Decline And Fall Of The Spinach Kings: On The Wilting Of A Family Dynasty

My London-­born great-­grandfather, Arthur P. Seabrook, emigrated to nan United States astatine nan property of five. He arrived pinch his family astatine nan Battery, connected nan confederate extremity of Manhattan, successful January 1859. Over nan adjacent 3 generations, Arthur’s fifty-­eight acres of rootlike and nutrient fields successful confederate New Jersey became nan largest workplace successful authorities history. At its peak, successful nan mid-1950s, Seabrook Farms owned aliases controlled 50 1000 acres successful nan southwestern area of nan Garden State, employed up to 8 1000 group aliases much astatine 1 time, and grew and packed astir a 3rd of nan nation’s stiff vegetables. As a exemplary of cultivation engineering, location were fewer farms successful nan world that compared. Asparagus could beryllium cut, trucked to nan plant, trimmed, washed, blanched, packaged, and quick-­frozen to -­40 degrees Fahrenheit successful little than 2 hours; 1 was nan goal. A 4-­page photograph effort that Life mag published successful January 1955 called Seabrook Farms, pinch only immoderate hyperbole, “the biggest rootlike mill connected earth.”

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The Seabrook Farms marque stood for family, freshness, and home modernity. Its advertizing promised an extremity to drudgery done nutrient engineering. As a 1959 Seabrook people advertisement blared “Food Miracle Frees Wife…Delights Husband!” Seabrook Farms Frozen Creamed Spinach, sold successful nan boil-­in-­the-­bag Mylar Miracle-­Pack, became nan brand’s signature product, known and sought aft up and down nan East Coast. Seabrook’s cutting-­edge packaging materials lent a space-­age consciousness to its wares. In Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, Floyd, 1 of nan astronauts, is concisely glimpsed sucking from a repast of Seabrook Farms Liquipacks—­a liquified carrot, fish, and leafy vegetable—­while transiting to nan moon.

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Charles Franklin Seabrook, my grandfather, was nan main dreamer, main promoter, governmental fixer, maestro builder, and autocratic ruler of this business farming empire—­and yet its destroyer. The original rootlike mill was built connected onshore his father, Arthur, purchased successful 1893 and called Poplar Brook Farm. Arthur and Charlie, who started nan Seabrook & Son business successful 1905, were nan first farmers successful nan region to usage overhead irrigation. The processing works was modeled connected Henry Ford’s Highland Park automobile factory, which opened successful 1910; Seabrook guidance moreover installed a clip timepiece retired successful nan fields, wherever workplace hands punched successful and retired of work. Instead of Model T’s, which Ford introduced successful 1908, nan Seabrooks’ rootlike mill turned retired fresh, canned, and eventually, stiff vegetables connected a monolithic scale.

Henry Ford, nineteen years older than my grandfather, was Charlie’s inspiration. Both grew up connected farms and looked to manufacture to prevention them from nan drudgery and monotony of workplace work. Both industrialized what had antecedently been cottage industries—­in Ford’s case, nan artisanal carriage trade; successful Seabrook’s, marketplace gardening. Both men enjoyed paternalistic relationships pinch their workers but had difficult and yet tragic relationships pinch their sons.

Although his passport gave “Farmer” arsenic his profession, C. F. Seabrook saw himself arsenic a builder. He hoped to emulate figures for illustration Henry Kaiser, who parlayed a paving business into a shipbuilding empire, and Warren Bechtel, a Kansas workplace boy who founded nan Bechtel Corporation, which became nan world’s largest location building company. The great-­grandson of nan owner, Brendan Bechtel, now runs nan company, which is still owned by nan family. C. F. had thing for illustration that successful mind for his ain family. Things didn’t rather activity retired that way.

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In 1912, Charlie misled his too-­trusting begetter astir nan worth of nan workplace and purchased Arthur’s stock for acold little than it was worth. Then, backed by nan Wall Street finance patient of W. A. & A. M. White, he created, successful 5 years of furious construction, nan surrounding infrastructure of roads and railways to support an business farm. At Farm Central, nan Seabrook headquarters, a ceramic smokestack, built by Kelly Brickworks successful Philadelphia, pinch nan sanction SEABROOK painted vertically, roseate 225 feet successful nan air. The five-­thousand-­gallon h2o tower, pinch nan Seabrook Farms logo connected it, could beryllium seen from miles away, a reminder of nan domiciled irrigation had played successful nan Seabrooks’ beginnings. Six magnificent greenhouses enclosing 3 acres of onshore stood beside nan road that C. F. himself had built arsenic a New Jersey road commissioner.

The labour basal to recognize C. F. Seabrook’s rootlike mill was supplied by thousands of worker-­tenants. From nan move of nan period done nan early 1950s, displaced Italians, Russians, Syrians, Jamaicans, Barbadians, Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Japanese Americans, Estonians, and Latvians came to activity for Seabrook Farms. In nan 1920s, Blacks migrating from nan Deep South arrived successful ample numbers. During and aft World War II, much than 2 1000 Japanese American men, women, and children, and a mini number of Japanese Peruvians, came from nan incarceration camps wherever they had been confined by Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin Roosevelt connected February 19, 1942, successful nan racist hysteria that followed nan onslaught connected Pearl Harbor. Some 7 100 Estonians came to Seabrook from postwar Europe, nether nan auspices of nan Displaced Persons Act, each of them personally sponsored by C. F. Seabrook.

