Canning asparagus in Dayton

For decades, the plant defined life in Dayton, swelling the town’s population of 2,000 odd people in the summer with an influx of nearly one thousand migrant workers in the plant, and hundreds more who worked in the nearby fields.

Section:Gallery

Sun., May 21, 2017

Duane Dunlap, 79, stands at the now closed Green Giant housing facility in Dayton, Wash., were he managed migrant farm workers until he retired in 2002. They gutted the plant of all those machines and sent them to Peru, said Duane Dunlap, the plants former personnel manager.

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A rare undated historical photo of the asparagus packing production line the inside the Green Giant plant.

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The Seneca seed processing plant it Dayton, Wash., employees about 50 locals now. When it was a asparagus processing plant, a local workforce of about 50 people swelled to more than 1,000 in the summer, as migrant workers, mostly from Texas, worked hunched over in summer heat to harvest the green spears and can them.

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Maurecio Ramos started working in the asparagus fields around Dayton in 1975. He moved his family to Dayton after a few years in the fields, and eventually began doing irrigation work for the company. He left Green Giant in the early 1990s to take a job at City Lumber, a hardware store where he works today in downtown Dayton.

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The plant in Dayton opened in 1934 with the name Blue Mountain Canneries and was built in just 45 days, according to records from the Dayton Historic Depot. Workers processed peas from surrounding fields at first, then added asparagus in 1939.

Dayton Historic Depot
A relic of the past, a Green Giant cardboard cutout isnow part of the Dayton Historic Depot archive.

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A larger-than-life Jolly Green Giant still sits on the hillside above Dayton, Wash., though the plant that canned the companys asparagus left town for Peru in 2005.

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