Consumer History | J.M. Smucker — The Cider Mill on an Orrville Lot
· 1897
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Consumer History | J.M. Smucker — The Cider Mill on an Orrville Lot
kevin
People treat Smucker's as a national grocery brand that always lived in a red-gabled jar.
The first company was a cider mill.
In 1897 Jerome Monroe Smucker, a Mennonite farmer born in Orrville on 5 December 1858, built a mill in the same town and pressed local apples into cider and apple butter.
The company later said some of those trees traced to plantings associated with John Chapman, known as Johnny Appleseed. That claim is the firm's own tradition, not an orchard register.
Smucker sold the butter from a horse-drawn wagon across Wayne County.
His son Willard joined the route around 1900.
The private firm incorporated as the J. M. Smucker Company in 1921.
By then annual apple-butter sales were $147,000 in 1921 dollars.
Jams and jellies besides apple butter entered the line in 1923.
Distribution reached Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana by 1928.
After losses in 1932 and 1933, Willard opened a Washington State plant in 1935 to pre-process fruit for the Orrville cookhouse.
National shipment began in 1942, and apple butter went into wartime rations.
The firm listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1965.
Headquarters never left Orrville. The present campus sits at 1 Strawberry Lane.
The mechanism that survived is the one the wagon proved: cook fruit in the town that grew it, put a family name on the jar, and keep the kettle in the same county.
Photo: Orrville, Ohio, the town that kept the mill, via Wikimedia Commons.
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