The cannery as a physical object is enlivened by the work and conversations that move throughout the space. While it is a building with a physical location on the map, it is also an experience beginning with the primary function of canning, and expanding into the dialogue and relationships that transcend the physical boundaries of space. As I write about the enlivened nature of this place, I find myself experiencing a tension between my historical voice, and my ethnographic voice, and my creative nonfiction voice. I have explored various ways of
conveying the story of the Prince Edward County Cannery in my “Introduction” and “Place” sections. The story that I want to tell here emerged as something of a memoir in a distinctly creative nonfiction voice, reiterating to me the importance of anecdotal storytelling as an essential methodology for shaping a full ethnographic and documentary narrative.
By embracing this style of writing, I see my place in this narrative as central, reflecting the summer and fall that I spent in Farmville becoming an active participant and member of the community. As my own engagement with the community became deeper and richer, I found myself increasingly engaging the creative nonfiction voice. I am aware and carefully conscious of the reflexive nature of this kind of storytelling, placing myself as a main actor in a story which I entered less than one year ago. By inserting myself into the story as a participant and narrator, I inherently take some of the power away from my consultant community. I am constantly
experience without neglecting the voices of my consultants who shape life at the cannery and have for many years.
Whenever you spend time conducting any kind of ethnographic research, you quickly find out that there are “kin-keepers” in every community, people who hold a special kind of knowledge that you are constantly being pointed towards to find out the truth about a place. From the moment I began spending time at the cannery, it became readily apparent that “Ms. Lena” Huddleston was one of these community elders. Patty Gulick, the cannery manager, spent the first several weeks of the summer trying to help me track down Ms. Lena, who was at that time living in an assisted living facility in Richmond, to sit down with her and conduct an oral history interview. Unfortunately, due to her failing health, I was unable to meet Ms. Lena. Not meeting Ms. Lena may not have been the worst thing, though, because it reminded me that folklorists too often chase the past when we should be chasing the present. The extent of Ms. Lena’s legacy has become something poetic and ungraspable to me, but at the same time it has been concretely shaped by the present voices of those who knew her well and were able to speak to the way that she influenced the life of the cannery.
There was nothing normal at all about Monday, August 26, 2019 at the Prince Edward County Cannery. It was much too cool for a late August day in Farmville, Virginia. When I arrived to the cannery around 7:30 a.m., I was wearing my usual “uniform” of jeans and sneakers, but I had a Carolina hoodie zipped up over my t-shirt, as the temperature hovered in the low sixties. The morning was made more unusual by the quiet in the cannery. The four large fans that perpetually circulate humid air throughout the canning floor were turned off, and Patty, Rodney, and Patty’s friend Anne were the only people in the building. The windows were all opened up and let in the crisp air that hinted at a fall that wouldn’t truly come for over another
month. We had set aside that morning to cook tomato soup for Anne. Patty’s demeanor added to the strangeness of the morning. She was quiet, somber even. It was then that she broke the news to me that one week earlier, on August 19, Ms. Lena had died at the age of 79.
Saturday the 24th, the morning of Ms. Lena’s funeral, had been the first day in an unusual streak of cool weather that August. Patty and Rodney had arrived to the cannery around 6:00 a.m., and spent some time discussing if they should shut down the cannery for the day out of respect and to attend the funeral. Rodney is the quiet but essential operations manager that helps the facility run on a daily basis. He had taken over from Ms. Lena’s late husband, Tommy. Patty admitted that she was hesitant to go to the funeral. Ms. Lena had not been her biggest fan. Patty never speaks of Lena with anything less than respect, but there was still residual tension about Patty taking over Lena’s role as cannery manager when Lena retired. As they debated calling the county office and asking if they should close for the day before customers arrived, a car full of cannery patrons pulled into the parking lot just before 7:00. As Patty recalled, “I guess that answered that question,” and they went ahead with opening procedures.
The women came into the cannery and Patty shared the news with them about Lena’s death. Out of nowhere, as the group talked, the overhead lights flickered and then the power went out completely in the cannery. It was a sunny enough morning, and there didn’t seem to be any reason why the power would have mysteriously shut off due to weather or any sort of
electrical issues. Patty called next door to Granny B’s, and sure enough they had power. She then called the county office to see if there were any sort of outages that she needed to be aware of, and nothing had been reported. About five minutes passed and just like that, as smoothly as it shut off, the lights came back on, with no flickers or issues for the rest of the day. Patty believed
that this was Lena’s way of sending a moment of silence, and then telling them to move on with their day in the cannery that she had loved so much.
