My first job after graduation from College had me doing water deliveries for the Arrowhead Water Company in Ventura, California. The most affordable areas to rent back then was the Avenue Oil Field which had a lot of housing built in the 1920s and 1930s for oil field workers. The land had been part of the San Buenaventura Spanish Mission farm fields which eventually was sold to individuals. One of the new owners was the grandfather of an elderly customer of mine. A Porteguese Lima bean grower who raised lima beans for decades and my customer remembers working on the steam belt-driven harvesters at an early age. Mr Rodriguez had a whole lot of interesting items cluttering his modest apartment among which were several jute Lima bean shipping bags, much like this posted photo. It wasn't volunteered to me to purchase any one of them and I did not ask, but I sure would have liked to have gotten one. Another large area of agriculture land dedicated to beans was the Central Coast area around San Luis Obispo, where large amounts of beans were shipped off by railroad flat cars of the narrow gauge Pacific Coast Railway. Since these loads would be transferred to standard gauge box cars, or to coastal steam ships, most were loaded onto narrow gauge flats.

-Andy Carlson

Ojai CA