Bennett, Jim

Permission to use or quote from this transcript must be obtained from the Delaware Agricultural Museum and Village.

This is an interview with Jim Bennett of Bennett Orchards of Frankford, Delaware. The interview was conducted on Wednesday, June 26, 1991, at Jim Bennett's home. The interviewer is Mary Emily Miller representing the Delaware Agricultural Museum for the Delaware Department of Agriculture Century Farm Oral History project.

MM:Now you've been on this, the family has been on this property which is Bennett Orchards for three generations. Would you like to tell us something about the family and how you acquired the property and special features?

JB:I guess it was great-great grandfather, Captain Henry Long, bought the farm in 1867 for fourteen hundred dollars and it consisted of eighty-nine and a half acres. And at that time it was a working grist mill and water powered sawmill. And his son, John Long, bought the property from his father and in turn sold it to my great-great grandfather, Richard Miller in 1898 and Richard Miller left it in a will to his daughter, Ivy Hill Miller and her husband, Asa Bennett. My father, James Hare Bennett, inherited it from his father, Asa Bennett, and upon his death in 1971 my mother, Mary Bassett Bennett, inherited the farm and passed it to myself and my wife, Carrie Bennett, in 1983. So we're actually the fifth generation to live here. And my two sons are James Hare Bennett the third and Henry Bassett Bennett are the sixth generation to live here and in the same house.

MM:Oh that's nice.

JB:The house I think was probably built in the 1850s and our family lived here until 19.... About 1918 at which time my grandfather, Asa Bennett, moved into the town of Frankford. He had a cannery in Frankford and I guess moved into town to get electricity and water and all the ??? of life and from 1918 until about 1978 the house had been used as a tenant house for workers on the farm. And 1978 I came back and spent three and a half years renovating the house. ?????

MM:It takes time particularly ????? And it's larger now?

JB:Yes. I started the orchard in 1983 trying still to live off the land and make a living on the land without having enormous acreages that you would have to have for corn and soybeans and grain crops. So that was my experience and still make a living in small scale agriculture.

MM:And the mill, the grist mill, that's not still operating?

JB:No. They were called Baltimore Mills and we have documented the existence of them back in the late 1790s. We haven't got any further than that. And the grist mill was in continuous operation until probably the 1920s. Our family ceased to operate it about 1895 and other operators operated it until the 1920s. The sawmill I believe probably was in operation until probably the 1870s or '80s. And we had an old barn that just recently fell down or recently tore down and a lot of the stuctural members had been taken from the water powered sawmill. So I theorize that when the sawmill was no longer in use they took a lot of the timbers and brought up and built or rebuilt this barn. The barn was always known as a Centennial Barn which I figure was 1876, so maybe that's when it was built and it comes in that the sawmill was out of use then.

MM:?????

JB:I think my great-great grandfather, Captain Henry Long, was also a sea captain and had several schooners and his brother had schooners. And I believe the grains and lumber products were probably shipped out at what was called Factors Landing which was down on ???? Creek. Probably shipped out the Indian River Inlet to markets maybe in Philadelphia and New York. Captain Henry Long's brother, John T. Long, had a store in Frankford. And I believe that they shipped the raw materials out and brought back finished good which they sold through the store. Then the Long family owned extensive acreage in what is known as the Cypress Farm. So I think that, you know, they owned the acreage on which the raw materials were produced and the ships would transport them and the stores would sell the finished product.

MM:Were the ships made though here?

JB:I believe so. They were probably a shallow draft because the ????? was you know ??? is always changed and a lot of times they're shallow. And probably eh.... I know of the existence of a couple of these when they used to build boats on the Indian River. So I'm sure they were all locally built. As far as the physical size of it I really don't know too much about it but I imagine it was fairly small.

MM:A shallow draft then they would probably have a lot of deck cargo and then local people probably were the crew.

JB:Yeah. That was the only means of transportation until the '70s or '80s until the railroad was brought through.

