Caywood Trackside Bldgs

Ninety-year-old Clayton Smith Porter of Florida responded to the spring issue's mystery photo of "Porter's Hired Helpers," taken at one of the trackside buildings near the Caywood Station on the Lehigh Valley Railroad. He and his wife, Warda, recently celebrated their 67th wedding anniversary.

 

"I remember this building being built for packing fruit. From there, the fruit was loaded into "refrigerated" cars on the railroad. An ice house was in the north end of the packing house to ice the cars. The ice was cut from the Porter and Campbell dam in the winter and was hauled down in bob sleighs."

 

"The fruit was grown on the Porter farm. When the market became larger than we could produce, "Porter Produce" bought from other farmers mainly peaches, pears, apples and plums. These were sorted out and graded on a gasoline powered grader with women standing on the sides sorting the fruit as it tumbled off the table into baskets and containers according to size. From there, it was loaded into refrigerated cars. The cars were always painted freight yellow and marked "perishable" in big, red letters."

 

"The picture (Porter's Hired Help) is not clear enough to identify the people for sure. Some of the earlier employees I remember were truck drivers Don Bradley and Fred VanDoren. Don's father was the store manager; two teamsters were Doc Budman and Nate Friends; Lettie Yaudes was the business secretary."

 

"The fruit trees eventually played out, the market changed and grapes came to be the money crop. The orchards were torn out and set to vineyards and grapes became the crop. The bean business can on as they could be milled, sorted and packaged during the winter months. The "packing house" was then rebuilt into a bean mill, and that's another story!"