the truck and they ran through the rows of stalls picking the corn and throwing it onto the truck, Over recalled.

“It didn’t take long for those kids to get it picked,” he said.

Time was of the essence with the crop taken to the Martinsburg plant for immediate processing.

Over often drove one of the trucks, getting the corn out of the field early in the morning then heading up to Teeter’s Hotel on Allegheny Street for lunch.

“We’d sit all together at a big long table,” John Over said. “It was a thriving business for a while.”

David Snyder of Loysburg remembers the operation well.

“The kids would ride the truck into the cannery and they’d throw corn out to their friends as they passed,” Snyder said.

The short growing season for corn limited full time employees to less than a dozen and included people such as M.V. Bankert, plant manager; Claude Barnard, field superintendent; Donald Bankert, assistant plant superintendent and Lester Beach, husker leadman.

Continuous changes

Big improvements came in 1951 when a continuous cooker was installed. The new method was cited as being “far superior,” to the conventional cooking method.

Green Giant spent $10,000 to help Martinsburg Borough increase water supplies and about $100,000 toward development of a waste water disposal system to meet Pennsylvania environmental standards.

The large volume of waste from the corn husks and cobs was handled in a more creative way. The trucks were weighed and the waste returned to the farmer for processing into silage and similar by products.

The annual contracted average quickly reached 3,000 acres and at the height of the endeavor production reached nearly 300,000 cases of corn in a single season.

The figures pale to those boasted by the corn processor Lakeside Foods in Wisconsin, where 40,000 tons of sweet corn is processed per season.

Lakeside prides itself in completing the process from arrival at the cannery until it is husked, cooked, cut, cooled, sealed in the can and ready for shipment at 25 minutes.

Meanwhile, in Martinsburg, the operation was beneficial for two decades until late 1957, when Verne Dudley, director of Blue Mountain Green Giant division based in Dayton, Washington, told employees that the plant was closing because the nation had an overproduction of corn making the move necessary.

Local effects

Another possible reason may have been local changes. More Cove farmers were following a trend to increase their dairy herd requiring a greater amount of acreage for animal feed, some have speculated.

The Martinsburg cannery created a pinch on sweet corn at least for some homemakers in the Cove. Ella Snowberger in her “Bygone Days in the Cove,” spoke of the sweet corn shortage in 1939 when an elderly Loysburg woman, who dried corm for winter use, was unable to top her record of 52 quarts.

“Last summer she hoped to out-do the record, but the cannery at Martinsburg proved to be too powerful a rival,” Snowbergr wrote of a woman identified only as Mrs. Isenburg. “The cannery cornered the market for roasting ears, leaving little surplus for drying.”