Chapter Three:
Truck Farming on the Eastern Shore: 1880-1950

Shawn Kidd

Truck Farming is a curious term.  Often mistakenly associated with railroad trucks, the mode of farming began not along railroad tracks but near waterways.  In 1901 the USDA recounted the industry’s roots asserting “One of the earliest centers for the development of truck farming in its present sense was along the shores of the Chesapeake Bay, where fast sailing oyster boats were employed for sending the produce to the neighboring markets of Baltimore and Philadelphia.”[i]  The truck of truck farming is actually a term derived from the trucking of fresh produce, initially by wagon, from farm to either local market or shipping port.  In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries developments in rail transportation and ready demand of growing urban markets combined with American glorifications of both farm life and entrepreneurial zeal made truck farming on the Eastern Shore, not only a profitable business, but a pursuit that was distinctly American: a coupling at once of both Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian ideals.

Though traditional truck crops varied according to region, a typical truck crop would have included “quick harvest” fruits and vegetables such as strawberries and raspberries, sweet corn, snap peas, tomatoes, watermelons and cantaloupe, potatoes and cucumbers, to name a few.  Truck crops were crops of a “perishable nature” and ideally were produced for “distant markets” where demand, and hence profit, was higher.[ii]

As the USDA contended in 1901, “The truck [farming] business…is a modern outgrowth…from the older occupation of market gardening” that outgrowth being due to developments in transportation.[iii]  The distance between source and market categorized the source as either market garden or truck farm.[iv]  With the completion of the railroad through Salisbury in 1860, farmers in Wicomico County became connected to new, more profitable markets.  The railroad, and more precisely urban consumers on the urban end of the railroad were inviting this outgrowth business and the fruits it had to bear.  With opportunities for high profits available in New York and Philadelphia, farmers were now aiming to produce larger crops transformed methods and production.  With new markets available, the objective of the truck farmer took shape: his objective now was to “get his vegetables [and fruits] to market ‘ahead of the season’”, or, as the USDA contended, to “supply the Northern cities with…goods before they [could] be produced [locally].”[v]

The Growth of Truck Farming

            As mentioned previously, water freight was the first available option for the market gardeners as they expanded their business.  However, by 1860, on the funds of local investors and the toil of novice laborers—as “railroading was still” at the time “in the state of uncertainty”—a railroad, running through Salisbury, came to connect the Lower Shore to the already existing rails in neighboring Delaware.[vi]

            While water freight was still used to ship from the shore to Washington and Baltimore, as it was less costly than rail freight, trains soon became a faster alternative that could, with careful packing, produce a fresher crop for more distant, higher-demand/higher-profit markets.  However, as more distant shipping involved more risk, farmers soon turn from standard—which, from Salisbury, would have likely stopped at Seaford, Harrington, Wyoming, Dover, Townsend, Middletown, New Castle and Wilmington, before reaching Philadelphia—to express freight.  The express trains provided farmers and shippers with non-stop shipping, however, “the objections to express shipments [were] twofold.”[vii]  The first concern in shipping via express rail was the high freight rates which did not pay (literally) if market demand was low.  The second concern was the “frequent damage resulting from the necessarily hasty and often careless handling” of the shipments.[viii]  The crops characteristically shipped on express were highly perishable, and thus, inherently delicate.  For an industry in which the early shipment gets the best price, however, express freight was at times a worthwhile risk for farmers and/or shippers.

            As the industry grew in net worth, shippers, already gaining financially from the business, began investing their gains in technological innovations that would reduce assumed risk; these entrepreneurs recognized that less risk would mean a higher and more dependable profit.  Early in the development of the trucking industry, “shippers were obliged to use either common box cars or the rough open cattle cars, neither being suited to the [intended] purpose.”[ix]  In the aforementioned 1901 USDA report on trucking interests, horticulturalist F.S. Earle wrote, “box cars were too tight and excluded the air so completely as to induce heating,” whereas, “The stock cars were too open and exposed the goods to the weather.”[x]  As ideal conditions and opportunity attracted new farmers to the growing truck industry, investors funded the construction of the modern ventilated fruit car.  While the vented car served well the shore farmers and shippers of the cooler early and late season crops, they acknowledged that some perishables were still at risk of crop losses, especially during high summer temperatures.

