Posted 2:39 am Sunday, April 19, 2009
Basket Company Brings Old Methods to New Millennium
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By BRIAN PEARSON
Business Editor
JACKSONVILLE -- The dainty, quaint baskets belie the noisy, smoky and violent process that creates them.
Tucked away on a side road off U.S. Highway 79 in Jacksonville, the Texas Basket Company has turned bark-covered logs into millions of baskets large and small over the past 90 years.
Business Editor
JACKSONVILLE -- The dainty, quaint baskets belie the noisy, smoky and violent process that creates them.
Tucked away on a side road off U.S. Highway 79 in Jacksonville, the Texas Basket Company has turned bark-covered logs into millions of baskets large and small over the past 90 years.
Walk into the store at the front of Texas Basket Company, 100 Myrtle Drive, and it looks like a country store, only with more baskets for sale. Walk around back, and it looks like a logging operation, with heavy machinery slinging trunks into grinders for de-barking.
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In between is a surreal world of chopping, steaming, slicing, sorting, stapling, tossing and drying as wood gets transformed into a colorful array of baskets, with as many as 13,000 produced daily.
While many of the baskets wind up as home decorations or filled with Easter eggs, the company was meeting a growing agriculture demand when it incorporated in 1919.
Basket Case
Texas Basket Company owner Martin Swanson believes the business was around before 1919, but how long is unknown.
"That's about as far back as we can find something," Swanson said.
In the early 1900s, Jacksonville was known as "The Tomato Capital of the World."
The earliest baskets were used to tote fruits and vegetables, mainly tomatoes.
Trains transported baskets full of tomatoes from Jacksonville to destinations nationwide.
The company has been owned by four different families over the past nine decades, Swanson said.
The first family was Newton, followed by Slover, Shank and then Swanson.
Martin Swanson's father, J.C., bought the business in 1977. He died in 1991. Today, Martin Swanson and his wife, Jackie, own the business.
Martin Swanson's son, Moon, 33, a farmer and rancher who helps out with the company, said that before World War II, there were seven basket makers operating in Jacksonville.
Their number was quickly was whittled down to one when the tomato industry went rotten after the war, he said.
Martin Swanson, 57, said the company's key to survival is coming up with new products.
"We've tried to diversify as much as we can," Swanson said. "My favorite part (of the business) is trying to diversify and making new products."
A-Tisket, A-Tasket
The company still uses some of the industrial equipment that was part of the operation when it incorporated in 1919, Moon Swanson said.
That includes gigantic shavers and slicers that create the strips that make up the baskets.
Another original piece of equipment is a monstrous fire box that looks like something straight out of a smoky, early 1900s industrializing America.
Wood scraps and rejected basket strips are used for fueling the fire box, whose heat once created steam for electricity that powered the entire operation.
Today, the power company provides the electricity, but the mammoth box still produces steam used to soften de-barked logs before they're shredded.
The process starts with raw logs, preferably from sweet gum trees, whose wood is softer and more suitable for basket making. The company also uses cottonwood, black gum, elm, hackberry, birch and magnolia.
The logs are dumped into a shaver, which knocks off the bark, and then cut into sections.
The sections then hit the steam tents, where they softened up before moving to the shavers.
Like massive potato peelers, the shavers slice off thin sheets of wood, which head to one of several choppers, which create strips of various sizes.
The strips move via conveyor belt to the basket-making room. Workers hand-pick strips and arrange them into asterisk shapes before they are stapled in the middle. Rejected strips get tossed into a conveyor belt that takes them to the fire box.
The asterisks then head for basket-punching machines. Finished baskets hit yet another conveyor belt, which takes them to a 100-foot-long dryer.
From there, they are placed in towering stacks in a nearby warehouse.
Moon Swanson said the early 1900s-era machines, for which parts cannot be bought anywhere, are prone to break down.
That's why the company has two mechanics on hand to make parts in a machine shop.
Bushel And A Peck
The company makes 500 types of baskets, from "half pecks" to bushels, which hold four pecks. A bushel is a unit of dry measure equal to 32 dry quarts, or the metric equivalent of about 35.2 liters.
Between 40 and 150 employees, depending on the season, work at the facility.
One would think Easter would be the most popular time of year, but Swanson said the holiday season tops it.
Brookshire's, Brookshire Brothers, H-E-B, Whole Foods, Hobby Lobby, Michael's and The Containment Store carry the baskets.
The products are shipped to all 50 states as well as Germany, England, France, Australia, Japan, Israel, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Canada and, of all places, China.
Martin Swanson said he takes pride in seeing his baskets everywhere.
"I like when I travel to different places and I come across our products," he said.
Moon Swanson, who plans to take over the company some day, said making baskets was an integral part of his upbringing and loves the historical aspects of the business.
"I learned a lot at a young age," Moon Swanson said. "I've learned a good, strong work ethic."
"It's in my family's history. As long as we keep making baskets, we have to have somebody to keep it going."
Swanson said the baskets not only have made great gifts over the years, he decorates his home with them and uses them in his farming operations.
"We give out baskets for everything," he said. "I have a lot of baskets in my garden."
But above all, he never gets tired of seeing the baskets used for their original purpose -- holding tomatoes.
"They look so good in a basket," Swanson said.