MM:And that parallels that same kind of development along the eh - further in Kent County and on up into New Castle.

JB:Yes. There's an interesting eh.... In Henry Long's will an interesting ??? here, we left to his son, John H. Long, a certificate to sixteen shares of the capital stock of the Delaware, Maryland, Virginia Railroad Company. As a warning never to invest money in any enterprises that he has no control over together with all the profits and incomes thereof. So apparently that was a growing.... I think when the railroad first started to come through they thought it was going to be their salvation, yet the railroad monopoly was just a precipice. The lack of transporation ????? didn't do the local people that much good. It made the railroad ???? rich.

?M:And there were feeder lines and some of those went bankrupt. So that might have been a feeder line that went bankrupt.

JB:So that was kind of an embarrassment and it must have made an impression upon him to ??? his own ??? And that will was dated 1886, 7th day of August. That's when I guess the will was written.

MM:And that tied in the eh.... Probably after that they didn't use the schooners as much.

JB:By probably '50 the schooner was out of business. And also at that time they had eh.... In order to get away from the shallow boats they had dug the canal from the Indian River to Rehoboth Bay to Roosevelt Inlet which was a man made inlet so they could eliminate going out in the treacherous ocean inlet. Yeah I think when those canals were built they were probably obsolete as they were being built because the railroad took over the sea travel as a much more reliable way to transport goods.

MM:And yet they're still continued to be traffic and Philadelphia and of course around the Peninsula to Baltimore.

JB:Yes.

MM:And those were alternate possiblities on that. You said that you grew grain then on the land for awhile. What other types of crops?

JB:My grandfather grew uh... He had a cannery so he grew tomatoes and English peas, potatoes and a lot of different crops that could be canned. And the cannery burned down I think in the '20s in the town of Frankford. It was on the railroad about where the present day Mount Airy Grain was or Agway. And after that in the 1930s he got into the poultry business. And at that time he started to grow grain crops in conjunction with the poultry operation.

MM:For feed?

JB:For feed yeah. And he also grew strawberries early in the 1900s the same as everyone else did. But poultry was the real ?????. The agriculture was ?????

MM:With the cannery did he buy from local people?

JB:I think so. It was probably a seasonal type operation in the months the products were on and everyone was very busy and then they probably closed down.

MM:Do you know about how many people worked there at all?

JB:Well I've got a lot of records from the cannery, old records, and I've never really had the time to go through them. But it would probably give a wealth of information as far as materials and eh..... My aunt has a painting of the cannery that our cousins ????? back in the '20s when it was still in existence.

MM:Oh that's nice.

JB:So that's my only guide to go by.

MM:I'd probably like to get a photo of that if that's acceptable.

JB:Yeah she's in ???? Someday I'll get it. I'll go over and get it. So all the records that we have of that I really haven't had a chance to go through but someday I want to make a project of it.

MM:And that fits in too with the railroads coming in and then moving to canning vegetable, garden type variety, for their years of......

JB:I think there probably was a profusion of cannerys in the Delaware ?????

MM:All up and down the Pensinsula.

JB:Every little town had a cannery.

MM:And of course the railroad would take the finished product and then that would extend the sale range and would also undermine the schooner trade, particularly if you had the navigation problem with the canals. You said strawberries, a lot of people grew strawberries. Were they local or were they shipped to Philadelphia or...?

JB:They were probably all shipped out. I don't know that much about the operation here. Just talking with older people that a lot of times the strawberry season was the only time that they'd have any cash income. And then maybe they'd have made maybe one hundred, two hundred or three hundred dollars in strawberry season. That was the only cash that they had for the rest of the year. We have a field that's twenty acres that's ????? My grandfather had a shack up there that the workers used to stay in during the strawberry season and they would pick. They used to ship fresh and they used to can them also. Some type of sugar syrup and maybe a fruit toppings or something like that.

