The Democratic advocate. [volume] (Westminster, Md.) 1865-1972, 1897-05-15

N'NN
Thousand for Shaping Baskets-S,000 a
Days Work.
When you buy pie, pound or two OF
butter, or strawberries or other small fruits
for dessert, the grocer sends them home to
you each in its own neat wooden plate,
cup or basket, with no extra charge for
the package and with no injunction upon
you to return or even to care for the pack
age. You use the packages for other pur-
poses, burn them, or pitch them into the
refuse barrels, probably without a thought
as to the source from which they came,
the ingenuity of their manufacture, or the
great convenience which they offer to
yourself and the dealer in the improve
ment over the methods of handling goods
which were in vogue only few years ago.
The next time one of these neat wooden
packages comes into your hand give it a
moment attention, and ten to one it will
set you wondering at the skill andingenuity
which is evident in its production and at
the cheapness of product which can be
given away with each few cents worth of
groceries or fruit. Butter plates are in
fact so cheap that if the grocer weighs the
thin wooden dish as part of the butter and
sells it at the price of butter he is making a
larger profit upon it than he makes on the
butteritself The manufacture of these clev-
er wooden packages has all grown up within
few years, but the use for them has
grown to such an extent in this short time
that the numbers of them sold every year
can only be computed by getting into the
hundreds of millions. The manufacture of
them has become very important industry
in communities where perhaps little or moth
ing else in the manufacturing way could
be successful, and it is computed that be-
tween 25, 900 and 10000 persons are
employed in this industry. The making
of the packages goes on during the whole
year, but the great market time for them
is just beginning, commencing with the
first shipments of early fruits and garden
truck from the market gardens of the
South, 1t is the farmers who nowadays
pay for the packages in which we buy our
fruit and vegetables, and, little as these
packages cost, they form serious tax upon
the farmer at the present prices of his pro
ducts
The simplest of all these packages is the
pie plata mere circle of veneer stamped
into form in a hot die. Next comes the
butter dish, which, if you undo one and
lay it out fiat, you will discover was cut
from single piece of veneer and bent into
form along lines partly cut through it. 1t
is held in its final form either by being
crimped at the edges between bits Of tin OF
stitched with small wire staples which are
driven through and clinched A more
complicated piece Of work is the berry
basket. The butter dish needs little
strength, for its duty is done in going
from the shop to the purchaser $ house,
and it does not matter that cross grain
section of wood forms the sides. But the
berry basket must be strong enough to
carry its load through the rough handling
of perhaps hundreds of miles of railroad
travel, two or three earnings, and finally,
perhaps, the hawking of the berries
through the streets. If you examine one
Of these you will find it made of two
pieces, cut with ingenuity, so that when
they are folded and crossed they form a
basket, with the grain of the wood run
ming endwise in each piece, and these
pieces are finally fastened together with
tacks or staples and bound around the edge
with double strip of a veneer of tough
wood
Go to the fruiterer, the grocer or green
grocer, or the florist and you will find each
using baskets or cups made in similar ways
and of veneers The foundation of this
modern package business lies in the inven-
ton of a machine which shaves logs Of
wood into continuous strips of veneer in
stead of the old way of saving the veneers
out like boards That machine was in
vented about twenty years ago, and since
then it has turned whole forests into pliable
strips of wood of the thickness of ordinary
cardboard and as capable Of manipulation,
while possessing qualities which make them
available for purposes for which cardboard
would be utterly useless.
As could be guessed easily, the manu-
facture of fruit packages has to be carried
on at places which are right at the edges
of the forests, while at the same time near
to or upon transportation lines and in the
vicinity of towns and villages. Not many
spots combine all of these features, and the
men who own the principal factories make
matter of mystery of the exact locations
of their works Where poplar, beech, and
birch and elm and sweet gum grow, there
are made the baskets The crates in which
berries are sent to market are made where
white spruce grows So if one were to
hunt along the outskirts of the farming
districts, in New Hampshire, New York,
Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and in
Michigan every once in a while he would
find a little town in which perhaps 200
persons were employed in making fruit and
berry packages. Twenty or thirty of
these would be men, who are hauling in
the logs from the woods and doing the
heavier parts of the factory work, and all
the others girls and boys or women, who
do the lighter work.
The process of manufacture begins at
once with the barking of the logs. The
logs are then SAVED into sections of about
y feet in length and Immediately plunged
into long vat of boiling water or sealed
into tanks where live steam is fed to them.
They are steamed or boiled for twenty four
hours. A crane picks them up one by one
and lands them between the centres of a