In distinguishing between historical context and present-day functionality, I am mindful that my first step is to render the cannery as an object, or constellation of objects. I see it as imperative to describe the cannery as a physical, material place, through which I am better able to make sense of it as an enlivened space. Because the story of the Prince Edward County Community Cannery is so complex, beginning with a detailed description allowed me preserve the space in detail as it was laid out in the summer of 2019, and to discover possible points of entry into the narrative by highlighting facets of the cannery that stood out as most important in my mind. Tackling this section became my first undertaking in writing the larger thesis. In order to accomplish this task, I turned to examples of narrative descriptions of historic landmarks in the National Register of Historic Places as models of thick descriptions of place, and emulated that style here.
Today, the Prince Edward County Community Cannery faces northwest onto a gravel and dirt parking lot off of Abilene Road in Farmville, Virginia. The one-story building, speckled with sun bleached white and red bricks, is relatively unassuming. It is approximately one hundred-feet long by thirty-feet wide. Along the front elevation of the building are two entrances, internally marking the beginning and end of the main caning floor. A white wooden door sits at the
northeast corner of the building, and on a normal canning day this door is left open to an interior screen to let out steam, more than to let in the hot Virginia summer air. The other set of doors is the main entrance, offset slightly from the center of the building towards the southwest side of
the cannery. These two grey doors have a ramp in front and serve as a loading dock to wheel produce in and cans out of the facility.
Wooden posts, spaced every ten feet with thick rope looped between them, separate the parking lot from the cannery and ensure that cars don’t park too close. An old wooden picnic table lives between the roped off lot and the brick exterior of the building, to the left of the double grey doors. It is typically too hot to enjoy sitting outside for long during canning days in the August heat of summer, but occasionally the picnic table offers relief from the high
temperatures and loudness that build inside the facility. It is used as a place for patrons to grab a quick cigarette while they wait on their cans to be pressure sealed inside. A large blue dumpster sits catty-corner to the northeast door. More than once, a local community member has dumped their trash into the cannery dumpster and left the door open, inviting racoons and other critters in to feast on the scraps from the cannery. The manager has since placed a large white sign on the dumpster urging patrons to “CLOSE THE DUMPSTER,” to prevent similar encounters with local wildlife.
The front elevation of the cannery features a ventilation system, displayed along the roof ridge between the two entrances on the northeastern half of the building. From the road, this external structure looks a little like a set of small elevated windows. The vents live directly above the cannery floor, helping to expel steam out of the building. The cannery has four windows along the northwest side of the building between the two sets of doors, and then two windows on the southwest side of the building, indicating the location of two internal offices. In the window opening to the right of the grey double doors rests a massive yellow air conditioner window unit. This unit is the only air conditioner in the entire facility, and this office serves as a respite on the hottest of canning days. Positioned between the air conditioning unit and the grey
Figure 2.1: The Prince Edward County Community Cannery exterior view. Courtesy of the Virginia Food Works website. https://virginiafoodworks.org/facility-and-equipment/
Figure 2.2: The Prince Edward County Community Cannery exterior sign. Courtesy of the Virginia Food Works Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/VirginiaFoodWorks/
double doors, a small three-foot by two-foot white sign reads “Prince Edward County
CANNERY. No Produce after 10:00. Open at 7:00.” From the road, you can barely make out the word “CANNERY,” let alone discern any more information about the facility. On days that the cannery is open for home use, the facility manager, Patty Gulick, usually sticks a bright yellow yard sign in front of the parking lot closest to the road indicating, “CANNERY OPEN 7:30- 10am.” These signs are deceiving about the length of a canning day. Although no new produce is accepted after 10am, patrons are typically working in the facility still processing food or waiting for cans to cool from the retort until at least 1:30pm, and until after 4pm on the busiest of days. The main double doors open directly into a spacious industrial kitchen. The majority of the facility extends into one large room. The ceiling is lined with open rafters and rows of rectangular florescent lights, evoking an industrial scale operation. Towards the southwest side of the building, a white, double stacked washer and dryer and a small grey metal cabinet full of linens share a corner. Towels of various colors and sizes drape over a wooden clothes-drying rack set up next to the washing machine, before being folded and stacked neatly on top of the cabinet. Although the cannery has a dryer, it was never hooked up due to lack of proper piping and exhaust. It remains attached to the washing machine, a permanently dysfunctional feature of the canning floor.