MM:Were the workers local or.....?

JB:I remember hearing conversations that they would go down to the Eastern Shore of Virginia and bring people up during strawberry season. So apparently they didn't have enough people at the peak of the harvest. What probably happened was their season was tapering off down there maybe two or three weeks ahead of us and the people came up and followed the crops much as today's migrant workers do except they just followed them on the Delmarva Peninsula rather than....

MM:Didn't travel as far. Were most of those black?

JB:I think they probably were, a large number.

MM:Actually much of that didn't continue very long the first World War then?

JB:Well probably eh.... Of course I imagine through the Depression there were willing to work, but I think probably by the second World War the local population as far as being laborers was over. I think that's.... You can see a lot of the orchards and things that were very labor intensive all went out in that time period. A lot of migration to the cities to get higher paying jobs.

MM:And then if the cannerys had closed. You said it burned in the '20s.

JB:Uh huh.

MM:So that there wouldn't be the local facilities and then they would have to be shipped fresh which would make a different kind of shipping.

JB:Probably during the Depression there were a lot of people willing to work but there was noone to buy the products so it really didn't do any good because if you couldn't sell your product to someone there wasn't any need to have anybody harvest it.

MM:People bartered?

JB:Yeah up on the corner there was a general store run by Mr. Lewis Daisy. And I've got a tape of his recollections going back to the 1890s. And he states that he basically did the barter system with everyone. Anything that anybody had they brought to the store and traded it for what he had and no amount of money was involved. And with the grist mill the mill owner would take what was called a toll. If you brought a bushel of wheat to be ground the miller would get a certain percentage of that, the flour, for his share of grinding it ???? But he in turn would take that to the store and trade for whatever he needed or trade with other people in the community.

MM:So probably except for taxes there wouldn't have been much need for actual cash for most people and they could get by and could still feed families because they had ????

JB:Yeah. Everyone, you know the recollections, everyone seemed to think that even though they were poor they always had plenty of food and really weren't that unhappy. So I guess they made out somehow.

MM:Were family members coming back from the city? Do you remember hearing anything about that?

JB:Oh yeah. Well what it...... My Great- Grandmother, the daughter of Henry Long, Mary Long, had moved to Philadelphia as a young girl to work. And that's where she met her husband Richard Miller. And Richard Miller had lived in Philadelphia ???? Upon his sort of retirement had moved back and that's when he bought the apartment from his brother-in-law in 1898. So I imagine there was a lot of movement, people who wanted to move away. Then there was probably a lot of speculation activity. I've just seen old deeds and things that a lot of.... Philadelphia seemed to be the connection this area. I guess it was the closest metropolitan area. Seemed to be a lot of trading people and everything and people would come down and buy things.

MM:The creeks flow in Delaware and then out to the....

JB:Yeah to the Delaware Bay. And I guess when the railroad came through they still went to Philadelphia. I can remember even up until I graduated from highschool we always to Philadelphia for eye exams and twice a year to buy clothes. And all the stores that our family had dealt with and we continued that tradition up until....

MM:Were there steamboats that stopped anywhere in this area?

JB:I think there were. I have a picture of a steamboat on Wyatts Creek which is down near Ocean View by the Holt family which was my great-grandfather's wife's family. A picture of the boat is at Milford, but it was built in the 1890s or something on Wyatts Creek. So I imagine it was a large boat running way down here.

MM:Many of them that went on to Philadelphia stopped several places.

JB:Yeah but I imagine by the time steam became plentiful the railroads had probably taken over that. It's still probably easier, at least in this area, to ship by rail rather than.... Because you still had the problem with the inlets and the shallows and things. And I think probably that the Delaware Bay ports were probably a lot more important for steam than they were down here.

MM:I think that maybe feeding the feeder line, well passengers, but mostly for cargo. Well the highway came in too and that had an impact with trucking.

