North Walton

This place is on a boom.  The T. A. Snider Preserve Co. is running day and night with a force of 100 hands – women and men, under the management of J. R. Johnson.  They are handling from 8,000 to 10,000 bushels of tomatoes a week.  These tomatoes are raised around Walton, Verona and Glencoe.  They shipped from the last two places.  The farmers receive 24c for them delivered.  They raise from 200 to 400 bushels to the acre.  They are made into catsup and chilisauce.  J. W. Conner is the head of the chilisauce department with 40 young ladies, who do the peeling, receiving 5c a bucket, averaging about 40c per bucket [?].  Napoleon Rich is at the head of the large catsup department with 50 stout young men, who receive 15c per hour for day work and 30c for night work.  They turn out from 50 to 100 barrels of chilisauce per day and about the same amount of catsup.  Their payroll at the plant Saturday is from $1,000 to $1,200.  This plant covers about two acres of ground.  They have a large warehouse tiered off like a bonded warehouse, where they store all their goods until cold weather, when it is shipped to their bottling house in Cincinnati, where it is graded and bottled and put on the market.  The seed from the tomatoes are barreled and shipped to Adrian, Mich., to the Barrett Seed Co., where they are cleaned and dried and put on the market.  Your writer found this plant in a sanitary condition, everything clean and neat.  They have fine water works and the floors are cement, so they turn the water on and flood them, cleaning them nicely.  The company could not have selected better man to superintend their plant than Mr. R. J. Johnson.

from the Boone County Recorder, September 19, 1906