Russell Mawby

Under the urban renewal in 1963, it was decided that those old parts of town should go away and they should put in new things. From Ship down to the river, they bought all of the old buildings down there and tore them down. That was in 1965 that they finally bought them and closed our business.

In 1925, my dad and mother started a distribution outlet for a basket company out of South Haven, Michigan , known as the Pierce-Williams Company. They needed someone in this area to distribute their containers, and my dad decided to take it on.

Instead of using literally pounds of material per acre, it’s a matter of two or three ounces per acre. The trees are all green and orchards look completely different now than they did fifty years ago. Technology has been marvelous and the, you know, fruit growers continue to be very concerned with minimal use of chemicals. Technology has made that very possible.

We used to have literally thousands of migrant workers [who] would come into the state. [They would] move [from] south to north. Fruit ripens earlier in Benton Harbor/ St. Joe (St. Joseph) than it does in Traverse City . So, the migrant streams would move north with the harvest. With the automatic harvesting of cherries, that migrant stream has virtually disappeared. It’s still there to a lesser extent for the fruit that still has to be hand picked.