In August, I was fortunate enough to view The Paradox of Seabrook Farms, a documentary film about Seabrook Farms and its employees. The film was directed by Helga Merits, an independent Dutch-Estonian filmmaker. She interviewed 50 people (in 2019, 2022, and 2023) who had ties to Seabrook Farms primarily during the 1940s and ’50s leading up to when C.F. Seabrook and his family parted ways.
The film premiered in March at the Levoy Theatre to a sold-out audience of 700 and was screened there again when I attended, with about 650 people in attendance. It covered how displaced people from different countries came to unite at the village of Seabrook. Despite the displacement caused by the horrors of World War II, workers endeavored to keep their traditions alive. They strove to give their children a future of possibilities.
The documentary also explored some of the complexities of Seabrook Farms owner Charles F. Seabrook as an industrialist, and concluded with his estrangement from his family.
The film inspired me to join a CU Maurice River field trip to visit the Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center in Upper Deerfield Township. Even with the address in hand, that proved no easy task for the nearly 30 visitors who were to meet at the museum. At length we discovered that the collection is housed in the basement of the Upper Deerfield Township Municipal Building.
It’s wonderful that the township hosts this collection; however, some signage directing visitors to its entrance might give it a wider audience.
The museum provides a great deal of information that needs to remain in the public consciousness from many important perspectives. We began our tour with an introduction by Executive Director Larry Ericksen. Later our entourage divided into two groups, with Ericksen and docent Bonnie Bertram guiding us through the collections. Those who lived in the multicultural villages of Seabrook during the 1940s and ’50s were a unique and diverse assemblage, brought together by the circumstances of World War II and what Charles F. Seabrook saw as an opportunity for an affordable workforce.
Japanese Americans from the United States and Latin America were arrested and put in internment camps due to U.S. government fears about disloyalty to the U.S. and allegiance to their former homeland. These individuals were deprived of their civil rights. Their lives as American citizens were derailed. They were confined to camps patrolled by armed guards in tar-papered army-style barracks, surrounded by barbed-wire fences.
Seabrook, an agriculturalist and innovative businessman, found his laborers among those displaced or detained by the distrust and prejudices caused by war. He offered the opportunity to live in family units, albeit within rudimentary housing. With the support of the U.S. government he recruited these detainees. They could choose to leave western U.S.-based camps for a rural agrarian lifestyle in southern New Jersey. It sounded more idyllic than it was, but nonetheless it was likely an improvement over camp conditions.
Seabrook Farms continued recruitment of released prisoners after the conclusion of World War II. Nearly 1,500 Latin American Japanese had been incarcerated at the Crystal City, Texas internment camp. Roughly 80 percent of them had been deported from Peru. After the conclusion of the war, 209 of these former detainees resettled at Seabrook Farm.
Labor was in short supply during the war. Those who have studied Seabrook’s life generally agree that his motivation was primarily business-related rather than altruistic in recruiting these potential employees. His sons describe their father as “cold and calculating” to the family but “highly successful at projecting a warm, caring, friendly image to the public at large.” (Rutgers Digital Exhibits Seabrook Farms)
Other groups of people displaced by war came from Europe to begin their lives anew at Seabrook Farms. Estonians arrived in significant numbers, and German soldiers who were interned at Parvin State Park also became part of the village.
At Seabrook today, flags depicting the homelands of people who found new beginnings at Seabrook are displayed around a model of the village and its surrounding farmland. These include (in addition to countries already mentioned) France, Mongolia, the Czech Republic, Italy, Russia, Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Hungary, Barbados, Ukraine, Cuba, Lithuania, Puerto Rico, Latvia, and Norway. Other countries mentioned in museum displays include China, India, Korea, Austria, Denmark, Bulgaria, Romania, Scots-Irish, Jamaica, St. Kitts, St. Lucia, Trinidad, and Yugoslavia.
Additional recruits to the workforce were laborers from the Caribbean, Appalachia, and the Deep South; all were significant contributors to what the Center calls an “authentic global, bootstrap village.”
This diversity created a multicultural heritage thought to be unmatched by any other rural area in the continental United States. The museum’s narrative suggests that this section of Upper Deerfield Township was indeed “a rural ‘mini-United Nations,’ a place, surprisingly, more culturally diverse than many urban areas. In the 1940s, Seabrookers would not have found it at all unusual to witness German prisoners of war eating in the Seabrook Community House cafeteria or Jamaicans playing cricket on the Seabrook School grounds or a Japanese American baseball team competing against an Italian American one.”
