WHERE IS IT?

Mystery Answer

The answer to last week’s Where Is it? mystery game is the pickle shed as it looks and remains at the baseball field and Music City Texas building park today.

While the building is elderly, it does relate to an interesting time and history, i.e. the era of the cucumber. The cucumber may not get much respect. It’s a bit low on the admiration list of vegetables.

But back in the 1950’s, several communities in Cass County would have pickle sheds where sorting of cucumbers to size would take place daily during pickle season June 15 to Aug. 1.

Cucumbers were a helpful cash crop being shipped to the Brown and Miller Pickle Company in Texarkana.

Linden had its pickle shed which is still standing at the American Legion Park baseball field. Information is scanty for the shed, but the structure is elegant even if decaying.

Local historians Kaye Stephens and Sue Lazara remember Linden’s shed primarily for its connection with the county fair held there annually. Perhaps the shed on this occasion would be used as a vegetable display venue.

By way of example, the town of Bloomburg has more information about its pickle shed because of the Westmoreland family and its general store which added a pickle shed to its business in 1952.

The late Sidney Westmoreland once recalled the year the store took in a million and a quarter pounds of cucumbers.

“In 1952, my dad Lester opened up a shed in back of his store where he bought cucumbers from local farmers,” Westmoreland said. “The best day in the best year was a Saturday, July 5, one year when July 4 came on a Friday, and so growers hadn’t picked since Thursday. He had eight truckloads of about 1,600 or 1,700 bushels that day. His best year was over a million and quarter pounds. It was real prosperity for farmers.”

Lazara tells that Linden’s shed may go back to having been a New Deal site when the Roosevelt Administration established a CCC canning program in Cass County and a plant was constructed.

The Cass County Sun newspaper of June 28, 1935, reads: “The Linden Chamber of Commerce has just completed a canning house which is located on Highway 47 just east of the business section of town. … constructed by Relief Labor.

“The plant is already in operation and is canning the fruit and vegetables and furnishing the cans for 60 percent of the canned products and 55 percent of all canned meats.

“The plant is under the direct supervision of Mrs. Frank Shew. Mrs. I. E. Lanier is the general superintendent of all canning work in the county. The citizenship and chamber officials are to be congratulated upon completion of this new plant. Dr. O. R. Taylor, M. B. Allen, Ralph Ford, J. E. Davis and J. U. Nelson have spent considerable time working to build a canning plant.”

This plant would have been located in the second block east of the county courthouse, roughly the parking area for the building now used for Precinct 1 voting and across from Giesler Dental.

Lazar continues that the surviving shed is facing what is now Club Lake Road, which is the old highway from Linden to Daingerfield. This road dates to the 1840s and was for many decades the only road west from Linden.

“This history places the Pickle Shed on a major roadway,” she said. “The age of that road and the many decades of wheels that passed over it, I believe, is why the embankments into each hilltop are so high.”

Her other hypothesis is that the openair shed was part of the old Cass County Fair.

“The fair started in 1917 and continued until mid-century. I am thinking the shed could have served both purposes — the CCC canning program and the county fair.”

To conclude, there are some reports in the Linden community of preserving the Pickle Shed.

“It’s about time,” Rodney Dangerfield would have said, “ for the shed to get some respect.”