Over the course of nearly forty years, an Illinois farmer and inventor by the name of Parker Earle developed and redeveloped the idea of the refrigerator car—initially “chests”—for the shipping of strawberries.[xi]  Shipping these chests by express and ordering interval re-icings, as he initially did, proved to be both too costly and too heavily subjected to the neglect of unconcerned rail station workers.  Earle suspended his experiment but continued to toil over the concept.  In time, he began to experiment with holding fresh berries in a “cooling box” for twenty-four hours, then shipping them to Chicago (the nearest urban market for him).  What he found was that “those so cooled [berries] went into Chicago in better condition than those freshly picked from the field, although [those frozen] were one day older.”[xii]  While there is no indication that any similar process was done in Wicomico County this early, Earle’s late 19^th century innovation most likely served as a model for the freezing industry that would come to the shore starting in the 1920s (see Chapter 6, Evan Howard).

            While this combination method was a great advance for truck farming, Earle, and his developers, were still unsatisfied with the need for both cooling boxes and iced-cars.  Earle began to plan for a car specifically designed for the shipment of fruits and vegetables.  In this design, Earle specified the necessity for a five-ton ice capacity that would allow equal temperature distribution to the fruit and enough cooling power that re-icing would not be necessary for most trips of less than three days.  By 1901, the idea had been realized; Parker Earle and his associates had constructed a refrigerator car that was suited for the increasing scale of truck farming.

            Though Earle’s car was first produced in Illinois, it seems that not much time passed before truck shippers on the Eastern Shore sought the refrigerator truck for their business.  As Maryland historian Hulbert Footner asserts, “it was the invention of the refrigerator that revolutionized agriculture on the Eastern Shore…[permitting] the Eastern Shore farmer,” or more likely the shore truck-shippers, “to ship…perishable (and profitable!) crops as far as Canada.”[xiii]  The businessmen who had initially been mere shippers of the farmers’ profitable crop had come to finance the industry, bringing fresh produce to multiple peripheries, and had brought additional profit to farmers and shippers alike.

A Fruitland Story (and its lasting implications)

            Adopting its name in 1873, Fruitland, Maryland, directly to the south of the larger Salisbury, was also developing its business interests in accordance with the growing markets.  Railroad man James S. Taylor, in 1954, would tell his story in an issue of the Salisbury Advertiser of the business boom that came to Fruitland after the completion of the railroad.  Sent from the New York, Philadelphia and Norfolk Railroad Company in 1889, young James, eighteen at the time, was to “take charge of its station at Fruitland”[xiv]  James—not as ambitious as his new Fruitland friends George Hayman and Harry Gray, who would leave the small town to explore opportunities in Chicago—nonetheless had quite an important experience while working in Fruitland, especially important to the topic of this chapter.

            As James writes, “In those days, the only big rush at the Fruitland station lasted for about two weeks in May when the big shipments of strawberries were underway—and believe me, everyone seemed to be shipping them!”[xv]  Truck farming, namely trucking strawberries, had brought the hustle and bustle of the newly connected urban centers to rural Fruitland, even if for only two weeks of the year; with the new business, farmers, and more importantly shippers came into new capital.

            Some Fruitland entrepreneurs reinvested their earnings back into their crops, some into the railroad, some into timber, some into fertilizer.  In an unprecedented way, members of the Fruitland community had fresh options for investment, for occupation, and for financial successes by new means.  One such opportunist that James recalls is I.H.A. Dulany, the owner of the “only industry at Fruitland then…the big sawmill”—a profitable business for Dulany in the late 19^th and well into the 20^th centuries (see Chapter 4, Kimberly Wheeler).[xvi]  But Dulany was not a mill man any more than he was a produce man; nor was he a canning man or a poultry man, despite owning a cannery as early as the 1890s and his company, Dulany & Sons, being “the biggest buyer of poultry at the time.”[xvii]  As the railroad connected the Eastern Shore, physically, to urban centers, it also connected once rural shore-towns to a greater number of outlets for the commercialization of their agricultural businesses.  Not only did opportunities to market agricultural products increase (i.e. truck crops, timber, canned goods), but consumers in urban centers encouraged the spirit and the business of the commercializing shore men; in this, investors like Dulany became an integral part of Eastern Shore commerce and of the development of truck farming into an enterprise recognized and financially supported by metropolises like Philadelphia and New York.