Next to the washer and dryer unit is one of the most impressive pieces of equipment in the cannery, a colossal scale capable of weighing up to 1,000 lbs. The scale was procured from an old warehouse, and has a five-foot by seven-foot metal base. A black iron post serves as the stand for a one-and-a-half-foot circular face that lists numbers from 0 through 1,000, with a thin red arrow that points to the appropriate weight. Patty has a prized photograph of an entire
elementary school class that came to tour the cannery standing on the scale, proving its high tolerance for weight. Behind the scale and washer/dryer, a wall partitions the cannery.
The main canning floor is approximately eighty-feet long by thirty-feet wide, and the back half of the building is roughly thirty-by-thirty feet. The main open area is separated by a wall that bisects the building from northwest to southeast, with a small hallway leading to the rear of the facility. A handwashing station containing a sink with an inconsistently functioning foot pedal, a paper towel dispenser and a silver trashcan adorns the portion of the wall next to the large scale. In front of the hand washing station, still towards the northwestern side of the
building, a brown four-foot by two-foot table displays pamphlets containing information about the cannery. These pamphlets include recipes, rules and regulations. This table is also where the hair nets, beard nets and gloves are stored.
The informational table is the last landmark before reaching the break for the hallway along the back wall of the cannery. An old meat grinder that rarely gets used resides on the other side of the hallway opening, still in the main facility, along the southeastern side of the wall. The meat grinder backs up to a single door, leading into a ten by ten-foot storage room filled with cardboard boxes for canners to carry their finished cans home in. A door inside this storage room opens to a small boiler closet, housing the main heat source for the facility.
The hallway connects to the southwestern side of the facility. Four doors line the hallway on either side. On the right, the doors are slightly more spaced out and reveal the two offices. The furthest southwest office belongs to Kathleen Gregory, the commercial canning manager, and is almost always closed.
The first office, where the lone air conditioner is mounted, belongs to the home canning manager, Patty Gulick. A four-foot by two-foot brown desk faces the doorway, displaying a
Figures 2.3: Washer/dryer, scale and linen storage in the cannery. Photo by Hannah J. Evans.
white desk calendar, business cards, mugs full of writing utensils, and Patty’s computer (the only place to get internet in the building). A four-foot by two-foot brown desk faces the doorway, displaying a white desk calendar, business cards, mugs full of writing utensils, and Patty’s computer (the only place to get internet in the building). Three chairs with chestnut brown frames invite canners to come in and rest during breaks. The chair directly in front of the desk is yellow, with a green chair to the right of the entryway and its matching green counterpart under the window and AC unit.
A white refrigerator flanks the yellow chair, typically stocked with sample products, and always with bottles of water. Next to the refrigerator a small wooden cart contains a random assortment of cans and glass bottles. In between the two green chairs on the northeastern wall of the room spans a short taupe filing cabinet topped with a microwave, and a tall grey metal cabinet six feet wide by six feet tall. This cabinet displays Patty’s prized magnet collection. Family and patrons of the cannery always bring her back magnets from their travels, and her collection includes magnets from as close as Washington D.C. and as far as the United Kingdom. The magnets have always felt symbolic to me. Patty took over as the home canning manager after the beloved Ms. Lena served for nearly 40 years in the role. For Patty, this magnet collection not only serves as a way to make the space authentically hers, but as a constant reminder that she is loved and accepted as an essential part of the community.
The window, dressed with green checkered curtains, serves as the focal point along the back wall of the office. Next to the window, a wooden hutch proudly exhibits books on canning and another small file cabinet in the back-left corner of the room serves as a printer stand. On the southwestern wall of the office, Patty’s safety certifications to operate the machinery in the cannery are framed and hung. Patty also keeps her partner Rodney Scott’s certifications framed
above her desk. The certifications are hung next to a time clock where Rodney and Patty have an old-fashioned punch card reader, complete with paper cards that always look like they are faded yellow from age, to record their hours for the county to pay them.
Other decorations in the room include a large “Homegrown Virginia” banner along the southeastern wall above the wooden cart with odds and ends and a framed two-by-two-foot puzzle of canned goods in glass jars that is displayed on the hutch on the northwestern wall. My favorite two decorations are near the green armchair on the northeastern wall, hanging over the microwave. The first is a framed and yellowing newspaper tribute from a 2015 issue of the
Farmville Herald to Ms. Lena, Patty’s predecessor, titled “Preserving Memories, Huddleston Seals Career”. The second is the Longwood University softball schedule. Patty’s niece played for the Longwood softball team for all four of her college years, and she remains an avid fan.
