Across the tracks from the Del Monte Cannery at 740 West San Carlos Street was a three story dried fruit packing house.
In the early (1915) Sanborne maps, this was marked as the "Pacific Fruit Products Co."; on the 1915-1950 map, it is "Abinante and Nola". The Sanborn maps show that the building had four floors. The first floor was warehouse space; processing and fruit bins were on the second floor; the third and fourth floors help packing and grading. Sulphuring was done on the third floor. A separate boiler house, fuelled by oil from an underground tank, provided power and steam.
Here’s the 1915 Sanborn map. Note the bits of Del Monte Plant #3 across the tracks from Pacific Fruit Packing, and note the warehouses of the Santa Clara Valley Mill and Lumber next door. San Carlos St. crosses the tracks at grade level, the crosses a small bridge over Los Gatos Creek.
(click on the image for a larger version.)
Here’s the 1950 Sanborn map. The name of the business has changed to Abinante and Nola, but the shape of the building and the adjoining boiler house are the same. The number of water buckets (12!) hasn’t changed in 40 years, which I suspect means that Sanborn never updated the map. We can see the concrete viaduct crossing the railroad tracks and Los Gatos Creek replaced the old street; that viaduct is still there in 2010. The lumberyard next door now has a “billboard material storage” warehouse, which will eventually hold an equipment rental business, and is now vacant.
(click on the image for a larger version.)
Beyond the Sanborn map details, I don't much about the place. The building no longer exists. (See Google Maps satellite view.) I do know that Abinante and Nola was a prune processor and packer, and existed into the 1960s (when they opened a plant in Fairfield, CA). Pacific Fruit Products was another packing company; Eugene Sawyer's "History of Santa Clara County" from 1922 states that Pacific Fruit Products packed dried fruit under contract from the California Prune and Apricot Association -- also known as Sunsweet. (The reference to Pacific Fruit Products is in a biography of James Edwin Blaurock.) By the 1950’s, Sunsweet had another facility a few blocks south on Lincoln Ave.
The building disappeared between 1948 and 1956; according to one Abinante descendent, “it burned down without fire insurance” but they eventually rebuilt the business. Here’s aerial photos from Historic Aerials showing the before-and-after of the site:
The Model
I built my model using a Campbell "Tower's Flowers" warehouse kit as a starting point. The front and back walls were combined for the front of the new structure. As with most of the industries on my layout, it's large (about 20" in length), holds a reasonable number of cars (two boxcars and a tank car with oil), and uses materials typical of the Santa Clara Valley's industry of the 1930's.
