May 20, 2006
City of smells
Hygrade Food Products Corporation
South 15th and East Cary Streets
Our adventure for the day was more photography, this time of the Hygrade buildings down in Shockoe Bottom. Click on the picture to see more pictures (or not, hey, it's your call).
But this got me thinking, after we went into the smokehouse part of the complex which still smells of smoked ham, about smells. This part of town now has city smells, mostly car and truck exhaust. What did it smell like a century ago?
We have this smoked ham plant, right across the street from a tobacco facility and right down the road from Tobacco Row. There's an old livery stable a few blocks away, and a saddler, and any number of feed distributors, so we can make some assumptions about horses. Coffee distributors. A train station. A canal (which is kind of stinky now). There were ironworks a short way up the river.
I'm trying to imagine layers of smells: coal smoke, ham smoke, manure, tobacco, creatures of many species, less than perfect sewage and garbage containment, coffee and tea and spices. But the mind boggles. I don't know if I've ever smelled that many things at once.
201 words | May 20, 2006 10:28 PM | Ghost signsI love bringing up smell with my students. I mostly save it, though, for that moment in the 19th century when the grand reversal took place: when cheap cotton and urban plumbing reinvented our olfactory environment....
Baltimore's Inner Harbor used to have a McCormick spice factory in the neighborhood: I still can't get used to the harbor not smelling like nutmeg.
Posted by: Jonathan Dresner at May 21, 2006 12:07 AMWe have a spice factory too and a cookie factory, out on Broad Street too far west for me to get a whiff from home. There's a Nabisco plant out in the east end, and when we're in the area we can sometimes smell Oreos baking. When the wind is right we can smell tobacco curing in warehouses south of the river.
I don't mind the lack of industrial smells, of course, but I wouldn't mind smelling 1900s Richmond for a day.
Posted by: 100wordminimum at May 21, 2006 08:50 PMI really enjoy your site as all of them are familiar to me. Both of my parents were raised in the Churchill area and my grandparents worked at some of these establishments. One of them is even owned by my relative. I came to the site as my grandfather was a driver for Nolde's Bakery at 16 years of age in 1930 before years later opening his own bakery. I was looking for a picture of what it may have looked like in the 30's. I will have to show my dad some of these pictures. Thank you. Marie
Posted by: Marie Jennings at May 24, 2006 07:42 AMThank you! I hope your father enjoys the pictures. You may have already found them, but Dementi Studios has some of their historical images of Richmond online.
I've been taking pictures of the Nolde Bakery building, but they're all cluttered up with the construction work that's going on there right now. As soon as they clear some of the fences, trailers, and trucks out of the way, I'll get some better shots.
Posted by: 100wordminimum at May 24, 2006 03:06 PM