The company's founder often said that he was following in the footsteps of his mother, Ms. Elizabeth Bradshaw Cates. Driving a horse and wagon through the streets, she had paid for her children's schooling by making jams, jellies, pickles, and preserves.
Mount Olive N.C.
In the Strawberry Fields: Wallace, 1944
In this photograph, we see a group of African American women and children harvesting strawberries in Wallace, N.C., in May 1944. They were among the tens of thousands who labored in the fields of North Carolina's "Strawberry Basket"-- a stretch of towns including Chadbourn, Tabor City, Rose Hill, Burgaw, and Wallace that supplied much of the U.S. with strawberries in the years around World War II. (Part 15 of my "Working Lives" series.)
David Cecelski 