JB:The trucking well it made the producers independent of the railroads, so therefore you could have a lot more of a competitive transportation system. And the establishment of the trucking industry probably is what made the ???? because you had a lot of independent producers that could grow a product, make their individual contacts and have it to Philadelphia or Washington, not Washington, Philadelphia or New York within a relatively short period of time. Apparently when the poultry industry came along all the poultry was shipped off the shore alive. It wasn't until probably after World War II, maybe before that, that people picked up the idea of processing things here.

MM:Then there were changes in processing?

JB:Uh huh.

MM:And experiments during the Second World War with military food, freeze dried and all those.......

JB:But most of your natural poultry I think was for eh, was kosher, was kosher killed so that meant that they had to be taken to the individual processing plants in the cities that had a Rabbi to kill them. So once the chicken became a staple for everyone then that was no longer necessary.

MM:Do you have any recollections of special holidays?

JB:Not really. We celebrated holidays as they came but there weren't any great, you know, significant more so than any other time.

MM:Any family gatherings or was the family too small or too spread out?

JB:Our family was basically too small because my father just had one sister. So we really didn't have any extensive immediate family. However we had extensive cousins. I think a lot of them, at least in Sussex County, are related to eachother. My mother grew up in Selbyville. Her mother was a McCabe so that you know that.....

MM:That's a good Sussex County name.

JB:So the McCabes had a reunion which is quite an extensive family. But as far as the Bennetts it was too small.

MM:There's some Bennetts around Milford.

JB:Yeah.

MM:And I didn't know if they were any relation.

JB:Probably if you go back far enough, but they're not any immediate relation. And our families tended to have small families so.....

MM:????

JB:And my mother was an only child and my father just had one sister and she had no children we had a kind of....

MM:Any recollections that you remember from World War II?

JB:I was born in 1949.

MM:Of hearing anything?

JB:Well not too much. I know there were a lot of German prisoners of war, POWs, around that would work since a lot of the labor force was away. But not really too much.

MM:Did they have a camp in Sussex County?

JB:There was down near in what they call Bear Camp. William Banks had the farm and the camp was still there and it was the German POW camp. And the prisoners lived there and worked out. I know at some of the small sawmills around here the POWs worked there and did a lot of the work. The people that worked with them praised them very highly as far as being industrious. And it was hard to conceive of them as an enemy.

MM:They were probably glad to get out into a more normal setting.

JB:And I think for the most part they were very.... It was a very beautiful type arrangement. But other than gas rationing I think we pretty much, you know..... With the poultry industry there really wasn't a Depression in this area in the sense of like a lot of other areas. I think probably that helped keep the economy going through all those years.

MM:Then you said about the processing change after the War. Did that change the poultry business?

JB:Yes. What happened instead of having hundreds of small, independent producers..... My grandfather had a feed business. He sold feed and at that time all the feed was shipped in from Pennsylvania. It was Casto Feeds and there were no real feed mills in the area. They didn't grind the grain on anything down here. It was all done outside and the bulk feed was shipped in by railcar, unloaded by hand in one hundred bags, brought to all the small feed houses and then each grower had his own formulation that he used for certain ages. Own recipes that he would use for day old chicks and weeks old chicks and things. And then they would sell feed to all the other people around with poultry houses. And I think what had happened when the processing business came in that the people who were in that all of a sudden now could control the price. Not that they got together to control the price but prices started to become lower. The vast profit margins were decreased and I would say probably in the late 40s and 50s the poultry industry its amount of luster. A lot of people went bankrupt. And then the processing companies, the feed mills came in it became an integrated type of system where someone grew the layers that hatched the eggs that produced the chicks that you fed them your feed and just hired someone to.... You know rented.....

MM:The building.

JB:Yeah rented your house and you took care of them and that's the way the present day house system had become. And that was probably just the nature of big business moving in, consolidating and.....

MM:And they'd provide the feed so that therefore they could control the intake.

