Texas Basket Co. of Jacksonville, Texas, still makes wooden fruit-and-vegetable containers the old-fashioned way. Since the company first opened its doors in 1919, the factory has branched out into a variety of sizes and styles from the familiar tub-shaped peck baskets to woven baskets in the shape of wagons and watering cans to become the largest manufacturer of wooden baskets in the world.
“We make more than 500 different styles,” says Troy Parker, vice-president of the operation that has been in the Swanson family since 1977. “We even make them in the shape of 50 states and school insignias.”
A wide variety of the company’s products are for sale at the gift shop near the main entrance to the plant at 100 Myrtle Dr. (U.S. 79). Along with assorted baskets, the shop also carries crafts, candles, potpourri, and holiday gifts. Factory seconds are also offered at the store at a fraction of what you would expect to pay for an icon of the past that retains its usefulness in a technological age.
Looking down on the factory from the observation room during a free tour gives the visitor a good idea of the uniqueness of the operation. Much of the machinery used to staple, bend, and shape the baskets was made before World War II. Since then, the number of basket companies has steadily dropped.
Jacksonville claims that the first basket factory in Texas opened there before the turn of the last century. Once known as the tomato capital of Texas, the surrounding farmers need a boundless supply of containers for the tomatoes and peaches. The town grew to support four basket factories, of which only the Texas Basket Co. survives today.
After the war, the harvests began diminishing in size as crop diseases, disastrous weather, and a change in land use took their toll, Parker said. Then, in the 1950s and Sixties, cardboard replaced the lightweight shipping containers. When the Swanson family purchased the factory, they were the fourth owners, and they realized that to keep the doors open they would have to diversify their product line.
Texas Basket Co. still makes the familiar produce baskets, but some food items, such as spinach, cannot be shipped successfully in cardboard, so the company has found other markets. Of the company’s 150 employees, 30 or 40 work in the specialty department producing handmade designs like baskets in the shape of a state, armadillos, dog bones, “almost anything you can imagine,” Parker says.
The state’s nurseries have become a new market for the basket company. Plants can be propagated in wooden baskets and then planted, and the basket simply rots away. “You can plant without shocking the plant,” Parker says. The company also does good business supplying the arts-and-crafts market and has moved into the retail display arena.
When I was a boy, my first basketball goal was a bushel basket with the bottom cut out nailed above the garage door. The baskets of today are not much different than the ones we used to find in the barn behind the empty feed sacks.
The process begins when loggers bring a load of fresh-cut timber to the plant, usually from within a 400-mile radius of Jacksonville. Parker says that sweet gum and cottonwood trees are the preferred wood, although they also use magnolia, hackberry, elm, and birch. Often, wood common in other industries is not good for basket-making. Pine has too much sap, and oak is too hard, he says. Sweet gum is pliable, yet takes a staple without splintering.
Thousands of the baskets are then shipped around the world to farms, gift shops, cheese factories, even to Hollywood for movies like Harry Potter, and hundreds of other businesses that still rely on the sturdy but lightweight baskets for shipping.
The Texas Basket Co. sits by the railroad tracks about a mile east of the junction of U.S. 79 and U.S. 69. Tours are given anytime during the day, but Parker recommends arriving after 8am and before 3pm to see the plant in action. The gift shop opens Monday through Friday, 9am to 5pm. For more information, call 800/657-2200. The baskets can also be ordered online at www.texasbasket.com.
647th in a series. Day Trips, Vol. 2, a book of Day Trips 101-200, is available for $8.95, plus $3.05 for shipping, handling, and tax. Mail to: Day Trips, PO Box 33284, South Austin, TX 78704.
This article appears in Tom ‘Leatherface’ Delay.
