In the late nineteenth century, Cambridge, Maryland, became an important center for the packing and processing of oysters, tomatoes, and sweet potatoes. Seafood and vegetable packers grew rich with the coming of railroads to the Eastern Shore and with the advent of the twentieth century, Cambridge would become a company town and personal fiefdom of the Phillips family.

Levi B. Phillips (1868-1945) and William Grason Winterbottom (1868-1952) organized the Phillips packing company in 1902 out of what previously had been the Wallace Oyster Packing Plant. The company prospered, especially under the able direction of Albanus Phillips (1872-1949), who turned a small regional packing operation into a huge vegetable and seafood conglomerate that ultimately gave employment to 10,000 workers in Cambridge and other areas of the state.

While the family continued to pack oysters, Albanus Phillips concentrated on canned tomatoes, catsup, and sweet potatoes. Under his direction the firm became one of the largest food processing businesses in the nation. Phillips food products were so well known that Admiral Richard Byrd made Albanus Phillips the food provisioner for his Arctic expeditions in the 1920s. Byrd and Albanus Phillips became such close friends that the admiral named a mountain range in Antarctica after the intrepid Cambridge tomato king.

The Phillips Company had extensive contracts with the military during World War I, and in World War II the Phillips Company became one of the largest suppliers of "C Rations" to the United States Army.

Despite the business acumen of Albanus Phillips, there was a dark side to his character. Ruling Cambridge like a feudal overlord, he fought unions during the 1930s when the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) attempted to secure better wages and working conditions for the thousands of cannery workers in the Phillips canneries and warehouses. The company used armed guards to beat strikers and suppress labor unions. Throughout 1937 two thousand workers at the Phillips canneries stoned policemen who came into the plants to arrest them. July 1937 was especially tense. Phillips's armed guards shot strikers, and finally the National Labor Relations Board was called in to Cambridge to quell hostilities and restore order.

Despite strikes, labor violence, and union agitation, Albanus Phillips never gave in to worker demands for a forty-cent hourly wage and a forty-hour week. Phillips controlled the farmers who brought their produce to him, and his was the only large cannery operation. Until World War II the "catsup kings," as the Phillips clan were called, did whatever they pleased. Life in a tomato-packing town forms the setting for the novel, The Floating Opera, by Cambridge native John Barth.

Changing consumer tastes in the 1950s brought an end to the Phillips Packing business. Americans changed from canned foods to frozen foods, and demand for tinned vegetables greatly declined. When the Phillips Company ceased its operations in the 1960s, an era had passed. No more would the big canneries dominate the economic life of Maryland's Eastern Shore.

Wennersten, John R. Maryland's Eastern Shore: A Journey in Time and Place. Centreville, Md.: Tidewater Publishers, 1992.