Lena Rose Huddleston, always affectionately and respectfully called Ms. Lena by everyone at the cannery, was born on January 23, 1940. She worked on her family’s dairy farm with her husband, as well as working as a nurses’ aid, special education teacher, and school bus driver for the county, before becoming manager for the cannery. As the Farmville Herald wrote, “Huddleston was a special education teacher at Prince Edward County some 40 years ago when one summer day she happened to be at the cannery—canning, of course. She was asked to pitch in to help the rest of the day and managed it ever since.”34 Patty likes to tell the story with a bit more flare:
Ms. Lena did give me a little bit of her background, and it’s kind of a funny story. Her and her husband were dairy farmers and they were farmers their whole lives. She drove the school bus. She worked with handicapped children and the lower grade ages of like, third, fourth fifth grade. And she used to come into the cannery—she was an avid customer of the cannery. And now this is way back when because the cannery was combined and rebuilt in the early ‘70s. This would have been the cannery before the 70s. And she was using that one, working the school bus, and running the dairy.
And then they built the new cannery, and the manager that was running the cannery at the time—when Mr. Lena was in here—had a bad day. And evidently called her
administrator at the time 40 years ago and said, “I quit!” And walked out the door. And Ms. Lena said, “Well, what am I supposed to do?” And she said “close up.” Ms. Lena called the county and said, “Hey, your manager has just walked out and you got three customers in here. What am I supposed to do?” And they said, “well, do you know how to run the retorts?” And she goes, “Well, yeah.” And he said, “run it, shut it down, and then come and talk to me.”
And so she ran it that day and finished those three customers, shut down the cannery, closed it up, went to the administrator and sat down to talk to him and he offered her a job. And she was the cannery manager for the following 40 years until she retired and I guess it's been three, four years now that she's retired.35
34 “Preserving Memories, Huddleston Seals Career.” TheFarmville Herald, June 16, 2015.
35 Patty Gulick, Interview by Hannah Evans. In Person Interview. Prince Edward County Community Cannery, Farmville, Virginia, 19 August 2019.
When I went back to reference my interview with Patty about Lena, another peculiarity immediately stood out to me. Patty and I had recorded this interview in her office on Monday morning, August 19, the same day that Lena died.
Ms. Lena lives on in her handwritten recipes, inscribed on fading white construction paper pinned to a corkboard outside of Patty’s office. Patty also keeps a pdf version on the county website, and always leaves printed copies at the front of the cannery for easy access. The recipes have been reused, adapted and adjusted hundreds of times over the years. For instance, just because the recipe that Lena had worked out might call for a certain quantity of salt, the particular tomato crop you end up using might be more or less watery, and need adjustment on the fly. Patty prefers to double the celery in Lena’s tomato soup recipe to bump up the flavor. The years that Lena spent honing these beloved recipes set a foundation and a guideline for our work that August morning, making tomato soup.
The soup preparation began a month earlier, on another unseasonably cool Tuesday in late July. I met Patty and Anne at the cannery in Farmville on a sixty-five-degree rainy morning, and we all joked about how relieved we were for the rain after a string of 105-degree days the previous weekend. We loaded into Patty’s cherished 1980s black Toyota Forerunner, complete with fuzzy brown seat covers, and drove to Charlotte County to the bi-weekly produce auction run by the local Amish community. As we drove, Patty quipped about getting lost the last time she’d driven out to Charlotte County to give a talk to the McGuffey Fire Department about the cannery. Patty doesn’t trust GPSs, and in fact had just gotten her very first smart phone about two weeks earlier. If it wasn’t for her newfound love of sending GIFs, I’m pretty sure she would have returned the phone right away. Unfortunately, even having a GPS capable smartphone wouldn’t really help us to find our destination that day. There is very little media presence about
the Southside Produce Auction in Cullen, Virginia, because of the religious beliefs of the Amish community members who run the event. The auction is advertised primarily by word of mouth. The facility doesn’t even have a technical address, it is simply the large pavilion at the
intersection of Vincent Store Road and Virginia State Route 47.