            While Dulany was making a living as a, more-or-less, middle man—for example, buying wood from farmers and selling it in Philadelphia for profit in a fashion similar to the sale of truck crops—he was generating indispensable revenue which he directly and indirectly returned to the truck farming industry, while at the same time gaining associates that would come to benefit Fruitland in ways not solely financial.  A business acquaintance of Dulany’s, a Mr. Jeff Staton, had learned in similar business dealings of “a fine new strain of strawberries known as the ‘Gandy’”, a product of New England.[xviii]  As James continues:

The new berries grew wonderfully…and both Mr. Staton and our growers made much money from this venture.  James goes on to tell of how “the berries were as large as small hen eggs, very bright read in color, of a wonderful flavor and would keep well when shipped as far away as Boston and Providence.[xix]

The primary concern of men like Dulany and Staton, most likely, was the financial profit that was to be had in new and more distant markets; but the “Gandy”, nonetheless, was a berry of high quality in terms of appearance and taste and also a less perishable berry than those that were regularly grown in Fruitland at the time.  Though Staton most likely took the chance on the new berry strand for its financial promise, the product, perhaps a positive bi-product, was that an excellent crop was produced—excellent in its hardiness to benefit the shipper, and excellent in its taste and appearance to benefit the consumer.  Staton and Dulany were men who saw financial opportunity in the truck farming industry and invested financially to its growth of scale; this was good for the development of Fruitland, as similar investments were beneficial to similar trucking towns.  As large scale agriculture affects the environment here today, concerns are raised, but in 1889 community members in Fruitland, or in Salisbury, or in Pittsville did not know the meaning of the word ecology—it, in fact, was not yet a word; the primary impact of agriculture was then on economy (as it still is today though with an increased concern for environment).

Historian Donald Worster, in Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, observes astutely American culture’s capitalist interpretations of farmer and land in three principles: “Nature must be seen as capital…Man has a right, even an obligation, to use this capital for constant self-advancement…[and] the social order should encourage this continual increase of personal wealth.”[xx]  Truck farming on the Eastern Shore grew immensely from its advent around 1860 up until the invention of the refrigerator car in 1901, and did so, in great part, by abiding by these principles of capitalist agriculture.  The industry grew as technology advanced, but also as population increased on the shore.  There is quite an interesting demographic, in fact, of those who were coming to the shore to farm.  Among recently freed slaves, and immigrants of foreign countries, were white Americans seeking solace from hectic city life.

Urbanites Farmify, or, Making the Country Home Pay[xxi]

            There was, in the late 19^th and early 20^th century, a movement among the masses toward the outdoors.  It was during this time in U.S. history that outdoor enthusiast Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt, through succession, became president.  The USDA, raised to Cabinet status in 1889, really began to take shape under his presidency.  Boys’ and Girls’ clubs that would later form 4-H were being encouraged by public schools.  And the president’s friend and colleague, John Muir, was making Thoreauian sentiments into minor bestsellers and essays for which the nation’s periodicals competed.[xxii]  In the words of Muir, “thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home”[xxiii]  This fascination was not limited, though, to the mountains.  People fed up with poor conditions in cities, low pay, and menial, unsatisfying factory work gave rise to the desire to, for lack of better word, farmify.  Writer E.P. Powell ran a series of articles in The Outing Magazine entitled “Can We Make the Country Home Pay?” in which Powell would respond to inquiries about the practicality of purchasing and successfully maintaining a farm; the majority of these inquiries were made by men and women from urban areas, longing, as one woman put it, to “learn how to grow things.”[xxiv]

