Cauliflower Brings Green to the Catskills

By T.M. Bradshaw

Historically, up through the first half of the twentieth century, married women were uniformly referred to by their husbands’ names—Mrs. John Smith, for example. This social convention makes it difficult to research women’s activities, especially if John Smith was married more than once. Is the Mrs. John Smith in question his first wife, Alice, or his second, Josephine, or his last, Mildred? Women regained their own first names when they were widowed, so after John’s death that last Mrs. John Smith became Mrs. Mildred Smith.

Even in instances of marriages of long standing, little information was available in newspapers about women other than what typically appeared in social columns: “Mrs. Ralph Felton visited her sister, Mrs. L. Finch, of Denver Monday evening.” (Catskill Mountain News, 09/06/1929). And in cases where both spouses contributed significant effort toward the family’s support, such as in farming, the woman’s achievements were attributed to the husband. And that’s the question here: Was William F. Van

Benschoten the spark that ignited the cauliflower industry in the Catskills or was it his wife, Thankful Van Benschoten?

William was credited with the innovation in decades’ worth of newspaper mentions and in his June 1928 obituary. But perhaps a clearer picture of who started what, when, emerges in Thankful’s September 1935 obituary. All other references to their leadership in the industry cite William, and later, their son, Orson. It makes one wonder if any mention of Thankful’s contribution would have been made had she died first.

Farming follows trends and fashions just like anything else. The earliest newspaper article I’ve found concerning cauliflower in a Catskill paper is a February 20, 1885 mention in a column called “The Country Gentleman” in the Catskill Recorder. It describes the storage of 400 pounds of cauliflower seed stored in the New York City vaults of the Mercantile Safe Deposit Company, enough to result in 13 million plants. The article does not state the intended market for that seed.

The next mention I’ve found is in the September 22, 1900 Hobart Independent, referring to William F. Van Benschoten of Margaretville as a “large cauliflower raiser” who was shipping about 15 barrels of the vegetable a day for a seasonal total of between twenty and thirty thousand heads. But how did an operation of that size get started? Let’s consider the early years of the Van Benschotens’ marriage.

William was born in 1852 on a farm in New Kingston, a place settled by his great-grandfather, Jacob Van Benschoten, after the British burned Kingston. In October 1879, William married Thankful Allaben Sanford a month before her eighteenth birthday. The young couple lived with William’s parents, Nelson Van Benschoten and Agnes Miller Van Benschoten, in their small farmhouse. Thankful’s sister, Fezon, had married William’s brother, Henry, in February 1879 and they, too, lived in that same small farmhouse. In 1883, William and Thankful’s son Orson was born. A few years later, the family built a new, larger house. While cauliflower almost certainly funded the completion of that new house, it was designed to pay its own way, with a wing of eight bedrooms for the summer boarding trade. Today it is the Margaretville Mountain Inn B&B.

In what must have been a very interesting household arrangement—two young wives sharing a small space with their mother-in-law—a new activity developed around 1890—Thankful began growing cauliflower in pots in the kitchen. The second year she grew about 200 heads, with the surplus sold to the boarding houses of Fleischmanns. Did Thankful point out the potential value of her enterprise to her husband or did he suggest they expand it to the farm proper instead of the family’s garden? Or was it the logical next step of a team working in tandem? We’ll never know. But in the third year, the crop of 2,000 heads was shipped to New York City. Prior to this, cauliflower growing on a commercial scale was limited to areas around Puget Sound in Washington State and on Eastern Long Island.

The head count continued to increase. The November 6, 1902 Columbia Republican copied the following item from the Kingston Express under a heading of Profitable Farming: “W. F. Van Benschoten, of New Kingston, has raised this year between 400 and 500 barrels of cauliflower on his farm which find a ready sale at $4.50 a barrel.” The Gilboa Monitor of May 13, 1915 reported the Van Benschotens’ intent to raise 125,000 plants that year. The report of the 1918 season’s first shipment in the July 26 Catskill Mountain News described Van Benschoten as a “veteran grower” and quoted him as saying it was “the best first load he’d ever shipped” and that the season looked promising. Numerous other farmers all around the Catskills had begun growing the vegetable as well; thirty were estimated to be raising the crop in 1918. Soon, warnings began appearing that new growers would drive the price down.

It’s interesting to follow through the old newspapers and see the arc of the business’s development and eventual decline as well as that of complementary jobs and services that grew along with the cauliflower. A 1926 ad for a nailing machine noted it was “Especially adapted for the nailing up of cauliflower crates.” A small, May 3, 1929 article reported that Halcottville had been a “very busy place” that week with the unloading of “three [train] carloads” of fertilizer and lime for the cauliflower growers. Ads offering jobs as buying agents and ads by agents seeking product appeared frequently.

Notices commented on the arrival or departure of people who lived elsewhere in the winter, but who worked on or main- tained Catskill properties for the purpose of growing cauliflower, like Chauncey Sanford of New York City in 1924 and Howard Todd of Connecticut in 1934. Before 1900, mentions of cauliflower seeds or young plants were within lists of various vegetables offered, presumably for the home garden; over time ads dedicated solely to cauliflower listed huge quantities of plants, often over 100,000.

For the May 21, 1926 Catskill Mountain News, W. F. Van Benschoten penned a lengthy editorial against the formation of a cauliflower grower’s association, arguing that it would drive down prices and incur unnecessary bureaucratic fees. Apparently not everyone agreed because on December 1, 1933, the Catskill Mountain News reported that about eighty people had attended the 4th annual banquet of the Margaretville Cauliflower Growers Cooperative, Inc. There were also at least two other co-ops, one in Bovina and one in Walton.

Son Orson Van Benschoten also appears in several news items; in November 1924 he and his wife spent a week in New York City so Orson could attend a cauliflower rate conference organized by the New York Central Railroad. But Thankful’s contribution was invisible in the press until after her death.

After describing the progression of Thankful’s initial cauliflower experiments in the kitchen and garden, her September 13, 1935 Catskill Mountain News obituary wrapped up by describing what those experiments had grown into. “From this start has grown a big industry. The cool nights of the Catskill hills allow the vegetable to head properly and thousands of crates are shipped daily to a waiting market.”

Many thanks to Diane Galusha and the Historical Society of the Town of Middletown. It was one of the Society’s annual June cemetery tours that provided an introduction to Thankful Van Benschoten. Newspapers were accessed through nyshistoricnewspapers.org.