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May 27, 2015
Inside
Big contract KF Aerospace is part of a consortium of companies bidding for a 20-year contract to service the next generation of search and rescue planes. ...............................
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LAKE COUNTRY MUSEUM
APPLEBOX BELLES, working in a Lake Country packinghouse, some sizing and others gently individually wrapping and packing apples into B.C. apple boxes ready for shipment around the world.
Eye on the Rockets Rockets fans hold out hope the team can rally to some wins at the Memorial Cup in Quebec City. ...............................
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Flyers ■ Dairy Farmers of Canada ■ Home Depot ■ Jysk ■ KMS Tools ■ Rona ■ Save On Foods ■ Shoppers Drug Mart
▼ MAKING OKANAGAN FRUIT FAMOUS
Share your memories of working at the packinghouse Stories and photos will join a national online exhibit. Are you an Applebox Belle? The Lake Country Museum invites the public to a community meeting Saturday, June 13, to share your own memories, or your mother’s or grandmother’s, of working in Lake Country’s early fruit packinghouses. The museum is working with the community to develop a local history exhibit for the Virtual
Museum of Canada. The exhibit, Applebox Belles: The Women of Lake Country’s Packinghouses, will present the experiences of the women working in Lake Country’s early packinghouses. The online exhibition will concentrate on the first women to work as fruit packers, their training, work conditions, and personal experiences. It will include firsthand accounts and interviews with these women workers and their descendants. The exhibit timeline
will include experiences in the first packinghouses of 1909-1911, during the First World War years, the changes in the fruit industry in the 1920s, and will continue through to the 1950s. The orchard industry and packinghouses are an integral part of Lake Country’s history, from the planting of the first seedlings in 1907 to the present day. In 1909, the Okanagan Valley Land Company and the Wood Lake Fruitlands Company planted extensive apple orchards alongside
the smaller, independent orchards, and the community became established as a fruit growing centre of the Okanagan. During the period 1909 through to 1936, eight packinghouses were in operation in Lake Country, employing a large number of men and women. Women generally worked as packers, whose job it was to wrap the apples in paper; place them carefully in a box, then send the box on a skid to the press man. The women received training in sizing
the fruit, wrapping and packing to box specifications, and in most cases quickly became adept at their work. Professional packers could pack 100 to 125 boxes per day of unsized fruit and up to 150 boxes per day of apples that had already been sized. Today, the Lake Country packinghouse is one of the major packinghouses in the Okanagan, still employing many women as packers. As an historic exhibit, Applebox Belles presents the story of the early years, before the chan-
ges in packinghouse operations and the style of apple boxes switching from wood to cardboard in the 1950s. Join museum staff and meet many others in the community with ties to the women who packed Lake Country fruit, Saturday, June 13, from 2 to 4 p.m. in the Carr’s Landing Room, Municipal Building, 10150 Bottom Wood Lake Rd., in Lake Country. For more information, contact the Lake Country Museum at 250-7660111 or email info@lakecountrymuseum.com.