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‘Fignolias’ not enough to save Angleton plant
Published September 14, 2009
Searching for additional products to keep their canning factory busy during the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Angleton Fig Plant developed a product it called Fignolias.
These were confections made from Magnolia figs — the variety most popular among growers throughout Brazoria County. The figs were cooked, then dried and packed in small boxes, each of which held only two or three figs.
In his book, “Memories of Seventy-eight Years in Brazoria County,” Frank K. Stevens, who was the plant manager, explained the plant used a special method of cooking and drying the figs.
The equipment already available was first used to cook the fruit, but special ovens about 6 feet square in size were developed to handle the drying.
Employees put the cooked figs on large trays and baked them at a temperature of only about 100 degrees.
“They made a very nice morsel,” Stevens said, adding the plant offered a variation which involved dipping the dried figs in milk chocolate. This was the more popular option, he said.
One person, Mrs. Minnie Kingswell, handled almost all of the drying process, as well as dipping and packing the Fignolias. These steadily had gained in popularity, and the product boxed for Christmas sales reached $5,000 one year.
The plant also tried packing string beans, and many local people planted them. Extra equipment was purchased to handle the beans.
One day, “when we really got in a lot” of them, the plant processed, cooked, canned and boxed a full carload of the beans for shipment, Stevens said.
A few months ago, 89-year-old Marvin Jacobsen called to relate his memories of the fig farms and the processing plant.
“I picked figs at a farm on Fig Lane,” he said. This was an area near the present Brazoria County Fairgrounds, and was the site of a large fig farm.
“When we first moved to Angleton, it was in the spring and there were no figs. That was when the plant canned beans,” Jacobsen said.
He remembered his mother went to the fig plant and brought home big hoppers of the beans, which she and her children snapped.
When they finished one hopper, she would take it back and get another, he said.
Jacobsen’s memory of the hoppers was that they were tall — bigger and taller than a bushel, more trash can size, and they held a large number of beans.
“The Depression hit while we were living in Arizona,” Jacobsen said. “We had a nice house there, but the plant where my father worked closed down, and we just left the house and moved to Florida.
“I don’t know what became of the house (in Arizona),” he said. “It broke my father’s heart (to have to leave it), and he would not buy another one. That just took all the wind from his sails.”
After his family moved to Florida, the Depression struck there, too, and the Jacobsen family moved to Angleton, because his father had bought 20 acres in what is now Bieri Farms, between Angleton and Danbury.
“My brother worked for the freight company, and also for the fig farm, spraying and taking care of the trees until the fig plant folded,” he said. “That was a sad day. The Depression got that, too.”
Judging from contemporaneous newspaper articles relating to the Angleton Fig Plant, every effort was made to save it, despite an overabundance of fig products and the flat economy that followed the 1929 stock market crash and bank failures.
In December 1929, the Angleton Times reported on efforts to bolster the fig industry as a whole through an association that would help reduce costs of supplies and advertise the products.
Another article on March 14, 1930, listed directors of the co-op, and a week later the paper printed a story about what it called “X Brand Fig Jam” that had been developed by an Angleton woman.
On March 28, a committee from the fig association was reported to be planning a trip to Washington, D.C., seeking a federal loan.
Despite the obvious problems faced by the local plant, the paper reported on Oct. 3, 1930, that five cars of fig products had been shipped from the Angleton plant.
And on Aug. 14, 1931, another story noted the Angleton plant was operating on a part-time basis. Six kettles were in use, and about 4,000 pounds of figs were cooked on the first day of this operation, with 51 persons employed.
Stevens wrote in his recollections of the sadness he felt at the plant’s demise. The efforts to keep it running by finding other things to pack during the months during the off-season for figs were not sufficient to make the plant’s operation profitable, he said.
“Had we had some substantial capital to draw on and the time to develop such things, I believe in normal times they could have been made to pay,” he said.
Those were not normal times, of course, and capital was certainly limited. The company was “deeply in debt and getting deeper and deeper in the hole,” when it closed, Stevens said.
During the first few years after the stock market crash of 1929 many banks went out of business. After his election as president, Franklin D. Roosevelt closed down all of the country’s remaining banks for a few days.
The financial climate, both locally and nationally, made it obvious the fig plant no longer could be kept in operation. Preserved figs were considered a luxury item, and there was no market for luxuries of any kind.
The company’s shareholders leased the plant to Kempner and Ulridge Sugarland Industries, but that company also was having sales problems.
About three years later, the three banks who held the plant’s indebtedness took over the property for the debt.
“Needless to say, this culmination of the Fig Company business was a great disappointment to me, as I had hoped it might be a real help to Angleton — as in fact it was for a year or so,” Stevens said.
Marie Beth Jones, a published author and freelance writer based in Angleton, is chairwoman of the Brazoria County Historical Commission.
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