Peninsula In Passage

My job was to pull empty cans out of the carton and put them on a conveyor belt. I stayed with the cannery even though I quit many times and it somewhat paid off. The cannery closed in 1984 – wasn’t making any money. The Bush Brothers in Tennessee were our biggest competition. They started the same year we did and were very aggressive. They had their own can company across the street from their cannery. Cans are where the money goes, rather than the product. The Eberwines shipped by water, truck and rail to Baltimore. In later years we delivered product to Baltimore by truck and picked up cans there. The hardest part of running the cannery was showing a profit. All four brothers had houses within three miles of each other. They all farmed and all worked together. The cannery started in 1934. Seemed that when there was a good crop, there was no market so the brothers decided to build a cannery to take care of surplus greens they couldn’t sell fresh. They ended up selling all canned goods. The cannery produced up to 45,000 to 50,000 cans a day but usually 25,000 a day that went as far north as Pennsylvania and as far south as Georgia. My mother, Gladys, came from Providence, Rhode Island and was vacationing here when she met my father. Dad went to Rhode Island to ask for her hand in marriage and her father asked why he couldn’t find a woman in Virginia to marry.

“Bumps” Eberwine’s yacht and home

Each of the four Eberwine brothers had gotten 48% of a farm when they graduated from school and each parcel had a house on it but when Gladys’s father saw her’s he decided to build a new house as a late wedding present. They lived in it until they were in their 40s and didn’t like the stairs so they gave the house to Alice and me. When our kids were growing up they did lots of water skiing and the house was a hangout for kids. Marrying Alice Barcalow was the best thing I ever did. She was from Eclipse and I met her at Chuckatuck High School. We started going together at 14 and married at 19. We lived in Portsmouth on North Street for a while, then with her parents in Eclipse and then moved into the house on Eberwine Lane. Bumps loved sailing and lived with Alice on a sailboat in Florida for four years. His favorite sailboat was his 30 foot Sea Star.

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