            As Powell writes of this novel attraction to rural life:

“Quite a bunch of letters is illustrated by this one: “I have worn myself out with shop work.  I want outdoor life, and my doctor insists on my having it.  I am thirty-eight years of age, had some experience in farm life when a boy.  Can I start in now at gardening and make a living?  I have a wife and two children, but I only have eleven hundred dollars to begin on.”[xxv]

Powell, initially apprehensive about this inquirer’s health and experience, suggests to the man: “clerk it a while longer…[and] raise your capital to twenty-five hundred or three thousand dollars…[However,] if you cannot secure more capital, make your trial somewhat in this way…Truck Farming.”[xxvi]  Though Powell does not disclose where his city-worn inquirer is from, it is certainly conceivable that, in this time, men and families in similar situations were migrating to the Eastern Shore from nearby cities for similar reasons.

            Truck farming in the 1910s, because of the refrigerator car, had become much more dependable than it had been in previous years and with the growth of urban markets, especially those in the vicinity of Maryland’s fertile Eastern Shore (i.e. Philadelphia and New York), the demand was greater than in previous years.    Among other improvements for truck farmers was a significant change in marketing.  In early years, truck crops were sold on commission, that is, the merchant would receive a percentage of the total money earned from the crop at market.[xxvii]  This method gave the advantage, clearly, to the merchant—men like Fruitland’s I.H.A. Dulany and Jeff Staton—for the cost of crops that perished en route to market were assumed by the farmer at a financial loss.  By the time that Powell’s inquirers were farmifying, they had the distinct advantage of selling their crops, in whole, to merchants at auction blocks.  While sources on the Salisbury Auction Block are scarce, the USDA contended as early as 1901 that the wholesale method had begun to take precedence.[xxviii]  To make the buying and selling of whole harvests easier, certain areas were designated as shipping points; at Salisbury, Fruitland and nearby Pittsville auction blocks were formed and upon purchase of a crop “the dealer…assume[d] all risk of transportation and marketing.”[xxix]  Those urbanites-turned-farmers of the early 1900s were coming into the industry with all the advantages that earlier truck farmers had not possessed.

            To say that the influx of Powellite types significantly increased truck crop production would simply be false.  It seems, in many cases, that such influxes were of idealists rather than those serious about farming.  As Powell writes, in a buyer-beware plea, “I have seen some pitiful results from the credulity of the poor people, who have let loose their small capital for a piece of property adjacent to swamps, if not itself under water.”[xxx]  The urbanites who had sought the country-life, it seems, often failed to reconcile their idyllic construction of farm-life with the realities of farming in a capitalist society, where thriving economically comes at the expense of both land and labor.

            Some urban idealists held strong to their beliefs in Thoreau (of whom Powell was an enthusiast) and their reverence for the land, which would later influence and be personified by Aldo Leopold and his A Sand County Almanac, but these constructs were in stark contrast with the principle’s capitalist agriculture.  The years that were to follow this time of idealism (World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II) were a time not for idealism but for practicality; the financial boom and bust of these years and the high demand for non-perishable necessitated an unprecedented growth of scale that would include internationalization and the introduction of government subsidies for farmers.  This growth of scale conventionalized American Agriculture into an operation concerned primarily with high-volume production, and a balance between environmental impact/health risk and economic affordability.

Declines in Truck Farming during World War I

            Truck farming during, and even prior to, the First World War took on something of a tragic disposition, for in its progress were the seeds of its downfall.  Though this downfall was not complete until the Second World War, in the first war the flaws of the industry became apparent.

