Trains and Canneries
Historic Cannery Row
The railroad
A major landmark in the history of the Monterey Peninsula was the Southern Pacific Railroad. Built in 1880, the rail line was intended to bring tourism to this scenic area. In addition to transporting tourists, however, it delivered an influx of new immigrants and provided a way of shipping the fishing industry’s products to the outside world.
World War I
World War I transformed Monterey’s archaic fish-canning operations. In 1918 fewer than a dozen canneries could produce 1,400,000 cases of sardines per year. Off-loading fish catches was still done by hand by cable and buckets from barges towed by Monterey clippers. Full mechanization came a decade later, when purse seiners and their huge nets off-loaded to turbine pumps in each of the canneries, which literally sucked the fish ashore.
Oceanside canneries and trackside warehouse
Canneries typically stood as far out over the rocky shoreline as possible. The canneries were connected to their warehouses by conveyors and pipelines housed inside crossovers that ran overhead across Ocean View Avenue. Railroad freight cars at the rear of the warehouses delivered cans and supplies and departed with cases of sardines, fishmeal and sardine oil. Today the old Southern Pacific rail line is the site of the Cannery Row Recreational Trail, and San Carlos Beach is one of the county’s premier shore-dive scuba sites.
Marker can be reached from Cannery Row.
Courtesy hmdb.org
