Blue Lake: How a Bean with Roots in California Conquered the Willamette Valley
This story was supported by Oregon vegetable farmers and the Oregon Processed Vegetable Commission.
Somewhere between eighty and ninety percent of all the green beans grown in Oregon today are bush beans in a class called ‘Blue Lake’. There’s a lot to like about them. They make reliable, healthy bushes that produce huge volumes of long, bright green pods that mature all at once. They’re a true snap bean, with no fibrous strings to remove. They’re straight, plump, and almost perfectly round, which makes them a cinch to process. And they also taste great, with a rich and satisfying flavor.
The particular Blue Lake cultivar being grown in Oregon today — OR 5630 — was released in the 2000s by Oregon State University plant breeder Jim Myers, who’s been breeding beans in the west since the mid-1980s. It’s the latest step in the continued evolution of a variety that has a history on the West Coast stretching back nearly 150 years.
The Perfect Bean for West Coast Canneries
The Blue Lake bean gets its name from the Blue Lakes district of Lake County, California, not far from Ukiah. There, a small bean canning industry developed in the 1880s, taking advantage of the new railway lines for supplying urban markets in California and the East Coast. Beans from Blue Lake were marketed as “Asparagus-Style Blue Lakes Stringless Beans,” underscoring one of their key selling points: tenderness.
The main variety grown in the Blue Lakes region at the time was a pole bean called White Creaseback, so named for the distinctive crease along its spine. The provenance of this particular White Creaseback selection isn’t entirely clear. Some said it descended from a variety called Scotia brought to North America via Germany, while others said it had been grown by Native Americans in the Missouri River Valley. It also went by a number of other names, including Earliest of All, Fat Horse, Ewing Prolific Pole, Transylvania Butter, Tall July Runner, and Missouri White Cornfield, adding to the confusion.
Around the same time, canneries were also springing up farther north, in Oregon. One which grew to prominence was The Eugene Fruit Growers Association, which was founded in 1908. At first, its main products were canned Kentucky Wonder beans and pumpkins. But when company manager J.O. Holt visited Lake County in 1923, he brought home a sample of those ultra-tender beans from the Blue Lakes to try growing in Oregon.
It turned out the beans from Blue Lake also thrived in the rich soils and mild climate of the Willamette Valley. Oregon growers’ transition from Kentucky Wonder to the cultivar they began to call “Blue Lake” was gradual, but by 1933, Blue Lake pole beans had become the number-one best-selling product of the Eugene Fruit Growers Association. As it became clear that farmers would have an eager buyer for all the Blue Lakes they could grow, the crop proliferated rapidly across the Willamette Valley in the 1940s and 1950s, buoyed by breeding work taking place at Oregon State University in Corvallis to improve the variety.
Summer Jobs for a Generation
Blue Lake pole beans were a labor-intensive crop. They didn’t ripen all at once, which meant each row needed to be skillfully picked multiple times. They also required immense trellises built fresh every year. One year in the 1950s, a major farm near Salem used 25,000 miles of string and a million board feet of stakes to trellis 500 acres of bean field.
As the Blue Lake bean industry grew, demand for seasonal workers skyrocketed. At the height of Oregon’s pole bean production in the 1950s and 1960s, tens of thousands of people were seasonally employed picking beans in Oregon. It was an eclectic, often rugged crew, including local high school and college students, housewives and retired people, migrant workers from as far away as Oklahoma and Missouri, homeless people, and others at the margins of society. Even Italian and German prisoners of war from World War II picked beans in Oregon. Pickers were paid by the pound, and skilled pickers could pick many hundreds of pounds of beans each day, which made it a reasonably lucrative temporary job.
In 1960, one of those pickers was Bill Luvaas, a Eugene high school student whose father had also picked beans as a young man. “It was kind of a family tradition,” he laughs. Bill and his brother would ride their bicycles to the bean farms around 6:30 in the morning, then hitch a ride on a flatbed truck out to the field ready to be picked. They were paid two and a half cents per pound, which translated to about $5 a day for a picker like Bill but more for some of the most skilled pickers, who could harvest up to 1,000 pounds of beans each day. “Their hands would just fly over the bushes,” said Bill. “They would just be dropping beans down into the bucket like a thunderstorm.” Those buckets were emptied into big burlap sacks. Once those were full, pickers would lug them down to the end of the rows, where a manager stationed with a scale would weigh and record each picker’s harvest before loading the beans onto a truck for processing.
