(Editor’s Note: This is the first of three parts of a historical essay recently written by longtime Sale Creek historian and author Curtis Coulter about the long-forgotten story of how World War II prisoners of war housed at area military bases and camps were used in the once-thriving peach industry in Sale Creek).
Over the last 34 years, I have written six books about Sale Creek, numerous written articles, and have spoken on other Sale Creek subjects. I have also produced two maps of historical and geographical sites in Sale Creek and produced a historical calendar of events.
However, the one topic that has probably interested and intrigued me more than any other was the existence of Camp Sale Creek which was a German POW camp established during the closing days of World War II and the presence of 287 German prisoners of war. I began a quest for some written documentation about the camp in 1989 when I wrote my first book, "Sale Creek, Tennessee – 1885-1955, Remembrances of a Gentler Time." I had heard stories about the camp from my parents, grandparents, and other local people while I was growing up; however, it was not until I wrote that book when I was forty-one years old that I really became interested in knowing more about it.
At that time and at the suggestion of former resident Col. Edward Alexander (U.S. Army), I contacted the U.S. Army Military History Institute at Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania to request any information their institute might have about the camp or possibly some pictures of it. Two weeks later I received a letter stating that there was no official record of there ever having been a camp at Sale Creek, and, therefore, there were no file photos available. Finding no success there, I turned to personal recollections of surviving community members who had vivid memories of the camp.
There are advantages and disadvantages to relying on personal recollections as I discovered. Personal feelings, experiences, and reactions are quite accurate and factual; however, dates are not. From interviews with those people, I determined at that time that the year 1944 was the year of the POW camp; however, recently, after finally locating a newspaper article about the camp as well as a book that mentions the Sale Creek facility, the actual year of the camp turned out to be 1945.
The book is titled "Axis Prisoners of War in Tennessee" by Austin Peay State University professor Dr. Antonio Thompson, and the newspaper article came from the Chattanooga Times dated July 23, 1945. The discovery of that newspaper article and the book ended a 34-year search for a written account of the camp.
This treatise will look at several aspects of the POW camp, and they will also be presented in separate posts on Facebook since this is going to be a quite lengthy piece; however, I felt that this is such a unique historical subject that all Sale Creek residents need to know about it and appreciate it as part of the history of Sale Creek. I will use the information from the article and the book as well as the interviews that I conducted with Sale Creek residents in 1990 when I wrote “A Sentimental Journey Down Country Roads” and a later book that I wrote in 1992 titled “When Peaches Were King – The Story of the Peach Business at Sale Creek, Tennessee.”
Conditions That Led Up to the Request for Prisoners to Come to Sale Creek:
Sale Creek was a major regional and national peach producer from the early years of the 20th century up until 1954. By 1926 there were over 266,000 producing peach trees in Sale Creek, covering every available and accessible hill. The business had grown in magnitude until buyers and shippers swarmed over the community each year to get their share of the peach crop. During that year over 600 refrigerated box carloads of peaches were shipped to Dayton, Cincinnati, Lima, and Cleveland, Ohio, Wheeling, West Virginia, Detroit, Michigan, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Buffalo, New York.
In addition to buyers and shippers, other industry representatives congregated as well, including chemical company representatives, additional railroad employees and agents, ice company agents, pump and spray representatives, mule and horse breeders, and other specialized workers. Sale Creek was a beehive of activity, especially during the peach preparation, picking, and packing seasons when the two packing houses often and routinely loaded fifty or more refrigerated box cars of fruit daily.
Dr. Antonio Thompson’s book, “Axis Prisoners of War in Tennessee,” stated that when Vivian Browne of the Chattanooga Times arrived in Sale Creek to report on the German POWs and to capture the activity surrounding what promised to be a record crop with new estimates approaching 250,000 bushels, she noted a varied crowd of people surrounding the two packing houses. There were college professors, farm extension personnel, high school boys and girls signing up for work, farm workers, writers, photographers, executives of food store chains, Army personnel, TVA observers, and customers who wanted any amount of peaches from a bushel and more.
Peach preparation began in the late winter and early spring with pruning, dusting, and spraying, and as one of my esteemed friends and the last owner of the Ell-Dee Orchard Company, William C. List, told me one time, “The secret to peach raising is spray, spray, spray.” Roads were repaired, machinery and wagons readied, and employees scheduled.
The actual picking process began around the third week of July and extended into early August. The Elberta variety came in first followed by a few other varieties with the Brackett peach being the main late peach in the community’s repertoire. All peaches are judged early or late when compared to the Elberta, which is the standard. The Elberta was far and away the most popular variety of peach raised in Sale Creek.
The Great Depression caused many small operators to leave the peach growing business, but the slack was taken up by two large, local companies – the Ell-Dee Orchard Company of W.H. List and T.E. Downey, and Hamilton Orchards belonging to Grover C. Eldridge.
When World War II started in December of 1941, many Sale Creek and local area men either joined the military or got drafted into service, approximately 387 by best counts. Many others who ordinarily worked in agriculture got better-paying jobs in defense plants and abandoned the life of the agricultural worker for good. By 1945, this exodus of strong workers created a real dilemma and manpower shortage for the two big companies.
From a high of nearly a quarter of a million bushels of peaches in 1926, the Sale Creek crop had dwindled over the years; however, the quality of the fruit had drastically improved to the point that high prices were normally attained for the available fruit. The 1944 peach crop was an average 50,000 bushels which still made a handsome profit for the growers; however, everything fell into place in 1945 to make a bumper crop comparable to 1926.
Grover Eldridge first estimated that there would be 150,000 bushels with the possibility of up to 250,000 bushels hanging on the trees. To put this into perspective, with 384 bushels of peaches per rail car, the crop would have required over 651 box cars to transport. If baskets were placed end to end, the crop would have extended for 71 miles or basically from Sale Creek to Knoxville.
This was a huge business, and there was a real danger that the area would suffer immeasurable financial loss if the peaches could not be picked and shipped because of a lack of manpower. The spring weather had also raised another concern – there were no late frosts which caused the fruit to ripen early and meant that the expected crop would come in at least one week earlier than normal.
With this realization in mind, Grover Eldridge, whose wife, Georgia, was a Rosenburg of German descent, made his way to Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, where a sizable number of German POWs were housed. There, he spoke to the commandant of the base, Colonel Howard Clark, about the possibility of getting prisoners brought to Sale Creek to harvest his crop for him.
At that time, prisoners had been used in other parts of Tennessee to harvest crops including strawberries, peaches, apples, peanuts, and potatoes. Eldridge explained the dire need for the prisoners to pick the crop or else the Sale Creek area would face severe economic harm.
Many prisoners did not like or necessarily want to work in agricultural jobs; however, they preferred doing the work over sitting idly around the main prison camps located across the state of Tennessee as well as other states. In all, there were over 425,000 Axis prisoners, 378,156 German and the rest Italian prisoners of war in the United States during the war with over 8,000 in the state of Tennessee, and the largest concentration being housed at Camp Forest in Tullahoma (now Arnold Engineering Development Complex belonging to the United States Air Force.)
A two-fold agreement was reached at that time.
(1) An advance party of forty POWs from Fort Oglethorpe would come in the early spring and stay into July to prune and spray the crops in order to get them ready for picking in late July and early August. (Editor’s note: Archie James Poole, Sr., who later in the war ended up in the Philippines, was a military policeman who started out transporting prisoners from East Coast bases to Fort Oglethorpe.)
(2) A follow-up group of 250 prisoners from Camp Forest in Tullahoma would arrive in late July to pick the peaches and load them into refrigerated box cars.
To be continued…