JB:Yes and so it became a very scientific approach to acutual.... Well I don't consider it raising the chicken, they built a chicken.

MM:They turned the lights on and kept going.

JB:Yeah it's very scientific. Even down to they calculate they don't clean up the chicken houses like they used to because the chickens will get a certain amount of protein by pecking at the old litter. And that's all calculated in that they may save a quarter of a pound of feed per bird by letting him eat the old manure. So it's very....

MM:So it cut out the small feed man.

JB:Yes.

MM:And even a lot of the actual farmers had to....

JB:That change of fixtures was a big shakeout. And near Selbyville they used to have the auction, poultry auction. I forget what they called it, the exact name. I can remember going there as a boy with my father and all the growers who had chickens to sell at that period of time went. And all the processing companies that wanted to buy chickens went. A few days before they came up for auction the men would come around and look at your flock to see if it had any diseases, or the health of it. And then when you brought it up for sale that day they were bidded on. And that probably only lasted through the the mid to late 60s. But I would say probably by the early 60s it was gone.

MM:And so if you go into the scientific raising you know what kind of product you're going to get and so you control that a great deal more and so there's no need for an auction. You've already made you contract.

JB:Now my father started raising turkeys in 1939. And after he got out college he came back and my grandfather was in the poultry or chicken business. So my father got into the turkey business and he raised turkeys up until about 1955. And basically the same thing happened there. And then they shifted from.... What they used to raise were the broad-breasted browns, dark ??? which was the original turkey, the Beltsville turkey was developed in Beltsville, Maryland, I guess and was a white turkey with a broad breast. A lot of breast meat. They liked the white feathers because it left no pinfeathers when they dressed it. And that had replaced the old traditional turkey. So think I can remember having twenty-five or thirty thousand turkeys a year raised here. My father got out of the business because it ceased to be a profitable enterprise.

MM:And for much the same reason as the chickens?

JB:Yes.

MM:So there have been these kinds of cycles in different things? Then that led you later when you took over the farm to think about peaches.

JB:Yes.

MM:Because there used to be an awful lot of peaches but there are a lot of developments where there used to be peaches.

JB:Yeah Delaware used to be the peach state. And I think in 1800s it was the leading producer of them in the country. And what led to it's demise was the yellows which was a virus disease transmitted by a leaf hopper. And viruses weren't discovered until the 1920s so they did not know what really to control it. But it was a soil borne type of disease. And the first ???? planted peaches was up around the C & D Canal. And the industry kept moving further and further south. And the reason why a lot of apple orchards were established was they ceased to be able to grow peaches so they planted apples instead. It wasn't that the apples were a more desirable crop it was just an alternative crop.

MM:So it wasn't that the apples were more profitable it was just that they were replacing the peaches?

JB:They were replacing the peaches and my decision to go into the peach business.... I had spent a few years while I was working on the house researching what type of agriculture I would try and get into and I had always like working with trees so that idea seemed to appeal to me. Secondly it was a crop that was a perishable crop so it's not something that you can pick and ship and hold in storage for a long period time so a tree ripened peach fresh off the tree is something that you really can't buy anywhere unless you pick it off the tree. And then it was a summertime crop, basically July and August were the prime peach months. Being ten miles from the beach there was a large summer influx of people to take advantage of these people. And it had to be something that I could sell direct to my customers rather than producing a wholesaler.

MM:Cutting out the middle part of it and transporting.

JB:Yeah because there's really no way you can compete with people that have thousands of acres of orchards. The idea was to give the consumer the freshest, highest quality possible product.

MM:And that's worked pretty well for you?

JB:Well like all agriculture enterprises the last two years we haven't had a crop at all.

MM:Probably due to the frost.

JB:We've had frost. Since I planted the first trees in 1983 and this is June of 1991 I've had one year where I really made money so......

MM:And that hurts.

JB:So I can't really say it's been an overwhelming financial success. So I guess the jury's still out on that.

MM:Do you have irrigation?