Photos of cultural performance groups such as the Estonian choir, the Japanese Hoh Daiko drummers, and Minyo folk dancers grace the walls as examples of maintaining and sharing cultural traditions.
C.F. Seabrook was innovative in both equipment and process. He developed some of the first irrigation systems for watering crops, increasing production by 300 percent. He extended the growing season by utilizing greenhouses, innovative for the times. Work was grueling and involved 12-hour shifts. The Seabrook Farms factory was automated, and C.F. Seabrook was known as the Henry Ford of farming. The factory was a labor-dependent and labor-run assembly line.
Seabrook and Clarence Birdseye were pioneers in the frozen food industry. When I was working on a documentary with Joanne Ruscio (c. 2014) of Greener New Jersey Productions, we visited the present-day Seabrook Farms and quizzed Jim Seabrook about the freezing process. He made it clear that aspects of the method still remain proprietary. As early as 1938 Seabrook produced two-thirds of the frozen vegetables consumed in the United States; Seabrook was especially famous for its frozen baby lima beans.
The Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center has an amazing collection of photographs. One depicts many of Seabrook’s 5,000 workers in front of the plant; it appeared as a feature article in a 1955 edition of Life, proclaiming Seabrook as the largest vegetable farm in the United States. Seabrook attracted national coverage in other magazines and newspapers, such as Newsweek, Reader’s Digest, National Geographic, Forbes, Business Week, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the New York Times.
One cabinet at the museum displays a fabric bag imprinted “Cavalcade of Silver Dollars,” with silver dollars strewn on top. This was part of a promotional campaign by C.F. Seabrook, in which he paid his employees in silver dollars so that when they made local purchases the community would witness the economic impact the company had on the businesses’ cash registers.
The quality of education received by the workers’ children at Seabrook School is historically considered to have been of high quality. A number of accolades about individuals who grew up at Seabrook corroborate this assessment.
Most striking for me is the number of people who grew up at Seabrook and went on to serve in the U.S. military. Particularly amazing are the Japanese Americans, whose parents were arrested for their potential to be disloyal to their country during WWII and who, as adults, went on to serve the country to protect our liberties.
The mission of the Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center is to establish a permanent place to preserve and present the settlement and experience of the diverse groups that were brought together in rural Seabrook. It acts as a repository of cultural and historical materials to improve the visitor’s awareness of Seabrook’s rich multicultural experience. And it acts as an example of how refugees and diverse Americans can come together to overcome adversity, preserve their heritage, and ultimately achieve success.
Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center gives the visitor a greater understanding of C.F. Seabrook’s agricultural innovations, community life at Seabrook during the 1940s and ’50s, the influences of diverse cultures, and some of the accomplishments of people who worked or grew up in the village at Seabrook Farms.
Perhaps most importantly, it is a testament to people’s tenacity and resilience in overcoming adversity and making new beginnings for themselves and their families. The museum proved to be well worth the visit.
Sources
Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center – museum exhibits and narrative
Seabrook Farms: Invisible Restraints, Live and Labor Seabrook Farms, “Origins, Innovations and Early Labor Struggles,” Digital Exhibits, Rutgers University. (https://exhibits.libraries.rutgers)
Modeling Seabrook
This reproduction of the village of Seabrook circa 1950 was built by Robert Yutaka Hasuike, who grew up at Seabrook, went on to become a U.S. Green Beret, and later was employed for 35 years as a model maker at Mattel Toys. Originally from Los Angeles, he was incarcerated with his family in 1942 along with 120,000 other Japanese Americans because they “looked like the enemy.”
The miniature village and a water tower and factory model were made by Hasuike in California and then shipped to Seabrook and assembled by local volunteers.
The buildings that housed Seabrook workers were principally built using World War II federal funding. “Sections of the village depicted include apartment and dormitory buildings, along with Hoover Village, Hoover Annex, West Village, Italian Village, Gelsten Village, and adjacent farmhouses and farmland. The Seabrook Farms plant complex, around which the village grew and where most of the villagers worked, was once the largest integrated farming-freezing operation in the world.”
Hasuike also created a chilling diorama of the internment camp at Manzanar, which is housed at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, CA.
The Millville Army Air Field Museum showcases a collection of Barbie dolls and Hot Wheels cars donated by Hasuike in a separate building. —JMG
Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center
Location: Upper Deerfield Township Municipal Building, 1325 State Highway 77, Seabrook, New Jersey 08302
Hours: Monday–Thursday 9 a.m.–noon (additional visiting hours upon request)
Phone: 856-451-8393
