Bethel’s Corn Canning Factory:

Taking advantage of outside investment, regional marketing

and a local farmers co-operative

Posted: March 12, 2008

This chapter about Bethel’s corn canning is part of The Bethel Journals

compiled by Donald G. Bennett

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.

For more information about the Wolff & Reessing Company see this Lubec, Maine, web site:

http://www.visitlubecmaine.com/about/abouteconomy.htm and another website covering the herring situation in Maine: http://seagrant.gso.uri.edu/noreaster/noreasterFW97/Sardine.html

In 1880, America’s food canning industry was only about 75 years old. Food canning had started in France in 1795.

In 1868 Burnham and Morrill opened their South Paris sweet corn canning plant; this factory may have caught the attention of Julius Wolff

In 1875 Julius Wolff went to Eastport, Maine to scout out a new source of sardines. In 1876 Wolff & Reesing opened their first sardine canning factory. His company eventually operated 18 sardine canning plants. Up to this point, it seems that Wolff & Reesing were importers but had not yet opened canning factories in Maine. Between 1876 and 1886 (my research has not found out exactly when) Wolff & Reessing Company expanded their canning to include an operation in Bethel.

Circa 1880, probably someone from Bethel contacted (lobbied) the New York canning company to persuade the owners to look over the Bethel valley growing area and canvass farmers as to their commitment for supplying sweet corn. Take advantage of a situation similar to the Norway – Paris area. The most likely contact person is Augustus M. “Gus” Carter from Middle Interval.

From 1886 through 1889, the only local name connected to the corn factory was Augustus Mellen (A.M. “Gus”) Carter who was 49 in 1889. According to William Lapham, writing in his 1891 History of Bethel, Maine, Carter was a farmer and civil engineer who lived in the Carter neighborhood of Middle Interval (Bethel). Lapham refers to Carter as the “superintendent of corn packing establishment in Bethel.

Carter had served one and one-half years in the Seventh Maine Battery during the War of Rebellion, in 1866 he was elected as a road surveyor and in 1868 was elected one of five road commissioners in Bethel. In 1890 when the Bethel Water Company began construction of a water line from Chapman Brook into Bethel Hill village, Carter worked as a civil engineer at least some of the time as pipe arrived by rail and hauled to previously selected drop-zones. After the water line was finished he was appointed to a state commission on evaluation and his corn factory superintending is not mentioned again in 1890 or 1891.

The Wolff & Reesing corn canning factory was on land previously owned by Eber Clough. Due to old age and misfortune Clough had moved elsewhere and had lost his property to foreclosure for non payment of taxes. Clough’s property, now occupied by the corn factory, was located less than one-quarter mile from the site where historians say in 1774 Bethel began.

In June 1884, the Oxford Democrat reported that 100 acres of corn had been planted for the Bethel Corn Factory. Its April 7, 1885 edition reported that Wolff and Reessing of New York have entered into a five year contract with (Bethel) farmers to continue canning and packing sweet corn. The canning company will spend $4,000 on improved machinery. Farmers will receive two and one-half cents per 26 oz. can of corn. Thus it seems Wolff and Reesing had been canning corn in Bethel before 1885 as some factory equipment was already in town.

1886: Sweet corn consignments for canning expand – Gilead and Newry farmers participate.

May: Farmers have signed up to plant 225 acres of sweet corn for Wolff & Reessing. Gilead: quite an acreage of corn and some acres of lima beans will be planted for Bethel’s corn shop. Bethel; The corn factory will take all the lima beans that farmers can raise this year. Seed in limited quantities can be found at the factory. Middle Interval: 17 acres of sweet corn has been planted for the corn shop.

July: E. Richardson & Son are manufacturing 10,000 packing boxes for the corn shop. When a seven ton boiler was loaded on to A.M. Carter’s wagon at the rail station, the weight of the load squat the wagon wheels into the dust.

In 1886, the Town of Bethel received rent of $200 from Wolff & Reessing.

1887: A great year for sweet corn

January: There was a short news item in the Democrat related to Maine’s sweet corn canning. The item was written by an occasional correspondent to the “Boston Cultivator” by W.D. Philbrick. “Sweet corn for canning is grown almost exclusively in the state of Maine.”

