The Corn Shop

Raising Sweet Corn and Bethel’s Corn Canning Factory

Compiled by Donald G. Bennett

Posted: March 10, 2008

 

New England was well known for its sweet corn in the last half of the 19th Century.  Maine soils in particular seemed well suited for raising sweet corn in the mid to southern part of the state.  Maine’s sweet corn was to the Boston market as Vermont’s milk and dairy products were to the Boston area.

 

For more reading about sweet corn in New England see:

 

Canning Gold: New England’s Sweet Corn Industry by Paul B. Frederick. ( Copy available at Bethel Historical Society’s Research Room.)

 

Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn by Thomas Hubka.

 

Burnham & Morrill canning in the 19th Century:

 

 

New York importers, Wolff & Reessing Co., inaugurated Bethel’s sweet corn canning during the early 1880’s.  This company was well known along the coast of Maine for its sardine canning factories.  The company’s arrival in Maine was due to the Franco – Prussian War of 1870 which had curtailed French exports of sardines to America.

 

The negotiations and motivation for this New York company to come to Bethel are as yet undiscovered. As national importers and distributors, Wolff & Reessing had obviously analyzed the size of the canned sweet corn market and deemed it worthy of what seemed like a modest investment in remote Bethel situated in the Androscoggin River valley.

 

Burnham & Morrill, the baked bean company had established a corn canning factory in South Paris as early as 1868.  B&M turned to canning baked beans after they saw the Maine raised sweet corn beginning to lose the market race to western growers.

 

Come September when canning operations started, the factory in Bethel became a center of attention. Yet the ground work for corn supply planning and commitments had to be done in the early spring. The corn factory’s manager had to visit all of the actual and potential sweet corn raising farmers to sign them up as suppliers for the fall canning operation.  Weekly news in the 1880’s and early 1890’s normally reported the corn factory manager visits to farms in Albany, West Bethel, Newry, Mason and Gilead. Sweet corn, apples and creamer butter plus lima beans made up the Bethel area’s agricultural co-op “market basket”.

 

Click here to read the corn canning journal.

 

 

 

Can labels used during the last quarter of the Bethel canning operations.  Fritz J. Tyler Canning Co., Bethel, Maine, may have been the only one to run Bethel’s canning business under a White Mountain brand.

 

The Pork and Beans label may represent Tyler’s canning company efforts to not be heavily dependent on corn as a product.

 

Both labels probably were used in the 1920’s.

 

 

Bethel’s canning operators  used two locations from 1880 to 1927.  The first corn canning factory was established near Mill Brook about one-half mile from the foot of Mill Hill in the direction of Songo Pond.

 

The second and last factory site was just north of the railroad tracks in Bethel’s “industrial park” which included Bethel Manu-facturing Company (chairs) a cider mill and the corn canning factory. The town raised $2,500 in 1890 to build a new “Corn Shop” for the Wyman Brothers, of Woburn, Mass.

Original labels courtesy of Doris Fraser, Bethel