            By the 1910s, “canneries [were] located in practically every community that makes pretense to being a fruit- or vegetable-growing center.”[xxxi]  The rise of the canning industry on the shore was due, initially, to an inability to market perishable truck crops at the rate and on the scale that they were being grown and harvested.  As early as 1881 the New York Times documents a competition between truck farmers and canners: “To-morrow should be a great day with asparagus, although there will be several great days during the season.  This vegetable is much sought for by canners, and the competition [with truck merchants] will maintain the prices.”[xxxii]  This competition was intensified during World War I as canned goods became a necessary commodity for military rations.  It was, in fact, during the war that truck farmers essentially lost the tomato crop to canners.  The USDA Yearbook, 1920, reported that one-hundred percent of Maryland tomato acreage harvested in 1917 and 1918—during which time Maryland was devoting the most acreage to tomatoes nationwide—was supplied solely to manufacturing; tomatoes, formerly a prime truck crop, ceased to be trucked to market during the war because canned tomatoes could be shipped overseas to military forces without any risk of perishing.[xxxiii]  The canneries that had originally been created for truck surpluses had come into their own as an industry.

            As R. Lee Burton, author of Canneries of the Eastern Shore, contends, “World War I really brought the canning industry into the twentieth century.”[xxxiv]  And military demand for non-perishables was not the only factor contributing to the advance.  During the war canneries were paying “daily wages which doubled farm pay.”[xxxv]  Part of this pay increase was a meditated effort to “lure farm hands away from the fields” in the wake of child labor laws, but because canned goods were in such high demand, cannery owners could afford to pay higher wages.[xxxvi]  This era in Delmarva agriculture was not unlike previous periods: workers went where money was to be made; such is the product—and a necessary one—of labor in a capitalist society.  Truck farming during World War I became a much less profitable market as desire for producing cheaper and more abundant non-perishable foods could be better satisfied by the canning industry.

Truck Farming Prosperity in Post-War Years

            Following World War I, there was a profitable return to truck farming.  As the war ended, military demand became less and less of a factor in agriculture—and as far as farmers, shippers, and canners could see, this would likely be the case for years to come;  the “Great War”, after all, was to be the war to end all wars.  Domestic prosperity was thought to be upon the horizon.  The cooperative efforts of canner and farmer were, together, providing the food source for both metropolises and local regions to ensure fresh produce in the spring, summer, and fall, and canned fruits and vegetables in the winter.

The typical truck crop had not changed much since its earlier days.  In 1926 farmers Jack and Bob Rayner “were producing cantaloupes, watermelons, sweet potatoes, cucumbers and strawberries.”[xxxvii]  The primary crops were perishable, as they had been before, but the earlier innovations, such as vented and refrigerated cars, and war-time improvements in telephone and telegram communication (imperative to avoiding “glut” or saturated markets) ensured that markets would receive a healthier crop, and farmers and merchants, a healthier profit.  The return to truck farming was so promising, in fact, that in 1926 Economic Geographer Paul Gemmill asserted that “With the greater demand for vegetables…large areas of the peninsula now used for staple crops,” such as grain and wheat, “will almost certainly be turned over eventually to intensive truck farming.”[xxxviii]  Gemmill asserts this projection because wheat and grain, less perishable than fruits and vegetables, could afford to be grown farther from city processing factories, not to mention the Eastern Shore soils, in close proximity to its urban markets, were (and are still) more ideally suited for—more adaptable to— the growing of fruits and vegetables.

            As large profits were to be made in the truck farming industry during the 1920s, there was “an unmistakable tendency to increase the acreage utilized for trucking purposes” to the degree, in fact, that Gemmill predicted a “rapid expansion” on the shore “now that the industry here has got beyond the experimental stage.”[xxxix]

            Gemmill was correct in his projection, and despite the dust bowl and the bowl weevil wreaking havoc on the plains of the Midwest and the west, truck farming on the Eastern Shore was not nearly as harshly affected by the Great Depression.  In an article published May 16^th 1935, an anonymous Washington Post writer asserted that though “strawberry acreage [is] about 4 per cent less than…last year…[there are] all indications of an extra good yield.”[xl]  In the same year The Post ran an article about truck farming on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, revealing little evidence that farmers, not very far south of Wicomico County, were suffering from the depression.  The article recounts

Mr. Farmer…going about his work…weeding his onions and cultivating his white potato field with a song on his lips and a cheery call for his neighbor…It’s kind of funny what a difference a little cash in one’s pocket can make, and a farmer—who is one of the most confirmed of gamblers—always gathers hopes for a comfortable price on all his crops when his initial crop sells well.[xli]

The “initial crop” that the writer is referring to is berries.  Truck crops, in this time, were selling well, and truck farmers were doing well enough during the Great Depression to work, at times, with a song on their lips.  While Gemmill’s projection of a thriving truck farming industry held true through the depression of the 1930s, what Gemmill and other enthusiasts of the shore’s primary ag-mode did not and could not foresee was World War II.

