Preserving the garden’s bounty—and a piece of local history
—at a Rockingham County do-it-yourself cannery.
by Natalie Ermann Russell • photos by Sera Petras

A trip to the grocery store is a rare occasion for 79-year-old Vera Bowman. She simply doesn’t need to buy much—maybe just the occasional bag of flour, sugar, or salt. She has two backyard gardens full of produce, yielding
more than even an army could eat in one season. And she cans much of it herself—as she’s been doing for more than 50 years— at the Keezletown Community Cannery near Harrisonburg.

The cannery, now located in a two-room clapboard building that was once the agriculture classroom, started in 1942 in the basement of the Keezletown School. At that time, schools were often home to public canneries. It was World War II, and people were tending victory gardens. They had to come up with a way to preserve the volume of produce that was coming out of the ground, and the community canneries gave them a place to do it.

After the war, as the need for growing one’s own food declined, so too did the popularity of such facilities. One by one, the others in the area closed, and the loyal patrons moved to the cannery that was the next closest. Today, Keezletown’s is one of the last in Central Virginia— and one of the oldest in the country.

Because of the cannery’s rich history, the education nonprofit Horizons Learning Foundation (HLF) wanted to save it from demise. In August, HLF took over after Rockingham County ceased funding. Now the hope is that the experienced canners who make up most of the clientele will be supplemented by newbies who are tending gardens,
shopping at farmers’ markets, and getting swept up in the localfoods movement, but are perhaps intimidated by canning at home.

“You don’t see many young people in here,” says Judy Coffman, a cannery customer for 40 years. “Most of those who patronize the cannery have come for decades. But it won’t stay open if it’s not utilized by others too.” If the current popularity of canning is any sort of bellwether, the future could be bright. Ball Corp., which makes glass Mason jars and other canning equipment, saw a 30 percent increase in sales in 2008. And seven million more
households planned to grow their own foods in gardens this year, according to research from the National Gardening Association, up 19 percent from 2008.

Royce “R.T.” Hammer moves calmly among the well-worn but immaculately clean kettles, pressure cookers, pulpers, and can fillers. The steady pace at which he works and his signature John Deere green suspenders convey an air of know-how that’s confirmed by his stories. He can tell you anything you could ever want to know about any piece of equipment here: where they got it, how many hundreds or thousands of dollars it cost, how many gallons it holds.

R.T. and his wife, Trudy, who has been canning since she was 14 years old, run the day-to-day operations here, helping both experienced and novice canners put up a wide range of foods: tomatoes, sauerkraut, soup, venison, and the list goes on.

“You’ve got everything you need to work with here,” says Bowman. “Then you just go home and put your stuff away. You don’t have to make a mess at home.”

The Hammers have been running the place now for 15 years, after retiring from their former careers—he as a food inspector for the Department of Agriculture for 40 years; she, at a bank. “They asked us if we would mind running the cannery for one year,” he says. “And it gets under your skin. We’re still here.”

Given his food-safety background, R.T. is the perfect guide and teacher. He knows what can compromise the food (“Whatever you do, don’t let your food sweat. The bacteria count will double”), and he knows which foods can be canned in glass (applesauce, tomatoes) and which must be in tin. Foods that require higher temperatures necessitate tin because glass can break in such an intense heat.

Because of the wide range of foods—vegetables to meats to cakes to sauces—exact canning instructions are ingredient specific. Tomatoes, peaches, pears, and corn, for instance, lose their integrity when cut or peeled too far in advance, so they should be left whole until arriving on site. Other elements can be prepped ahead of time: Celery,
carrots, and onions should be cut up, green beans snapped, and apples quartered, with the bloom (the side opposite the stem) removed.

Green beans will sit in the pressure cooker at 160 degrees; sweet potatoes at 175; tomato juice at 190. But no one really has to memorize the exact numbers, since they’re handwritten on a large gridded poster that hangs behind the desk. And when you have the Hammers as canning guides and machinists, you don’t need to know much.
They will show you the way until you pick it all up for yourself. All of it, that is, except the steam table and the pressure cookers, which are operated solely by the Hammers for safety reasons. The raw steam can be upwards of 260 degrees, and someone is liable to get scalded.

Customers are encouraged to bring their own manpower—for help with prepping, mashing, peeling, and what not—but the Hammers have been known to help out in a pinch, even calling in friends and relatives. It’s not unusual to find the two of them and a grandchild or cousin standing around the long counter peeling tomatoes or cutting up pears. That’s just the kind of people they are.

Today, Coffman, a second cousin of R.T.’s, is making applesauce. She has to prep her apples on site, since she got them from the Hammers’ daughter’s fruit stand and hasn’t seen them until now. Otherwise she probably would’ve walked through the door with black plastic bags filled with the apples already quartered, ready to get to work. The core, seeds, and peel can remain; they will be removed when the apples make their way through the sieve.

Applesauce is a popular item this time of year, since many churches, Lions Clubs, and other community organizations make jars and jars of it to sell at bazaars and fundraisers. Coffman brought sugar along, thinking the sauce may benefit from a cup or two. But she’s able to taste as she goes, and after the batch has cooked down in one of the 30-gallon stainless-steel kettles, she determines it is sweet enough au naturel. No sugar makes it into this lot.

Complete control over what goes into her cans means she knows exactly where everything originated. She has the power to moderate the salt, leave out the preservatives, eliminate the sugar. Unlike storebought cans, here canned foods can become local foods—whether from a garden plot, farmers’ market, or nearby orchard.

That said, not everything has to be local. To save money, R.T. likes to can items when they go on sale in the grocery store. “You just buy a tenderloin for $1.99 or $1.79 a pound, when it’s normally threesomething,” he says. “Slice it up raw, put it in the cans with a teaspoon of salt. Bring it up to 180 degrees in the steam. Then you cook it in the pressure cookers so you get a nice juice too. When you’re ready to eat it, just take it out of the can and brown it in a skillet.”

It’s just a few months more before the cannery closes for the season— the exact date depends when the pipes freeze. Vera Bowman, the woman with two backyard gardens, harvests what’s ripe now and loads up her tan Ford pickup truck. She and her bushel baskets of beets, tomatoes, and beans head down US-33 from her home in McGaheysville
to the cannery in Keezletown. This is a good time of year for canning. The last of her tomatoes will become homemade ketchup, blended with vinegar, sugar, celery salt, onion salt, ginger, cloves, and powdered mustard. No preservatives, no chemicals, no high-fructose corn syrup.

She gets her tin cans here, for $1 a piece—plus the usage fee of $6 for county residents or $13 for non-residents. Glass, on the other hand, she must bring along herself.

But other than the baskets of food to be canned, the glass Mason jars, and any spices or recipes she’ll use, she doesn’t need much. When it’s busy, there might be a shortage of peelers or knives. But on a normal day, she won’t even need those. Depending on what she’s preparing, she’ll use one of the kettles or the steam table. But she doesn’t have to worry about any of that at home—it’s all there at the cannery.

Within a few hours, Bowman is finished. The time has passed at a fast clip, partly because she stays busy and partly because it’s nice to visit with the Hammers and whomever else is there. As she heads back home, that truckload of loose beets, tomatoes, and beans is neatly tucked into a healthy number of tin cans and glass jars.

“I enjoy it,” she says. “It reminds me of my aunt and my mother, and I’ve done it all my life.” Because canning at the Keezletown Community Cannery means preserving not just tomatoes and beets and beans, but a time-honored knowledge and skill that is valuable to any generation.

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