Del Monte Plant No. 35
Del Monte Plant No. 35, fronting on Park Avenue between Hollis and Watts Streets, was originally built for Western Canning Company. Established in 1918. Western Canning developed the building for canning fruit and vegetables. Capitalized by Chinese investors, the firm’s officers were also largely Chinese, including its president. Chin Ring. The contractor was P. J. Walker and Company. The plant reportedly cost $1 million to build, and was adjacent to the tracks of both the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe Railroads. The original 5-acre development included the cannery building and 25 cottages for cannery employees. During the early 1920s, the facility was reportedly the largest cannery operating in California. The plant was designed to employ 1,500 people and to put out 600.000 cases of canned food (under the Westbest label) annually.
Western Canning had an enlightened policy of employee benefits for its day. In addition to employee housing, the company constructed a kindergarten and playground for the children of the company’s employees; these facilities were near the corner of 45th and Watts streets. The company cafeteria provided meals to employees at cost. and the cannery had a modern first aid room with a fulltime nurse.
Virden Packing Company
Western Canning only survived a couple of years before it was purchased for $1 million by Virden Packing Company in May. 1921. Virden was founded by its president. Charles E. Virden. The company sold its products under the Campfire brand. After buying the Emeryville facility, Virden moved its offices from Sacramento to San Francisco. Organized in 1919 with capital of $5 million, Virden expanded aggressively in the early 1920s by buying out other canning operations. By 1922. Virden owned 9 ‘plants located in both the Central Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area. A number of the Bay Area plants were also involved in meat processing. The Emeryville plant was used for canning only fruits and vegetables, and Virden planned to produce 1 million cases annually from this facility.
Initially, the Emeryville plant canned peaches and olives; by the mid-1920s, the plant also canned cherries, pears. apricots. tomatoes and tomato products. In addition to the Emeryv1lle plant. Virden had purchased two canneries in Oakland by 1923; the 1923 Oakland Tribune Annual Yearbook indicated that “Virden plants located in Alameda County have a capacity more than 50 per cent greater than any plants on the Pacific Coast.”
Virden was one of several large canners working in Alameda County. By the 1920s. Alameda County had 25 canneries. which included many of the West’s largest. Writers at the time often boasted that the Oakland area was the “center of the canned goods industry of the Pacific Coast.” In 1935. Alameda County was first in the state in its output of dry packed and canned product. Alameda County was also a major fruit growing area. with 12,000 acres of orchards having a 1928 output of $3.3 million. The growing area in the County extended primarily from Hayward to the Warm Springs district (south of what is now the City of Fremont).
California Packing Corporation
The size of Virden’s Bay Area operation made it an attractive acquisition for the California Packing Corporation (CPC), who bought out the company in 1927. Under CPC, the Emeryville cannery became known as Plant No. 35. CPC itself was the result of two major consolidations that had occurred in the California canning industry during the previous 28 years. In 1899. 18 canning companies, half of all the canning companies in California, combined to form the California Fruit Canners Association (CFCA). The merger included Cutting Fruit Packing, the pioneer canner from the 1850s. The featured CFCA label was Del Monte, a label developed by an Oakland canner in 1891.
The assets of CFCA, in addition to three other large companies. were acquired by a new company. the California Packing Corporation. in 1916. With the financial resources of these four companies and its 71 canneries. CPC was the first company to develop a national marketing campaign for food products. CPC began producing and marketing all its products under the Del Monte label. Before CPC was formed, CFCA had sold its products under 75 labels because each wholesaler preferred to market their own label. The advertising effort greatly expanded the market for CPC and canned foods generally. CPC doubled its fruit canning capacity between 1921 and 1930, largely by acquiring companies like Virden Packing.
CPC had owned the Emeryville plant for only a couple of years before the Great Depression began with the stock market crash of 1929. Demand for canned food plummeted, and the CPC posted an almost $9 million loss in 1932.
Depression-Era Growth
However, even though CPC eventually closed 24 plants between 1930 and 1940 because of declining demand, Plant No. 35 not only stayed open but was expanded during the 1930s. The 1930s expansion of the main cannery building was primarily to add new warehouse space since wholesalers would no longer buy a season’s production as they had done before the Depression. Other 1930s additions included buying an existing building at 4228 Hollis and developing it as a fish oil plant, building a research lab at Park and Hollis, and buying a small building on Park Avenue (north of the main office) and converting it into a men’s locker room and an employment office.
The expansion project had an impact on employee housing. Del Monte had built 25 wooden cottages for workers that were located east of the plant. The cabins were removed to make room for the new facilities, and the company village disappeared. Most of the tiny cottages were destroyed, but a few survived. Five cabins were moved to the east of 48th Street where they remain today, occupied by tenants who most likely are unaware of their origin. Identical in appearance, the brown, clapboard cabins are located next to Temescal Creek, now hidden in a subterranean culvert.
Waning Demand for Canned Food
Like the industry overall, CPC sales increased substantially during the war years and into the 1950s. However, as urbanization spread through the agricultural areas of Alameda and Santa Clara Counties during the 1950s and 1960s, it became less economical to operate a cannery in the Oakland area. Many canneries moved inland to be closer to the growing areas of the Central Valley. Other canners closed permanently because of the general decline in demand for canned foods beginning in the 1960s. In 1967, CPC changed its name to the Del Monte Corporation, after its primary label. When Del Monte’s Plant No. 35 closed in 1989, it was the last cannery operating in the East Bay. Del Monte consolidated Plant No. 35’s production into their San Jose facility, which is now their only cannery remaining in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Del Monte’s surviving brick buildings on Park Avenue and the cabins on 48th Street stand today as monuments to the generations of workers who toiled at Plant No. 35.
This story originally published in 1996 for the Emeryville Centennial Celebration and compiled into the ‘Early Emeryville Remembered’ historical essays book.
