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The pickle industry and railroading


merger Dingee eventually had eight fa- cilities with a total storage capacity of two million bushels. Their operations were spread from Minnesota to North Carolina, Louisiana and Texas. Squire Dingee was purchased by Beatrice in 1958, combined with the Bond Pickle Company of Oconto, Wisconsin, then became part of the Dean family of brands. Dean Foods spun off its pickles and specialty food lines in 2005 into Bay Valley Foods, which became part of today’s Tree- house Foods, the largest packer of pri- vate-label pickles in the United States. It is headquartered in Westchester, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago.


Making pickles There are three steps in making pick-


AUTHOR’S COLLECTION


In this idyllic scene a spur off of the Michigan Central curves its way around a pond up to the dock at a small pickle plant in Michigan. The supplies coming in and the outbound product would depend on how far the location processed the cucumbers. At the least, salt for brine would have arrived in bags or barrels in boxcars. If finished pickles came from here, sup- plies like pepper corns, dill, or garlic came from local farmers or were shipped in. Barrels or staves and rings could be either shipped in or made nearby. Tank cars hauling vinegar would also arrive here. During the season, cucumbers arrived daily in wagons or trucks from the area’s farms. Rural factories like this lasted well into the middle of the twentieth century and beyond, keeping pickle cars on the move to city plants where they were repacked.


workers a day. The C&NW ran a spe- cial “pickle train” just for them. The fare was five cents from Chicago. In the 1910’s, a major change came to


the industry around Chicago. Over the years various diseases began appearing on the plants, lowering yields. This was before crop rotation and proper sanita- tion were practiced. The diseases were being spread on the seeds, but the grow- ers did not know this. The final straw was in 1914. That year there was a se- vere drought and, coupled with the mounting diseases, the crop was ruined. All the packers in Chicago were


forced to look elsewhere for cucumbers. No longer were there lines of farmers in wagons waiting to unload at the small factories. Now pickles would come packed in barrels moved in boxcars from the salters for processing. It forced Samuel’s son, Sam, to forsake Evanston and move to Wausau, Wisconsin, where he started a new company. Likewise, the Squire Dingee Company established salting stations throughout the Midwest, primarily in Wisconsin. The Squire Dingee Company had


several more moves in Chicago, the last to a three-story building containing 45,000 square feet on Elston Avenue along the C&NW’s north main line. With the 1922 purchase of the Gohl Pickle and Preserve Company, which


84 DECEMBER 2011


abutted that plant, they had additional capacity and built a new four-story headquarters. With Gohl’s came the packing of preserves and jellies; in 1924 these were sold under the popular Ma Brown label. By acquisition or


les: salting, processing and finishing. Salting is the first step. Cucumbers contain a small amount of sugar. Salt leaches the sugar out and replaces it, preserving them. A lactic bacterium, which feeds on the sugar, is needed to properly cure the pickles. The salting process takes four to six weeks, de- pending on temperature and other con- ditions. There were small operators who bought cucumbers from the farm- ers, salted them down and sold the “brine stock” to any manufacturer that needed them. These operators were called “salters.” The resulting brine pickles are not palatable and have to be further processed. Processing leaches out the excess salt and plumps up the pickles to give them a pleasant appearance. For


The Chicago & North Western’s Clybourne station a few miles from downtown was the subject of this photo, but it also shows Squire Dingee’s Elston Avenue plant and head- quarters on the far right behind the reefers on the siding. Clybourne was the junction of the C&NW’s Wisconsin Division and the Milwaukee Division (on this side of the depot).


CHICAGO & NORTH WESTERN HISTORICAL SOCIETY COLLECTION


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