After a brief twenty-minute drive, we pulled into a gravel parking lot and up to a covered concrete pavilion about the size of a football field, running longways from northwest to
southeast. The building is open on three of its four sides, with large pillars holding up the tin roof. The southeast side of the structure is enclosed into a storage room, and in the southwest corner there is a ten-foot by fifteen-foot covered office and food stand where you can buy pastries, sandwiches, and on this particularly chilly morning, hot chocolate. By the time we arrived around 9:20am, most of the produce was already set up on pallets, in large crates and boxes, or on metal roller carts that might be found at a home improvement store. The produce lined the pavilion in rows, horizontally from the southwest to the northeast side. Customers parked mainly on the gravel around the southwest side of the building, as the northeastern parking lot was taken up by dozens of horse and buggy carriages, many with long bed trailer attachments built from wood and resting on metal wheels. We watched amazed as boys who looked to be about twelve years old directed horses to back up the large twelve-foot-long trailers perfectly up to the edge of the elevated concrete slab for easy access to unload their produce.
The auction runs every Tuesday and Friday from 10:00 a.m. until all of the produce is sold. Patty always encourages cannery patrons to visit the auction, and then to bring their newly purchased produce to the cannery on Wednesdays and Saturdays for preservation. Home canners maintain three days out of the week to use the facility, Monday, Wednesday and Saturday, and Patty purposely chose days that follow the local auction. Although many patrons of the cannery
Figures 3.1: The Lutz family garden and raised beds. Photo by Hannah J. Evans.
are farmers themselves, the auction is the best way to supplement their own produce, or to purchase additional ingredients for a recipe. For instance, the Lutz family grows an abundance of tomatoes, but will usually go to the produce auction to purchase onions in bulk for making pasta sauce or French onion soup. Everything at the auction is sold in bulk for wholesale. Although the auction is facilitated by the local Amish community, people from all walks of life come to buy. Restaurateurs, food service industry workers, farmers market producers, CSA organizers, farmers, and individuals off the street are all competing to outbid one another for the best produce each week.
Anne and I were grateful to have Patty along with us to show us the ropes. Registration for auction-numbers takes place in the small office next to the food stand. We forwent registering for our own numbers and let Patty do all of the bidding that morning, choosing instead to wander the aisles and made note of the fresh produce. Bushels of watermelon, cantaloupe of various sizes, cucumbers for eating and for pickling, and every kind of squash from acorn to zucchini covered the concrete slab. Each produce item was marked with the producer’s identifying
number, the type of product, and the quantity that you are required to purchase. For instance, one producer may have twenty boxes of green beans, with a minimum purchase of five boxes. Patty has a good eye for determining quantities, and was able to estimate based on weight and visuals how many bushels of produce were in each respective box. As the auctioneer went around to each product, the winning bidder could take as much as they wanted, as long as they took the minimum amount. Although several things caught our eyes that morning, including two boxes of the most beautiful purple Cherokee tomatoes I’ve ever seen, we were focused on the hunt for affordable tomatoes for tomato soup.
Two auctioneers opened the auction at 10:00 a.m. One man had a pop-singer-style microphone around his ear with the small mouthpiece hanging in front of his face. The microphone was hooked up to a battery pack on his hip and broadcast over speakers set up at junctions throughout the pavilion, creating a resounding announcement volume. Both men had long beards down to their chests accented with curls framing their faces. They wore straw hats and overalls held up with safety pins, not buttons. The auctioneer with the microphone wore a green shirt under his overalls, and his partner had on a blue shirt and carried a notepad with him to take records of all of the winning bidders and produce. It struck me that in a space so
dedicated to upholding the Amish belief system—no rubber wheels on their carts, no credit cards, no photographs allowed of the facility or any of the produce or community members—that an exception was made for the electric speaker system.
The auctioneer opened up the bidding on a selection of cucumbers, calling out
“cucumbers, fifteen boxes, you have to take five.” Anne and I walked around and chatted with other customers as Patty honed in on the tomatoes she had chosen. I met Tom, a frequent cannery customer and master gardener, and we talked about his daughter’s high school softball career while we watched the action around us from behind a set of speakers. Eventually, Patty came back with twokinds of tomatoes,five half bushels each, about ninety pounds of tomatoes all together. One variety went for six dollars per box, and the other for six dollars and fifty cents per box. The gamble with auctions is that you never know what the supply and demand will look like on a given day. Patty has told stories about CSA operators from surrounding cities coming down and paying upwards of eight dollars per dozen on eggs, because they know they have clients that will pay the exorbitant prices. Some days, one producers’ tomatoes will go for twelve dollars per box. But, if you only wait for a later batch of tomatoes, you can secure them for a
much cheaper price. On the flip side, if you wait too long, you’ll be left without the produce you’re looking for. We left with our tomato haul, as well as with three massive bouquets of flowers that we couldn’t convince Patty not to buy for us. I had enough flowers to give to both of my neighbors when I got home that day and still keep two sizeable bouquets for myself. Patty