This photo shows the construction of the Kamloops Cannery boiler about 1920 in a building at 116 Lorne St. in what had been the sales outlet for Arrow Lake Lumber. The building partially burned in 1939 and was later destroyed. It is now part of the City of Kamloops work yard.

Image Credit: Submitted/Kelowna Museum and Archives

Brian Stainton was born and raised in Kamloops and remembers a much different city growing up in the 1950s, it was a landscape bursting with agriculture.

Now 83, he lives with his wife Sharon and their two cats in a bright, cheerful fourth storey apartment building that sits on what used to be a family farm and orchard.

“The 1950s was a good time to grow up,” Brian said. “It was far more rural and simpler in many ways.”

iNFOnews.ca stopped by the Stainton’s suite for coffee last week and the couple shed some light on what life was like in Kamloops in the mid-1900s when tomato canneries were operating, vast apple orchards grew, and fresh milk and produce were delivered to homes.

Brian Stainton and his wife Sharon pose in their Kamloops apartment in Valleyview.

(SHANNON AINSLIE / iNFOnews.ca)

“I was 10 or 11 and had a job as a newspaper carrier, and when riding my bike from North Kamloops across the bridge to South Kamloops I’d stop and watch the unloading of empty cans from a train boxcar parked on the tracks beside Skelly’s Tomato Cannery,” Brian said.

“A single boxcar held a lot of cans. Each of the two fellows held a light wooden fork with two handles and the tines of the fork were spaced so each tine fit into a can. In one swift move, a chap could lift 12 empty cans at a time, placing them on a conveyor that moved down into the cannery.”

Brian said the cannery was full of the clanging sounds of metal on metal and the smell of tomatoes was in the air.

On a different occasion, he watched full cans with labels on being put back into empty box carts filled with tomatoes to be shipped to stores.

“These fellows were working without their shirts on. I never stopped to talk to them, back then you minded your ‘P’s and ‘Q’s with the big guys,” he said. “All kinds of things were happening in the cannery, and I saw the final product.”

Several canneries once operated in the Kamloops area, with the first one opening in Walhachin, west of Kamloops in 1913. Kamloops Cannery started up in 1920 and supplied local markets, Calgary and Vancouver for a few decades with tomatoes, beans and pumpkins, but the canneries in the region all closed in the 1950s.

Over in the Okanagan, one of the largest canneries was Bulmans Limited Canned Goods that once operated in Vernon. It was an established vegetable and fruit canning and dehydrating operation that started in the early 1900s and closed in 1978 due to competition from California.

Bulmans Cannery in Vernon

Image Credit: Submitted/Museum and Archives of Vernon

The demise of canneries can be partly attributed to refrigeration technology allowing the shipment of fresh vegetables to distant places, which opened the market for growers in the United States and Mexico, according to report called ‘The Kamloops Canneries: The Rise and Fall of a Local Industry, 1913-1990’ by John Stewart. 

Sharon moved to Kamloops from Saskatchewan in 1960 when she was a teenager, so she doesn’t remember seeing tomato canneries, but does recall vast acres of apple orchards, particularly in what is now the Brocklehurst neighbourhood.

During the early 1900s to the late 1950s, farm and orchard land owned by BC Fruit Lands covered the North Shore, Brocklehurst and Westsyde neighbourhoods, according to the Kamloops and Museum Archives, where a “Home Farm” was created to demonstrate the potential of irrigated land for crops and cattle.

“It was kind of like a co-op, the whole North Shore area was called Fruitlands,” Brian said. “It was a separate thing from the Village of Kamloops. They organized the marketing of the apple industry and there were acres of orchards."

Back in the 1950s, Brian said there were fewer bylaws, and no bylaws for dogs that tended to wander around at free will and get into fights.

“Where Surplus Herby’s was was Mr. Clapperton’s Dairy Farm and our dog chased his cows one morning,” Brian said. “So Mr. Clapperton phoned my father and lectured him about keeping the dog tied up and my father shouted back.

“One morning we woke up and two of Mr. Clapperton’s cows were in our front yard. Then my father had a chance to phone Mr. Clapperton back and give him a lecture.”

In the 1940s, after the war, vegetables were delivered to houses by a South Asian man named Mr. Singh.

“He had a big white beard and a turban, and a wooden wagon full of vegetables being pulled by his horse. He’d stop by our place and we’d buy hand delivered local vegetables.”

The milkman also used a horse pulling a wagon to deliver bottles of milk from D Dutchman Dairy door-to-door, but sometimes it was so cold in the early mornings between when the bottles were delivered and when the family came out to pick them up, the milk would freeze.

“You’d put your empty bottles out with coins in them, the amount you had to pay and the milkman would come down the driveway and replace them and go,” Brian said. “But in the mornings, when you picked them back up, they’d be frozen. The cap which was a cardboard cap with a little tab on it would be standing high above the bottle opening.”

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Sharon said the cream rose to the top and her mother would pour it out and make whip cream with it.

When Sharon was young, her brothers would go out to pick asparagus that grew along the roadways, and many years later she took her children to the riverbanks in the spring to pick asparagus growing on the sunny slopes.

Brian remembers post war struggles when a lot of people didn’t have work, and a lot of families and churches helped ensure everyone had a meal.

“We had a latched screen door on a back porch, and early in the morning there’d be a knock at the door and my mother would come to answer it,” he said. “I’d hear a male voice saying ‘do you have any work ma’am.’”

“She’d ask if he was hungry and feed him breakfast, she’d make a good breakfast. Then he’d go out and she’d hand him a rake and indicate a small section for him to rake to protect his dignity.”

Sharon remembers her family helping others during those times when there weren’t social programs available.

“We weren’t a wealthy family but my mother never turned anyone away,” she said. “In 1961 a fellow came by and all he needed was a dollar to take a bus to the Okanagan to pick fruit and he came back a year later to return the dollar.”

READ MORE: GOT MILK?: This Kamloops farm doesn't just milk cows, it's a self-sufficient processor

Brian and Sharon are both retired school teachers who have been married for over 60 years.

The couple live at the apartments at Orchard’s Walk in Valleyview on what used to be a tomato farm and orchard owned by the Skelly family, who owned the same tomato cannery downtown that Brian watched as a kid from his bicycle.

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