Posted in the hallway between the two offices are three pieces of construction paper listing some of the cannery’s favorite recipes that were developed over the years by Ms. Lena. These include the recipes for Brunswick stew and tomato soup handwritten in fading marker. Across the hallway, adjacent doors open into the women’s and men’s bathrooms respectively. Heavy-duty aprons and gloves of various kinds line the hallway next to the bathroom doors, hanging on wooden hooks. Typically, home canners only break out the aprons when dealing with the messiest of ingredients, like peeling fresh tomatoes. Even then, many people prefer to wear work clothes in the facility and not deal with the cumbersome, heat resistant blue aprons. Gloves
Figures 2.5: Cannery manager, Patty Gulick. Photo by Hannah J. Evans
Figure 2.7: Ms. Lena’s recipes pinned to a corkboard outside of the cannery offices. Photo by Hannah J. Evans.
are made of the same heat resistant material, and become essential when scooping from the large kettles. Patty guards her personal pair of gloves tucked in a desk drawer in her office because many of the ones in the hallway have holes in them. She also keeps her personal paring knife in a mug on the hutch, so that she doesn’t have to use the knives on the cannery floor, many of which are dulled with overuse.
Continuing down the hallway to the southwestern portion of the building, the facility extends into a thirty-by-fifteen-foot room. The hallway floor slopes to facilitate drainage, and is covered by thick black kitchen mats to help counter the slipperiness of the wet concrete floor. The back of the facility is dedicated to storage. Along the southeastern part of the back room is a double garage door to facilitate loading product into the storage room. Massive pallets holding thousands of tin cans line the southwestern wall of the facility. These range from pint to quart to gallon sizes, and cost patrons $0.40, $0.48 and $1.25 per can respectively. A thirty percent upcharge is enforced for clients who do not live in Prince Edward or the surrounding counties, which also contribute to the yearly budget for facility funding. The northwestern wall of the back room is taken up with an industrial walk in freezer and refrigerator. Shelves hold extra salt and sugar, as well as stockpiled cleaning supplies.
The majority of life at the cannery happens on the other side of the hallway, in the main canning room that takes up the entire northeastern half of the facility. The canning room has poured concrete floors with four long drainage lines built in to the floor, running northeast to southwest in the building. The drainage lines are covered with metal grates, and the cannery is set up in long aisles of tables and equipment to cover over the grates. The entire facility is designed for optimal cleaning ability. Almost everything is either stainless steel, plastic or concrete, and can be easily hosed down and sterilized at the end of a long day. The drains that
run throughout the building allow for water to be sprayed virtually everywhere without making surfaces slippery. Because food waste clogs floor drains, the cannery strongly encourages patrons to dispose of waste in trashcans located throughout the room.
The first row of equipment runs directly along the front northwestern wall of the building. To the left of the double grey doors is a five-foot-tall potato peeler. The machine consists of a round opening on top where potatoes are poured in, and then run through a sandpaper-like metal shield. The potatoes grate on the shield while being rinsed with water, before being spit out into a bucket waiting for the clean, peeled potatoes at the bottom.
A double sink inhabits the space between the potato peeler and the first window on the northwestern wall of the building. A sixty-gallon trashcan lives beneath the window, and a three- compartment sink extends adjacent along the wall. At the beginning of each canning day, the first compartment of the triple-sink gets filled with clean fresh water for rinsing, the second with soapy water for washing, and the third with bleach diluted in water for sanitizing. This is the main cleaning station in the facility and every kitchen implement that can be removed and washed by hand gets run through the three-compartment sink to be properly cleaned. A ledge next to the “rinse” sink holds soap, bleach, scrub pads and squeegees, and a stainless-steel table next to the “sanitizing” sink serves as a place to put utensils while they dry off. Above the double and triple sinks hang two magnetic knife blocks that runs two feet along the wall, where a variety of preparation knives are stored for easy access. Like Patty, canners frequently choose to bring their own knives for prep work, because cutting with the dulled facility knives can be incredibly daunting.
Next to the first set of sinks, a three-tiered metal storage shelf displays pots and pans of all sizes. Plastic cutting boards hang off the sides of the shelf, large metal mixing bowls and
Figure 2.11: Tipple-compartment sanitizing sink. Photo by Hannah J. Evans.
small handled pots line the shelves. The small handled pots are not used for cooking, but rather as ladles. Likewise, the top shelf is home to 5-gallon stock pots that see little cooking.
Occasionally, if the large bowls are dirty one of these stock pots serves as a substitute. Continuing to the southwest side of the building, along the front wall there is another smaller double sink, usually used for rinsing vegetables and fruit, followed by a metal rack containing replacement parts for many of the cannery’s large straining devices, as well as several large apple corers that allow preparation of a bushel of apples in minutes. A single sink that is most often used for hand washing or quick rinsing things, instead of heavy-duty cleaning, rests next to the storage shelf.
A sage green, three-foot-long corn cutting machine adds the only pop of color in the