General Archives | Page 3 of 6 | Applebox Belles: The Women of Lake Country’s Packinghouses

Okanagan Valley Land Company sorters, 1937

The sorters of the Okanagan Valley Land Company packinghouse, Okanagan Centre, 1937. Left to right: Back row: unknown, unknown, unknown, Ted Nuyens, unknown, Pam Wentworth Front row: Nellie […]

Jimmie Price Kobayashi Medvedeff

Jimmie Price Kobayashi Medvedeff Interview October 28th, 2015 Eleanor ‘Jimmie’ Price traveled from Red Deer, Alberta in 1947 to work as a ‘Summer Girl’. She was twenty years […]

Summer Girls

Left to right: Bea Smorden, Joyce Bell, and Eleanor ‘Jimmie’ Price, 1947.

Bea Smorden Taiji

Bea Smorden Taiji Interview September 29th, 2015 Bea Smorden Taiji was born in Slocan Park, BC in 1930, the daughter of a Doukhobor family. Bea began coming to […]

Applebox Belles, 1940s

Applebox belles on the packing line at the Vernon Fruit Union, Oyama 1940s.

Staff of the Okanagan Valley Land Company packinghouse, Okanagan Centre, October 15th, 1948

OK Apples brand box label

The OK Apples brand box label was used by the Vernon Fruit Union packinghouses.

A. P. brand apple box label

The switch from wooden to cardboard boxes also saw the end of the brightly coloured apple box labels such as this one from Alex Phillip’s orchard in Oyama. […]

Dorothea Allison, 1912

My job at present is apple-packing. I rush over the cooking washing etc in the morning — have one of the pickers in to dinner, wash up and […]

Square dancing party near the Woodsdale packinghouse, 1950s

The packinghouses fostered this camaraderie by holding dances each harvest season for the workers and their families, and in later years, dinners.

The first bulk bin in the Okanagan, 1957

Gordon Shaw, Manager of the Vernon Fruit Union’s Winfield packinghouse developed a new method of handling apples and with a crew of men, built the first five hundred […]

The packinghouse crew of the Vernon Fruit Union, Oyama, 1920s

The Vernon Fruit Union operated a packinghouse in Oyama from 1913 to 1974.