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- In the 1860s, Door County farmer Joseph Zettel
began planting apple trees,
and after 30 years, he and his family ran
what was then the largest orchard in Wisconsin.
In his decades of growing apples,
Zettel never lost a crop to spring frost,
due to the effect of Lake Michigan and Green Bay,
on the local climate.
His fruit-growing success
attracted the attention of Emmett Goff,
professor of horticulture at UW-Madison,
and Arthur Hatch,
a fruit-grower from Richland Center.
They set up an experimental fruit farm,
near Sturgeon Bay,
and word soon spread of their success in growing cherries.
- My grandfather got interested in some of the trees
that were planted down near Sturgeon Bay
about 130 years ago.
He made the three day trip down to Sturgeon Bay
to see those trees.
He came back all enthused about the possibility
of raising cherries up here in northern Door County.
He ordered 700 trees.
- Of course, farmers were looking for something else to do
besides milk cows and the things that they were doing.
The farms around our neighborhood,
some had five acres, some had ten acres.
Just a little orchard back in the corner somewhere.
And they had then
a product that they could sell at a roadside stand.
Years ago, it wasn't uncommon for people to trade at a store.
I'll have some cherries,
and maybe I can buy some oatmeal or something with it.
One of the first ways of marketing, of course, was pick your own.
Where a family would come up on a Sunday with their car
and pick cherries, take them back home,
and they'd can them, preserve them.
Jam and jelly.
Of course, you have to take the pits out,
but they found ways of doing that.
Hair pins work for that, in case you want to try it.
Cherries are prone to diseases.
There was bugs that would get in cherries.
The first fungicide to use:
blue vitriol or copper sulfate.
That was something that you would mix in with water,
along with hydrate lime and arsenate of lead.
You'd stand on top of the sprayer,
and as the team of horses pull that thing down the row,
you would stand up there and spray the cherries.
Of course, the thing would blow back on the guy
that was doing the spraying.
He was as blue as the cherry trees were, when they got done.
Everything was blue from the blue vitriol.
Suddenly, there were a couple of people,
a Reynolds and a Martin Orchard Company,
that decided to go into it big time.
Finally, the Martin Orchard Company
got to be 1,000 acres.
As the market developed
it occurred to somebody,
maybe we ought to try to commercially can these things.
They used to take the cherries into the factory
and they'd go on a belt.
They'd have people sitting along this belt that
would pick out the bad cherries, pick out the stems, leaves.
Then they go through the pitters.
The little thing goes down and pokes the pit out.
I remember as a youngster, we'd go to the factory
and then we'd have to wait to get unloaded.
The line would be a bend a half a mile long or something.
Waiting, and you'd get all the news
in the neighborhood, and all this sort of thing.
These boxes of cherries, they held four pails.
We had two boys.
They'd get on the truck
and they would unload the boxes for you.
One guy would pick up the box on the truck
and throw it to the guy that dumps it in the tank.
He'd take the box and throw it to the guy
that stack it back on the truck again.
There was a box in the air all the time.
The boxes weighed 50 pounds a piece
and they could go through 100 boxes in no time.
One of the interesting parts of it was
how are you going to get these devils picked
once you got them on the tree?
It gets to be a big job picking the cherries off.
It was a great opportunity for the neighbor kids
to come over and pick cherries
and get paid so much for a ten pound pail.
Not only that,
but families would come and pick for just money.
One guy told me one time
that the family would pick cherries
and it bought the coal for the winter.
Finally, it got to the point where
even the local people weren't enough to pick the cherries.
I remember having the Indian families coming from Oneida
and so many areas west of here.
Horseshoe Bay Farms
needed about a hundred people for three weeks.
So what they did is they started
the concept of a cherry camp.
They recruited 13- to 17-year old young boys
to come here to pick cherries.
They promoted it as coming to a camp.
You had to pick your room and board
every single day,
which was seven pails of cherries.
They had baseball fields.
They had boats and canoes.
They had a swimming beach.
The big attraction of cherry camp to the kids was
the camp counselors were Green Bay Packers.
- The Mexican families used to travel
from one end of the country to the other.
They'd start in Texas and they'd follow the crops up.
They'd work in the sugar beets.
Then they'd go and work in strawberries.
Then they'd end up in cherries. Then they'd head back to Texas.
The whole family was out picking cherries.
Little kids were climbing up in the trees.
The whole family--
They would actually look at this as being
a pretty important opportunity for them to make some money.
Well that went along
until the war came along, World War II.
The local people were gone, the people were gone to war.
A lot of people were busy: war plants, and this sort of thing.
One of the first things that happened:
we had people from Jamaica,
Jamaicans picking cherries.
Probably one of the most interesting groups
we had picking cherries was
German World War II prisoners.
These were German troops in Rommel's army
that got captured in North Africa.
We had camps that had the prisoners in them.
- Back in the early fifties, and so on,
was really the heyday of the cherry industry
here in Door County.
There were 700 growers growing cherries
here in Door County at that time.
We'd raise up to 50 million pounds in Door County.
12,000 migrants would come into the county
to harvest that fruit by hand.
- So, the place kind of got to be known as Cherryland.
We had the Cherry Blossom Festival.
People would drive up from all over,
drive around the country
and look at the beautiful cherry blossoms.
The whole county was white.
Then there was the Cherry Blossom Queen.
Then we had Cherryland Festival
where there would be a celebration, come to Cherryland.
We had a Cherryland airport.
The Cherry Road out at Sturgeon Bay heading north,
the whole road was lined with cherry growers.
Door County was Cherryland.
It was! It was Cherryland.
It was an industry.
It really kept people busy.