JB:Yes I do.

MM:You almost need that then don't you?

JB:I feel that any.... In this day and age with any type of high input crop you need to spend the money to have all the safeguards that you can. You're never going to defeat the forces of nature but maybe you can modify them enough to....

MM:What type of irrigation do you have?

JB:It's a trickle irrigation system which is a completely on the ground system and provides a small amount or a smaller of amount of water each day to the trees since the idea is that you give the tree each day what it needs rather than with an overhead system you come in once every week or ten days and water. This system you have to.... It's designed to keep operational all the time.

MM:It's more efficient you don't have the evaporation and the eh....

JB:Yes. And I irrigate approximate twenty acres of fruit trees with a two and a half horsepower pump and pump about forty-five gallons a minute. And we broke the twenty acres down into quarters so we're doing five acres at a time. It's very efficient and very satisfactory.

MM:So you're only using twenty acres for the peaches and what are you using for the other?

JB:The other acreage if sharecropped . I rent it to another farmer who puts in the traditional grain crops; corn, wheat, soybeans. And then the wooded land we have all reforested it to loblolly pine. And then the lower areas we have Brians Creek that runs through the property and I am converting that to cypress. So it's a lifelong struggle to make every part of the farm productive and viable.

MM:We put in about seven or eight acres of loblolly about three years ago. I don't think I'll live long enough but....

JB:Well it's something that eh.... The way I feel what I have now is what other people have done for me through past generations so if I can leave this corner of the earth a little bit better than I found it then I consider my life a success.

MM:And your family enjoys living out in the country?

JB:This has always been a sanctuary for us and it seems what happens we sort of revolve around this farm.

MM:And you're ten miles from the beach and not far from a small town center so it's not like you're way out.

JB:I guess it's home.

MM:Home is where you hat is.

JB:Yeah or where your heart is.

MM:That seems like quite a lot of information. You said you've done the research that you were going to put on the Historic Register.

JB:Yes we're in the process of doing that now. We've done all the research. And what we will do it will be house and the grist mill, the site of the grist mill, as the center of a mill seat. It probably has historic signifance for that. The grist mill was a very substantial wall. Today it's a brick foundation several feet thick in places. And most of the grist mills that were built were wooden structures that quickly disappeared. The only way that you knew it was a grist mill was there'd be a little dam and some millstones lying around but this was the first essential brick structure. So when it was done it was an important center.

MM:I would say it was probably the late 1700s and still operated into the 20th century.

JB:Yes.

MM:It had a long life span.

JB:Some of the stories, the miller, I think the last, well it was a Mr. Hugh. And this has been stories that Mr. Lewis Daisey looked up in the ????? and in the summer when the level was low, generally because it was drier, he had a Punch and Judy show that he would go around to all the towns and do puppet shows and things. And he could throw his voice and so he had a great time when people would come to the mill or kids or something and he would throw his voice to make it sound like somebody was shouting from somewhere else. And there was great amusement there. And Mr. Daisey said they used have great checker games. And as the mill wheel went around the building vibrated and if you waited long enough the checkers would change places so if you took long enough for your turn you could have an advantage or something. He mentioned that they ground a bushel of flour an hour. So it was a pretty slow....

MM:Are any of the mill wheels there?

JB:Well we have the gristmill stones. We took them out in the '50s. My my recollection some of the timbers were still there. We have pictures of when it was probably last abandoned. And at that time there was a debate whether we wanted to fix the roof. It's one of those things, you know first the roof goes and soon the whole building goes. So just a new roof at that period of time probably would have saved it.

MM:They just took the line that if it wasn't being used then what reason for...?

JB:Yeah that's why other things that we have falling down today you don't think about it being worth fixing up. Yet fifty years from now you'll say gosh why didn't I do that?

MM:Is there anything other that we've touched on that you wanted to add to?

JB:I can't really think of anything specific right now. I guess not.

MM:Well thank you.