The Rochelle Canneries

Ogle County grows corn, and for a long stretch of the twentieth century Rochelle was where a great deal of it was put into cans. Sweet corn and peas are harvested in a rush over a few weeks and will not keep, so a cannery had to sit close to the fields and close to a railroad, and Rochelle had both. The business that grew up on that was Rochelle Canneries, and in 1925 it was bought by the California Packing Corporation, the firm that would later take the name of its own brand and become Del Monte. The purchase was not incidental. Calpak was a California company packing California produce, and buying a going concern in Ogle County is what carried it into corn and peas, then the two most lucrative parts of the vegetable canning trade. Plants in Wisconsin and Minnesota followed. Canning employed on a scale that a town this size could not otherwise have supported, drew workers in, and tied local fortunes to a harvest calendar rather than a factory shift. Del Monte's name stayed on a plant on North 15th Street for decades afterwards, and the company later put a distribution centre on the south side of town as well. The pattern is still visible in the shape of the place: the cold chain, the rail access and the workforce were already here, so a refrigerated warehouse built beside the interstate in the 2000s was extending a local competence rather than importing one.