By Beth Clark
Many of us are fortunate to have a convenient stock of store-bought canned foods on the shelves during the cold days of winter. For an even more fortunate few, the resurgence in popularity of home canning allows some industrious suburban homesteaders to enjoy their summer garden vegetables in January. Just over a hundred years ago, Fishers was a commercial producer of canned vegetables, especially tomatoes that were the fruits of labor of the local farmers.
The Fishers Canning factory opened in 1912 at the end of South Street by the railroad tracks. A long wooden-sided warehouse with open windows to let the heat of the late summer canning process escape, its location near the Fishers station allowed for swift rail transport of its products, as well as easy receipt of tin cans from such companies as the American Tin Plate Company in Chicago and the American Sheet and Tin Plate Company in Elwood, IN. Elwood incidentally remains involved in the canning business to this day as home to the main processing plant for Red Gold Tomatoes.
The enterprising days of the Fishers Canning factory were few. The factory was defunct by the end of 1915. While in operation, it employed over 20 workers, most of whom were women. It took its place among a myriad of local canneries that opened in small towns across America at the turn of the century.
The rise of the local cannery can be attributed to a number of factors, stretching back to the Civil War when there was a great need for non-perishable canned foods for soldiers. The industrial canning process had been introduced to the U.S. in 1812 in New York by Robert Ayars, who popularized the use of tin-plated wrought iron cans rather than glass for food storage. War and industrialization increased canning production, but it was the 1904 widespread implementation of the double-seam tin can that lead to a boom in canning factories. The double-seam tin can eliminated the need for solder when sealing the ends of the can, which increased manufacturing speed, reduced cost, and made a local cannery a potentially lucrative business venture with a cheap supply of tin cans.
Numerous towns surrounding Fishers had local canneries by 1915, including Indianapolis, Noblesville, Atlanta, Carmel, Westfield, Tipton, Fortville, Pendleton, Lapel, and Anderson. Women comprised the majority of employees in part because food preparation was considered women’s work and because of the seasonal nature of the industry. The bulk of the canning work was completed after the spring and summer harvests. WWI and the Progressive Era further spurred canning production and the regulation of factory conditions respectively, and inspired the humanitarian work of local women’s clubs. A notice in the June 10 edition of the 1922 Carmel Standard newspaper states that the women’s group of the Carmel Friends Church worked for a day at the Westfield Canning Company, donating their earnings to the church.
Review of the 1915 Annual Report of the Indiana State Board of Health is noteworthy for its lengthy sections on Sanitary Food Laws and Indiana canneries. The Board of Health inspected 159 existing canning factories in 1915, down from 241 in 1914 in its effort to regulate sanitary conditions. The Fishers Canning factory was not included on the list of canneries by 1915. The Annual Report acknowledged that the past season had been a difficult one for the industry. A saturated market and a poor growing season meant the end of the Fishers Canning factory.
