hop a long

Click to enlarge...

This picture is in the Sardis area.....very close to what we used to call Cottonwood Corners...actually it is right smack dam in the middle of two malls....Cottonwood and Chilliwack Malls......the top picture is what it looked like until the 1970s....Hops....Acres of em....before the hop picking machines of the 1950s...thousands of pickers came to the area in August ...o ya...it was a big deal....I even had a crack at it when I was a kid.....for us it was just a lot of fooling around altho we could make a dollar if we got serious.....

I remember 5 cents a pound.....a front end loader bucket is about a pound of hops......thats what it seemed like......nevertheless some of those old time serious pickers could pick 100 lbs in a long day.....daily they would issue cards with your lbs and amount earned....they could be cashed or traded at any store in the area....to work in the field you just had to get there and start pickin.......