August: The New York owners shipped in new machinery. Mechanized corn cob strippers cut the corn off the cob and filled cans in one operation. News items claimed that the new machines did the job of eight men. In the same article, probably after talking with the factory’s manager, the reporter noted that Wolff & Reessing owned a total of 21 fish packing and other concerns, presumably Bethel’s factory was one of the twenty-one.

At the end of the 1887 corn canning season in Bethel, the county newspaper correspondents reported impressive results that also gave a good picture of the extent of corn raising in the Androscoggin River area east and west of Bethel. The corn factory paid $7,000 to 170 farmers. The average pay per acre was $35. Farmers from Gilead, Mason, West Bethel, Mayville, South and East Bethel, Newry and Albany made up the pool of corn suppliers. If the figures were correctly reported, sweet corn acreage amounted to 200 acres. So, on the average, each farmer grew only a little more than one acre – mechanical corn planters were just coming on the scene.

The factory spent its last operating day canning lima beans. Farmers who had planted even less than an acre of lima beans thought that they were being very well paid, again, according to news correspondents. The volume of one season’s canning also seems impressive: 340,000 cans were put up; best day’s production was 28,000 26 oz. cans. In 1887, the canning factory was approximately one and one-half miles from the Grand Trunk Railway depot in Bethel. Charles L. Davis used two teams of horses to haul corn from the corn factory to the freight cars at the rail depot. His teams made eight trips daily. There were 36 boxes (of canned corn) in each cart (hay rack) load. At 50 pounds per box it made a load of 1800 pounds. One carload held 500 boxes and 28 cars were loaded.

1888: A very poor year for sweet corn – the last year for Wolff & Reessing in Bethel.

Poor weather conditions throughout the summer of 1888, spelled disaster for sweet corn harvesting and the Bethel canning factory. No figures were reported but the word around town was that the factory suffered a seventy-five percent drop in canning compared to 1887. It was Wolff & Reessing’s last year in Bethel.

1889: The Wyman Brothers of Massachusetts buy out Wolff & Reessing’s canning factory.

In April 1889 it was reported that two brothers,J and E. A. Wyman of Woburn, Mass., had purchased the corn packing business in Bethel from Wolff & Reessing of New York and will carry it on for the present. Their agent, Augustus M. “Gus” Carter, Esq., is now signing contracts with farmers for planting. Two weeks later Gilead’s correspondent reported that Carter had been in town signing up farmers to raise corn and beans for canning. By August, farming news indicated a good corn crop despite some cold weather and heavy rain. Word on the street was that by the end of August the corn factory would start up.

As canning operations got under way, the factory employed 60 men and women; this number increased to about 100 as the month wore on. Near the end of September, the corn factory ran out of cans and telegraphed for an emergency shipment of 68,000 cans from Massachuestts. “Charles Davis had three full days of hauling (to get) them (from the railroad depot)to the factory-16 loads with horses-filled a large hay rack with each load.” When the factory closed in late September, 335,000 cans of corn and lima beans had been filled. From Gilead came the report that “the most paying crop this year is the lima beans which were planted for the canning factory: Eben Chapman raised $54 worth from one-eighth of an acre and Dana Wight $170 worth from three-quarters of an acre.” As if to confirm earlier estimates of how many acres of corn were raised by individual farmers, St. John Hastings, a North Bethel farmer whose fields included the area where Sunday River flows into the Androscoggin, said that he cut 110 loads, 55 bushels to the load of corn on less than two acres.”

In mid October 1889, the papers printed - the Wyman’s “are now sending their pack of corn and beans to Wolff & Reesing, New York. It will take 30 cars to carry the season’s pack. They had seven and one-half acres of Lima beans planted and raised eight hundred and eighty-seven bushels for which they paid $2,217.20, being $295.66 an acre. Who says farming doesn’t pay?”

A special town meeting was held Saturday, December 9, 1889. At the meeting it was voted to appropriate $2500 to be used for buying a lot and building a new corn shop thereon. A lot of land has been bargained for of Eli Barker, northerly of the railroad but westerly of and near to the chair factory. (See map below) “The shop is to be leased to the Wyman Bros. for a term of years and will be operated by them. The buildings will probably cost more than the amount appropriated, the deficiency being supplied by the Wyman’s. Wyman Bros. have operated in the old shop this season and have given universal satisfaction.”

