Tomato season then and now in Sussex County

Fresh garden tomatoes are coming on strong now in Sussex County. In the first half of the 20th century, canneries operated all over Sussex and the Delmarva Peninsula.

This postcard from the 1920s purported this Greenabaum cannery in Seaford as the largest in the world at the time with a capacity of 10,000 baskets of tomatoes a day. The cannery also claimed to be the largest pea cannery in the world. Barges brought tomatoes to Seaford via the Nanticoke River, collected from farms up and down the Chesapeake Bay side of the peninsula.