Packing House Receives Donation of Historical Truck

(CAMBRIDGE, Md) – In the halls of the Phillips Packing House in Cambridge, a little more history was added Wednesday. As a  Ford Model-T farm truck was donated to the building.

Lin Spicer owned the truck, and now he’s donating this piece of history.

Spicer tells WMDT, “It needed just a little bit of mechanical work done to it, which we did, and got it going. And we played with it a few times and had it in the parade with the Farm Bureau.”

And from the fields to the factory, we got a little history lesson on this truck.

“This would have been transportation from a tomato fields to Phillips Packing Company in Cambridge. At the end of the day, the beds of these things would have been loaded with baskets. And they would have waited in line along Dorchester Avenue out front here…” says the Dorchester County Historical Society’s Tom Bradshaw.

For someone like Amanda Fenstermaker with the Phillips Packing House, it not only feels like a full circle moment bringing this old tomato truck back to the building.

It even brings up a pleasant memory for her.

Amanda tells WMDT, “It is actually a full circle moment for me personally. Because my grandfather actually worked for Phillips Packing Company. He put the labels on the cans, on the tomato cans. And so I can almost see all the tomatoes coming in here, which then get processed and canned and so it’s very personal experience.”

And they’ve got some plans at the Packing House to show how this truck would have looked pulling up to the building for a delivery.

Tom tells us, “We hope that eventually we’ll be able to find some baskets and and fake tomatoes and put in the back of it to represent what, you know, what it would have looked like coming out of the field.”

This donation comes just a couple of months after the Phillips Packing House was recognized by the National Park Service as a Chesapeake Gateways site.