Map above shows Bethel village as it stood circa 1914 except for the railroad depot area. This area has been annotated to show development in the 1886 – 1890 period.

1890: Town subsidized corn factory built near rail depot - apples also canned.

During 1890, work on the new building for the Wyman’s corn factory started as soon as weather permitted. Papers reported: “Mr. Wyman, our sweet corn man, is taking down the old corn factory (located on or near the Eber Clough property west of Mill Brook) and is having it moved together with the machinery to its new location near the depot, where the town owns about two acres of land and is to build on it a corn factory building with the $2,500 raised for that purpose. Mr. Wyman will occupy it; the old factory building will become an annex to the new one.

By mid March, several carloads of lumber from the Berlin Mills Company (Berlin, New Hampshire) had been landed on the site of the new corn factory; the Town of Bethel had a strong crew at work putting in the foundations which were nearly ready; framing had begun. There was real sense of urgency by all concerned. Besides the new building, the Wyman’s work crew was putting up sections of the old building and getting the machinery ready. Also, they were building an ice house and stocking it with ice. At the same time as this was going on, the Bethel Water Company had over 100 men at work building a pipeline from Chapman Brook to the village for public water supply. One of the first large customers for pure water was the corn factory.

On September 3, 1890 the new corn factory opened; it was hooked up to the Bethel Water Company’s new main. On September 26, 1890 corn canning was finished. However, the factory was busy throughout October. The employees were reported very busy - sorting and labeling, packing boxes and getting shipments ready to leave by rail for New York, Chicago and the Pacific states.

And, the factory was still busy canning apples. As it turned out, this was the latest date in the fall season that the corn factory had continued canning operations since 1886. Sensing from all of the fall reports, those involved with the new corn factory, farmers, employees, town officials and the public were enthusiastically pleased with the outcome of the town’s investment. Getting packed cartons loaded onto rail cars was now much simpler than before; only a few hundred yards separated the factory from rail sidings. For farmers hauling corn to the factory from almost any direction, the new location was more central for all than the old site near Mill Brook.

1891: Good corn crop – successful canning season.

January: Eber Clough, Jr., is canvassing the town for the sweet corn plant for the coming season in the interest of the Wyman Bros. (Clough has apparently taken over the superintendent job previously held by A.M. “Gus” Carter.)

September: Grover Hill, Middle Interval and Newry report that a number of men from each location have employment at the Bethel corn canning factory. Overall, the factory reports about 150 hands employed. Officials of the Grand Trunk Railway stopped for an hour in Bethel and visited the corn factory and the chair factory. On the 22^nd, the paper reported that the Wymans are putting up about 33,000 cans a day. (In October, it was reported that the best day’s output was 32,000 cans.) The Bethel corn factory closed its season on September 29^th. The factory filled 300,000 cans; it was claimed to be the best year since the company had started operations in Bethel.

October: The Wyman Bros. are shipping their sweet corn as fast as they can label and pack it into boxes. The October 9, 1891 Democrat reported that the Wymans had finished and paid the town $150 in rent.

1892: The Wymans and Bethel corn canning factory enjoy another successful year.

At the beginning of September when the corn canning season was about to start a good corn crop signaled a successful canning season was expected. On September 27^th the paper reported that the corn factory had finished packing. The factory had put up 300,000 cans of which 95% were deemed as No 1 Corn. The Wymans told the paper that they considered it the best season they had had here.

Corn Canning Factory reports during 1893 and 1894 did not show any major changes. In May 1893 news reported that Herbert Lord of Waterford had assumed the manager’s job. When the canning season began in September the factory expected a heavy yield and in September they reported hiring 150 hands. In the last week of September, the can count had reached 250,000 with record 32,000 cans put up in one day. But at the end of the season, owner Wyman had noted that statewide corn harvest for canning was only half the usual yield; however, in Bethel he judged the season as producing about three fourths of an average good year’s crop.