Bill remembers his fellow pickers as the most interesting part of the job. “They interested me very much, because they were not like people I’d ever known,” said Bill. “They were really migrant laborers, right out of the Grapes of Wrath or Dorothea Lange photographs of people in the dust bowl. Rugged faces, weather worn. They cursed a lot, which I wasn’t used to as a kid. But they fascinated me, and they were friendly enough to us kids.” He recalls that many discussed moving on to Yakima next to pick apples, and then down to California for the grape harvest.
Pickers worked hard, but the day typically ended in the mid-afternoon before it got too hot, which gave them time to rest and recreate. With so many people filling Oregon towns for the bean harvest, it’s easy to see how a social atmosphere could spring up. Some workers stayed in Farm Security Administration-operated migrant labor camps, where lodging was offered in exchange for a couple of hours of work each week on camp upkeep, as well as a small charge for “recreational activities” in the evenings like sports, horseshoes, movies, dances, or amateur talent nights.
A sense of camaraderie was also evident at the annual barbecue at Alderman Farms in Dayton, which took place each year after the harvest was finished. It drew thousands of revelers, from migrant pickers to local politicians. It’s hard to say whether its appeal stemmed from the lure of a free meal, or a chance to rub shoulders with founder Urie Alderman, a fast-living bean baron who famously loved souped-up cars, ladies, and parties. More bean partying took place at the International Blue Lake Bean Picking Contest, which culminated in the crowning of a Bean Queen and her “Beanettes.” While a titular honor, the Bean Queen’s daily itinerary during the contest was no joke, including a “Chuckwagon Breakfast in Woodburn, the Salem River Days Parade, the Dallas Smileroo, and the Covered Wagon Cavalcade in Stayton.” (She undoubtedly also made an appearance at the annual Alderman Farms barbecue.)
The End of the Pole Bean Era
In the middle of the 20th century, growing Blue Lake beans was lucrative enough that a family could be sustained by a 10- to 20-acre bean yard. But beginning in the late 1960s, the industry began to switch from pole beans to bush beans, which were bred to ripen all at once and could be harvested by machine. That increased pressure for farms to get big or get out of the business, which meant small-scale pole bean production in Oregon took a nosedive in the 1970s. In 1966, 54,139 people worked seasonal jobs picking beans in Oregon. By 1978, there was just a single field of pole beans being grown in Oregon.
Bush beans have a lot to recommend them. They don’t require laborious trellising each year, and machine harvesting is more efficient and less expensive than human labor. Still, the end of the pole bean industry was the end of an era for western Oregon agriculture — and for the people who worked here. Some bean growers say they continued to get hopeful phone calls from former seasonal bean pickers for years after they’d switched to mechanically harvested bush beans, nostalgic for their time in Oregon.
Today, Oregon still grows a lot of green beans — 1.3 million tons in 2020 — making it the fourth-largest state for green bean production. Virtually all of those beans are sold canned or, increasingly, frozen. Frozen beans aren’t quite as obviously sexy as farmers market-fresh beans in the height of the summer, but they always taste better than out-of-season fresh green beans, which are sometimes weeks old by the time they make it to supermarket shelves. Frozen beans, on the other hand, are usually picked and processed on the same day, preserving as much of their flavor and nutrients as possible. And, just like in the early days, work on improving the variety continues. At Oregon State University, breeders are working on new varieties that resist common diseases like white mold, ensuring that Oregon farmers can successfully grow green beans for many years to come.
Curious to learn more about Oregon’s bean history? Read A Story of the Blue Lake Pole Bean Industry in Western Oregon by James R. Baggett (Emeritus Professor of Horticulture at Oregon State University) and William Lucas (former production manager at Agripac Incorporated), published as a personal project by the authors in 2005.
