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THE lNTELLIGENCER, Saturday, NovemberZfi, 1994 â€" Weekend EXTRA Douglas Crawford ‘ ’ SATURDAY Music, collecting and all those canneries By Jack Evans The Inlelligencer If you want to know what retirement is all about, ask Hillier Township resi- dent Douglas Crawford. He seized on his spare time to under- take a history of Prince Edward County's once~famous canning industry. He has been doing it in stories in County Magazine and is now complet- ing his 10th such story. Crawford, 65, retired back to Prince Edward County following a 41-year career with the Bank of Nova Scotia. But preserving the memory of county canneries and their many products is not all. When they returned to the county five years ago, they purchased the Cold Creek Road farm home where his wife was born, and in which they were married 41 years ago, and started on major renovations. Then there was his love of music and singing. He is president of the area com- munity choir, Command Performance, which involves weekly rehearsals plus concerts. As a collector, he is treasurer of the Quinte Military Collectors Society. He also heads the county Heart and Stroke Person to Person Campaign and is a member of the executive; he‘s president of the Bay of Quinte United Empire Loy- alists Association, and through that helps run the Loyalist Cultural Centre (museum at Adolphustown) and is an active canvasser on behalf of Heart and Stoke, CNIB and Cancer Society. When he isn’t rehearsing, involved in a meeting or canvassing, Crawford is spending time with his canning memo- rabilia, his military collection, or re- searching an article for his series on canneries. "I usually like to do inter- views with people who have immediate knowledge," he said. "Butl also find im- ‘ portant information from the Registry Office or from newspaper files." Then there’s time in front of his trusty typewriter to prepare the article. C And with a large rural lot, there are al- ways garden and lawn chores in the spring-fall period. Crawford’s interest in canning goes back to his youth. He was a part-time worker at a cannery operated by his un- ‘ cle, the late Fred Folkard. ‘ Commercial canning in Prince Ed- ward survived almost 100 years until the Cobi Foods plant, formerly Baxter Canning, finally closed at Bloomfield as recently as 1990. Prince Edward was once known as "the bread basket of Canada,” on the strength of its wide variety of canning produce sold across Canada and abroad. The range was tremendous 1n the l Inlelllgencer photo by Jack 13‘. Hillier resident Douglas Crawford, with.his collection of local product labels, remains active during his retirems. heyday, the 1920s through 19405, when factories not only canned produce like peas, tomatoes, corn and berries, but meats, especially chicken, with some factories maintaining their own chicken- raising barns next or near to the can- nery. The wide variety of produce is repre- sented by Crawford’s collection of 450 labels from 49 factories. He even has some original antique cans found in a footstool. (A sampling of his collection drew much interest during a special dis- play in the Wellington Museum last summer.) Many of the factories have disap- peared. But Crawford has tracked down the names and locations of 62 known factories so far and firmly believes there are still some missing. Canning in Prince Edward is traced to Wellington Boulter who opened a can- nery at Picton in 1892. Canneries increased rapidly, encour- aging more and varied produce from 10- cal farmers while giving the farmers a market for their produce in return. A partial list of products from Prince Edward County includes tomatoes, peas, corn, pumpkin, raspberries, cher- ries, plums, white Currants, chicken, green and yellow beans, apples and juices, blueberries, peaches and pineap- ple. Some, Crawford notes, were obvi- ously imported produce, but local cns were the bulk of the product, and illas shipped all around the world. Crawford’s articles have alreadcov' ered such major long-time canneri; es Baxter, Waupoos, Conley, Hyatt ad Greer. Ruins of factories, or bui\ding:con- verted from factories, even old-sfle pea viners, continue to dot the landsap in Prince Edward County, as Crawford continues his search for the definitive collection of county canneriesl (Pea vin' ers were centralized machines to strip peas from the vine before being shipped to a factory.) A trend to large, centralimd coma tions was the biggest euemy of the (HZ ens of local factories, said Crawford followed by the increased Dupulari Y 09 frozen produce. It was the articles on the 1-019st 1m pact of canneries that earned (ranor‘ the county’s Citizen of the Year awanl for 1993 For Crawford, that memore 2/ night was just one more avgntto at‘r in a busy calendar. 3’ l