History: Prunes in Oregon by Mary S. Alsip Polk County, Oregon ******************************************************************************* USGENWEB ARCHIVES(tm) NOTICE: All documents placed in the USGenWeb Archives remain the property of the contributors, who retain publication rights in accordance with US Copyright Laws and Regulations. In keeping with our policy of providing free information on the Internet, these documents may be used by anyone for their personal research. They may be used by non-commercial entities so long as all notices and submitter information is included. These electronic pages may NOT be reproduced in any format for profit. Any other use, including copying files to other sites, requires permission from the contributors PRIOR to uploading to the other sites. The submitter has given permission to the USGenWeb Archives to store the file permanently for free access. http://www.usgwarchives.net/or/orfiles.htm ******************************************************************************** Transcribed and formatted for use in USGenWeb Archives by: Catherine Leinbach May 2003 ******************************************************************************** The item below is contained in my genealogy information. I got it from a cousin who is now deceased who got it from her grandfather's collection. I thought it might be of interest to people in the area. Catherine Leinbach Winston-Salem, NC OREGON PRUNES BY MARY S. ALSIP 1927 Polk County, Oregon, is just about one of the most lovely spots in the world. Almost everything is grown here, grain, flax, hops, nuts, and all kinds of fruits and berries. The flax raised here is just a fine a grade and equal to that raised in Ireland. The hop business amounts to about a million dollars annually. As the Italian prunes are what we are interested in mostly, I will try to write about them. The Italian prunes are called tart sweet prunes and when dried are a glossy black color. There are fifty-five thousand acres of Italian prunes growing in Oregon and Clark County, Washington. Of these there are ten thousand acres in Polk County, Oregon and seven hundred and fifty farmers have prune orchards. Fifty million pounds are dried annually and go to all parts of the United States, Canada, England, Germany, France and other European countries. In planting a prune orchard, the trees are set 20 feet apart each way. They are pruned each year and kept well cultivated. The trees start to bear at about six years of age. Prune harvest begins about the first of September and usually the picking lasts about twenty-five days, according to the crop. They yield from two to three hundred bushels to the acre depending on the season and the size of the trees. When the prunes are ripe and ready to dry, they begin to drop from the trees. The trees are then shaken lightly and the prunes are gathered up, by women and children usually and put in boxes. Generally about three pickings are made before the prunes are all ripe. As fast as they are picked up they are taken to the dryer where they are first put through a vat of hot water and then one of cold water and then are run on wire trays holding about a half a bushel of prunes. This is all done by machinery. They are then put in the tunnels, which are heated at 180 to 200 degrees and it takes them about thirty-six hours to dry. The tunnels are about fifteen trays high and ten feet long. The trays run on slates or rollers with a decline of one and one half inches to the foot. The heat comes on the prunes at the lower end of the tunnel where they are taken out when dried and passed back through the prunes to the upper end where the prunes are put in. The heat passes out through a ventilator. As fast as the prunes are dried and taken out, the trays are pushed down and more put in. As soon as the dried prunes cool they are sorted by women who pick out all that are not properly dried and the inferior ones. Then they are sacked and sent to the packing house. The packing house is a three story building with a grading machine on the third floor, where the prunes are graded, a processor on the second floor and packing on the first. After the prunes are taken to the packing house, they are elevated to the third floor and graded to get the sizes, as prunes are sold by sizes. The largest are 20-30s and the smallest are 60-70s. 20-30s means there are twenty to thirty prunes to the pound. There are five or six grades made according to size. The grader is a long conveyer with small round holes at the beginning and gradually become larger. The grader shakes the different sizes into hoppers and then the prunes are put into bins. Next they are processed and packed. The prunes pass over a covered conveyer in which they are steamed and thoroughly washed and they pass downward through a chute and are packed, mostly in twenty-five pound boxes for the market. Mr. and Mrs. Thomas J. Alsip live three miles out of Monmouth, Polk County, Oregon. They have a sixteen tunnel dryer in Monmouth, holding one thousand bushels of prunes. Mr. Alsip does commercial drying. He and his son, Henry, had sixty tons of dried prunes last fall. They are members of the Co-operative Prune Growers, who have their own packing house and sell through the exchange. Their brand is the "Mistland Prunes".