A Cannery Comes Courting Puyallup Valley
Chicago investors scout the valley’s fruit crop, eye the old Pacific Meat Company building, and dangle $1,000 for a bridge at Sumner.
Capt. E. D. Comins, representing Chicago parties, has the matter of establishing a fruit cannery up before the people of Puyallup valley. The work of canvassing the district is under way to determine the amount of fruit to be obtained. The location at Puyallup enables the cannery to clean up the markets of Tacoma and Seattle every night, thus giving the commission merchants nothing but fresh stock to open up the following day's sales.
“I have ample encouragement from the Northern Pacific Railway Company,” he says. “There seems to be considerable interest taken by the fruit association there.
“The building originally occupied by the Pacific Meat Company will be used.”
The canning company has very liberally offered to donate $1,000 to the building of a bridge across the river just below the Northern Pacific bridge at Sumner, so as to shorten the distance from that point to the cannery.
“The location at Puyallup enables the cannery to clean up the markets of Tacoma and Seattle every night, thus giving the commission merchants nothing but fresh stock to open up the following day's sales.”
Food processing and rail access still decide which agricultural towns thrive; Puyallup Valley’s fruit economy was built on exactly this kind of courting of outside capital and infrastructure. The $1,000 bridge offer is an early version of the incentive package—private money for public works to serve a plant.
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