Workers and their families lived successful houses and barracks for which they paid rent to nan Seabrook Housing Corporation, which was wholly owned by C. F. Seabrook. Collectively, these mostly segregated worker villages made up Seabrook, New Jersey, nan institution town. The organization had a Seabrook occurrence department, a Seabrook constabulary force, a Seabrook glee club, a Seabrook Buddhist temple, and a Seabrook Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church. My grandfather utilized his governmental connections to get nan U.S. Postal Service to unfastened a Seabrook Post Office, truthful that each correspondence was stamped “Seabrook N.J.”

C. F. Seabrook was an exemplary American to galore of his workers, a man who, pinch nary much than an eighth-­grade education, had hauled himself up by his bootstraps, Horatio Alger-­style. Seabrook is remembered by immoderate erstwhile inhabitants arsenic a “bootstrap village”: a benignant of laboratory wherever workers could dream to emulate nan awesome man’s occurrence by moving difficult for nan company. The colony was unusually diverse, which was a consequence of recruiting labour from distant regions; it was a workforce comprised of group who had nary different options. Still, Seabrook formed a multicultural outlier successful a portion of New Jersey wherever de facto Jim Crow segregation remained agelong aft nan transition of nan 1964 Civil Rights Act.

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Each of C. F. Seabrook’s 3 sons inherited a different 1 of their father’s talents. His intuitive mechanical engineering brilliant passed to Belford, nan oldest, who designed and engineered nan infrastructure for nan quick-­freezing process successful nan 1930s, pioneering breakthroughs that became manufacture standards. Courtney, nan mediate brother, sewage his father’s gift for marketing. Courtney created nan family brand, that peculiarly American shape of heraldry, and oversaw package design. John, called Jack, nan youngest, was endowed pinch his father’s capacity for finance, arsenic good arsenic his request for full control. Their sister, Thelma, would person liked to activity successful nan family business too, but arsenic a female she was excluded from thing greater than secretarial aliases works work. C. F. felt powerfully that women didn’t beryllium successful business, and he ne'er discussed business astir Thelma aliases my grandmother, Norma Dale Ivins Seabrook, whom we knew arsenic Nana.

As a celebrated American agriculturalist overseas successful nan 1920s, C. F. Seabrook garnered invitations to play parties astatine immense feudal estates successful England that had been successful nan aforesaid family for 5 100 years. He advised his titled hosts connected really to negociate their lands much efficiently and scientifically; successful return, he sewage to observe nan British aristocracy up close. He brought what he learned location and group astir creating a South Jersey peerage of his own, made up of nan land, housing, infrastructure, and workers of Seabrook Farms: a benignant of feudal kingdom ruled by Seabrooks, to beryllium passed down according to nan rule of primogeniture for nan adjacent 5 100 years. “All his life,” Uncle Courtney wrote successful a timeline of nan family, “he stated to maine that he was moving and slaving to build up an property for his children and grandchildren….He told maine of his trips to England and Charleston, South Carolina, to look up members of his family, and of his life’s ambition to create a lasting business successful Seabrook Farms that could beryllium perpetuated successful his representation for generations. This was a continuous thought he told maine astir for twenty-­five aliases much years.”

Divide and conquer, C. F. Seabrook’s go-­to method of controlling his workers, was besides his strategy for managing his sons. Tensions arose erstwhile Jack, nan youngest, was chosen to beryllium their father’s successor alternatively of his older brothers. Even so, nan 3 stuck together and mostly supported each other. Jack started retired moving nan farming section and proved arsenic adept arsenic his begetter astatine guidance and firm finance. Still successful his mid-­twenties, he was efficaciously moving nan institution during World War II, erstwhile Belford enlisted and their begetter was sidelined pinch a mysterious unwellness successful Florida.

But though John M. Seabrook was successful each ways C. F.’s perfect successor and a seemingly cleanable son, his begetter could not surrender control. It required a devastating inland hurricane—­Hurricane Hazel, successful nan autumn of 1954—­and nan imaginable of ruin and ungraded to unit him aside. Still, nan aged man did everything he could to undermine Jack. C. F. humiliated his boy successful committee meetings. He refused to telephone him by his name. He spent nan past years of his life destroying everything nan family had worked truthful difficult to create. Ultimately, C. F. sold nan business to outsiders successful April 1959, nan twelvemonth that I was born, and near a smoking crater conscionable complete nan sky of my paternal heritage.

By nan extremity of nan 1970s, nan aged Seabrook Farms was gone. The works was demolished to prevention connected insurance, and nan onshore was fixed to nan township to debar having to salary taxes connected it. What remains is simply a Rust Belt-­like spot of postindustrial decline. The tract of nan erstwhile works is now a ample sunken rectangle of unfastened space, pinch writer increasing complete earth, shattered concrete, and surgery bricks. All that’s near of nan world that my bootstrapping grandfather built is simply a mini depository astatine 1 extremity of nan basement of nan Upper Deerfield Township Municipal Building, which is unfastened to nan nationalist 4 days a week and is tally by nan families of erstwhile workers. Here nan representation of C. F. Seabrook, his multicultural workforce, and his rootlike mill is preserved, swaddled successful gauzy nostalgia.

Thirty years ago, erstwhile I first began to ideate penning astir nan Seabrooks, my mother advised maine against it. “Don’t constitute astir your family,” she said. Coming from a erstwhile journalist, who met my begetter connected nan job, this carried immoderate weight. Why not?

“Just don’t,” was each she said. Maybe she knew what I was going to find out.

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From The Spinach King: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty by John Seabrook. Copyright © 2025. Available from W.W. Norton & Company.