Soon after the attack on Pearly Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt appropriated the War Food Administration and mobilized farmers—including the farmers of the fertile Eastern Shore—into war-time production.  Canning, because of the return of military demand, again became a profitable enterprise, and, in fact, the industry took on many of the truck farmers crops—at a profit to the farmers—to generate non-perishable forms.  Canneries also began canning military rations that, on the Eastern Shore, likely would have included the canning of poultry products.  Profit for truck farmers came also in producing watermelons and cantaloupe, which did not tolerate the heat involved in the canning process.  For truck farming as a large scale industry, the principles of capitalist agriculture that had yielded so much success were the same principles that were encouraging canning and poultry as its agricultural successors.  And, while canning was a major competitor for the trucking industry, the other major factor in the decline was a change in the American diet.

In 1948, in a retrospective explanation of Maryland agriculture during World War II, the Maryland Emergency Farm Labor Program maintained that from 1943-1947 “Maryland farmers…turned out 40% more food with 30 % less labor” than in pre-war years.[xlii]  During this time “Boys and girls and women vacationists,…soldiers on leave,…workers from Jamaica, the Bahamas and…Barbados” as well as “German prisoners of war” all added to the farm labor force of formerly migrant truck laborers.[xliii]  But despite the increase in labor, the production of fruits and vegetables in 1946 was valued at only 27 million dollars out of a total 207 million for the agriculture of the entire state.[xliv]  Towering in comparison was the rapidly expanding broiler industry, valued in 1946 at 56 million dollars, a quarter of Maryland’s total agricultural value.[xlv]  Not only did the emergent poultry industry provide formerly migrant laborers with a year-round livelihood, as opposed to the intensive but interim work that truck farmers had provided, the trend became permanent.

With a technological repertoire that included the refrigerator car, freezing technology, and the soon-to-be commercialized airplane, agriculture had become, by the 1950s, a national and international enterprise.  Improvements in transport allowed New York to purchase fresh berries from California with the same ease as buying from Delmarva.  As the Eastern Shore’s poultry industry was providing a quarter of the state’s agricultural value, the principles of capitalist agriculture called shore farmers—including former truck farmers—to turn to the growing of soy beans and corn for chicken feed.  Even marketing fruits and vegetables to canners ceased as Eastern Shore canneries saw their effective end by the 1960s.

Truck farming exists still today, providing fresh fruits and vegetables, on a small scale, to grocers and consumers.  But more so than the trucking industry, the principles of capitalist agriculture endure.  These principles have been guidelines for both the subsequent canning and poultry industries and have brought great progress to the area.  Salisbury is a city today because of its agricultural roots.  The profits made from trade with big cities served both to feed the stomachs of urban centers and the pockets—and later, the minds—of the Eastern Shore.  Quite possibly, without agriculture there would be no university here, no intellectual movements, no public library; there would be no minor league baseball team, no airport, certainly no prestigious business school; no City Zoo or city park would be in place for families and visitors to enjoy, there would be no Ward Museum, and there would be no environmental movement: no Blackwater Wildlife Refuge, no criticism of current lax environmental regulations.  Agriculture has thrived here because of its exploitation of the land, but as the area has urbanized, environmental movements most often found in urban areas have raised legitimate concerns about the ecological effects of growing agribusiness.  Truck farming operated on the Eastern Shore as an exploitative agricultural mode, but for all its ills, it cannot be removed from the area’s progression from periphery to metropolis.

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