Labeling Tomatoes

Label Collector Charles Woods

I told a few people that my next story would be about a local man who collects labels from tomato cans.  Most of those people looked perplexed.  Their eyes had that sort of, "Slow news day?" look.

Not at all.

I love this story.  It's colorful both in terms of the personality of the collector and the items he collects.  It's rare, if not unique, and it gives us a look at a time and place that we might never have thought about, if not for Charlie Woods and his 10,000 labels.

That's what I've always wanted John Carlin's Virginia to be.  We hear enough about high tech entrepreneurs.  We hear too much about Hollywood's latest darlings and scandals.  There's too much about the latest car accidents and this week -- the terrible sinking of a cruise ship.  Why not take a few minutes to see what one man has turned into a passion?
 

The artwork is beautiful.

There are a couple of story lines here.  Charlie Woods collects canning labels from canneries that were once located, "up every valley and holler around here..."  That's unusual.  Who does that?  Not many people that's for sure.  In my mind, that's plenty of reason to shine a light on this.

In addition, Charlie knows the personal stories behind many of these labels.  Like the one about a soldier who wrote home that the tomatoes he ate overseas came from the local cannery and made him think of home.

A Boones Mill area cannery

When Charlie talks about this cannery or that cannery in Bedford, Franklin or Botetourt Counties, he takes you along for a ride in history.  He knows where the canneries were, he knows how they worked, how many people they employed, and how the government slowly shut them down -- mostly because they didn't meet standards of cleanliness.  He can tell you the date of another label because there is or isn't an "s" on the Boone in Boones Mill.  The "s" wasn't added, according to Woods, until 1931. 

Note spelling of Cahays vs."Cahas" and no "s" on Boones Mill.

A cannery near Goode, Va.

So on the surface we have a story about labels.  But really, it's an interesting tour of the history of our rural counties -- which we would not have -- if people like Charlie didn't have such interesting collections.