Elliston farmland that once housed a thriving cannery and meat-packing plant could become the property of Norfolk Southern if the plan for an intermodal rail yard is realized.
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By Jeff Sturgeon | The Roanoke Times
The Roanoke Times
File April Frank Howard imagines a day when he won't have a choice but to pack up and leave the family farm in Elliston.
SHAOZHUO CUI Special to The Roanoke Times
The land that would be occupied by the railroad project is located on the south side of U.S. 11/460, where it meets Cove Hollow Road.
SHAOZHUO CUI Special to The Roanoke Times
Douglas Sink, a resident with a long history in Elliston, stands in the old tomato cannery building, which he worked
in.
ELLISTON -- From his porch, 74-year-old Frank Howard sees a field.
He recalls how his family grew tomatoes there and packed them in a steamy cannery out back.
Howard scalded the red fruit in water, among other jobs. Local farm women peeled the still-hot tomatoes. After the tomatoes were packed in tin cans and the cans cooked in a vat of boiling water, Howard's mother applied a red-and-blue label saying "Mountain Beauty" with flour paste.
A truck driver hauled cases of tomatoes to grocery stores and to train stations for shipping.
Just up the road was the Green Hill meat-packing plant, another prosperous industry.
Norfolk Southern Corp. intends to turn this same ground adjacent to U.S.
11/460 into an intermodal freight center.
Though they have long been retired from commerce, the story behind the Mountain Beauty and Green Hill brand names is still accessible through the tales of old-timers such as Howard, historical photos and real estate records.
Motorists can see the old industries from U.S. 11/460 -- but possibly not for much longer.
Montgomery County's elected leaders have sued to block the state from paying the lion's share of the $25 million cost for the intermodal yard and $11 million expense for road work. If the county wins, it could scuttle the project.
But Norfolk-based Norfolk Southern contends state financial support is appropriate for an expansion leading to greater freight efficiency.
It is buying land for the project even though a judge has not yet decided the case.
Last month, the railroad bought part of the former Howard farm, including the former cannery.
Howard, who has not struck a deal yet, can imagine a day when he won't have a choice but to pack up and leave the family farm, where he was born and raised, so crews can level his house and acres of adjacent crop land for paving crews. He expects to see the old cannery and the meat plant come down.
Where crews picked Mountain Beauty tomatoes from fertile eastern Montgomery County soil, machinery will forward steel boxes of general freight 40 or 50 feet long moving along the Heartland Corridor intermodal shipping route between the Midwest and the Port of Virginia, according to the railroad's plan. The meat plant site is needed for a road.
U.S. 11/460 and two train tracks border a rectangular, flat agricultural field nearly three-fourths of a mile long with a silo in Elliston adjacent to the Montgomery County-Roanoke County line. State and railroad officials call it the Elliston intermodal rail yard site.
Intermodal rail freight moves in containers carried either by ship, rail or truck, or a combination of those. The planned Elliston yard is designed to shift goods between trucks and trains, and vice versa, and span 65 acres.
That would appear to spell the end for the former Green Hill Inc. meat-packing plant on U.S. 460, which operated for most of the second half of the last century and employed 150 people during its heyday. It closed in 1990 and has been vacant since.
Under owner Walter Lipes since 1946, who also led the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors, the slaughterhouse would kill up to about 150 hogs in one day. Workers could convert a live animal to sausage in 28 minutes, he said.
"That's how we got the meat to stay fresh so long. Rigor mortis never had a chance to set in," Lipes said.
Former salesman Orville Pendry of Elliston said he called on grocers and grocery warehouses, taking orders for the company's whole hog sausage.
As a bonus, Lipes, 91 and now living in Myrtle Beach, S.C., took key personnel fishing in North Carolina in the spring and to New York in the fall.
"I enjoyed working there so much, I wondered why they paid me," said Pendry, who went on the trips. "Everybody knew everybody and everybody treated everybody with respect. It was a good situation."
Jerry Akers of Salem, who owns the Green Hill building, said he is open to talking to the railroad about a possible sale.
"You can't fight progress," he said.
While Lipes made his name in pork, the late R.H. "Robert" Howard made his prosperity in tomatoes.
Howard, originally of Pulaski, started what became a large family tomato business on the broad Elliston plain. His son, Raby Howard, joined in. Eventually, so did his children, who include Frank Howard. The year the business started is unclear. The family told Esso Farm News in 1954 that canning began under a tree about 1928.
Frank Howard said the canning moved inside a wooden shed beside the family home and, later, to a block building. He said his dad and granddad made a good living at it.
"Most of ours went to Kroger or Mick-or-Mack," he said.
When Howard retells the story of the business, he uses a stack of black-and-white pictures he owns. There's him dumping a load of scalded tomatoes in front of a crew of women in white aprons -- the peeling team. There's him watching a basket of sealed cans about to be dunked in a vat of boiling water for cooking. There's his mother, Mable, labeling.
Douglas Sink of Shawsville worked in the Howard fields and cannery.
"Anything to make a nickel," he said in a recent interview.
The growing operation grew to about 50,000 tomato plants on 40 acres, Frank Howard said. Crews doused the plants with the pesticide DDT to kill tobacco hornworms, green caterpillars that grow to 4 inches long, and copper dust for blight, Howard said.
At canning time, the business employed about 50 people in the field and 50 in the cannery, Howard said.
"Everybody that you talk to that lives in Elliston will tell you they worked here at one time or another," said Joyce Howard, Howard's wife.
She described Elliston during these times as "a booming little place."
Folks shopped at the Sunset Service Center supermarket, ate at Wilson's, which doubled as a truck stop, and filled up at the Esso station. All are closed.
When Robert Howard's health deteriorated, he pulled back and the tomato business wound down in the late 1950s, said Frank Howard, who later pursued business in contract services and cattle.
Robert Howard died in 1966 and is buried in the family cemetery. It is on a hilly part of the family property the railroad isn't interested in, he said.
The railroad has sought and so far obtained a portion of the former fields, paying $2.4 million in three transactions, county real estate records show.
Although the railroad has the power of eminent domain, meaning it can buy land from an owner who does not want to sell, it has not used the process. Instead, it has found the people who had acquired various parts of the Howard farm willing to sell. Norfolk Southern owns the former homes of Howard's sister Helen Lawrence of Riner and late brother, John. Both are unoccupied.
Down a country road, the block building that housed the cannery and a silo beside it are railroad property.
Frank Howard still owns his 65-acre share of the family farm, where he grows hay and lives with his wife. Four tomato plants grow beside the house.
Frank and Joyce's son, Allen, lives a stone's throw away in his house with his wife, Staci, and their daughter, Allison, 7, the fifth generation of the family to live on the farm.
The railroad wants about 20 acres of Frank Howard's land, including the house, and his son's land and house. Frank Howard said he is waiting for the railroad to offer a price he agrees with.
It is more than a place to live he is being asked to give up.
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