Nicknamed Mamma Dickie, Florence Adelle Dickinson started producing her family’s famous line of Dickinson Jams and Jellies in 1879 in the farmhouse kitchen on Stephenson Road (runs parallel to Boones Ferry just past Mountain Park) as a way to supplement her husband’s carpentry income.
When Arthur Jones — a neighbor — was a little boy, he remembered, “The Dickinson brothers helping their mother with the jams and jellies. They worked on the back porch of a small shed out beyond the main kitchen that had a big stove there and another big stove in the kitchen. It was a very simple, primitive operation by which they put these jams and jellies together.”
Charles T .Dickinson (not Charles Dickens), Florence’s husband, recollected, “The business began to flourish when Florence started taking orders over the phone from people in Portland. Florence was the first woman to talk over the Bell Telephone system. A good thing or Mamma Dickie’s enterprise might never have gelled. Charles continues the story: “They would take orders early in the fruit season (summer), then deliver to customers — mostly families — in the fall. The first year they put up about six-dozen (72) containers. The second year Flo and the boys made five barrels of 25 dozen containers each. By the third year I was ordering glass jars by the carload.”
Disneyland selected The Dickinson Conpany to operate a jam and jelly concession on Main Street in 1955. A television program in 1960, featuring the history of Dickinson’s, credited the flavor and quality of one of their most popular jams to the “rubus vitifolius,” or wild mountain blackberry. The J. M. Smucker Company acquired the family business in 1979 and began supplying fast-food restaurants and airlines with one-portion packets of Dickinson jams and jellies. Prior to distribution to the airlines, Smuckers offered the high-end Dickinson products to chichi white-tablecloth restaurants. But thanks to delighted fliers and diners spreading the word, demand grew and the Dickinson family of preserves found its way onto grocers shelves.
Florence and Charles were very active in the Oswego Grange, founded in 1874. He was a charter member; she spent 40 years doing Grange work, establishing herself as an expert on grape culture. A newspaper article credits her with proving, against popular belief, that Concord grapes could be successfully grown in Oregon. Before she became a farmer and manufacturer of jams and jellies, Florence taught school. Charles, born and raised in Oswego (1854-1952) was a charcoal wagon boy in his youth. His stories of hauling charcoal from the pits in Tryon Creek, where Douglas fir trees were burned to produce the charcoal, to the iron furnace, inspired Theresa Truchot to write the book “Charcoal Wagon Boy.” Truchot dedicated her book to Charles T. Dickinson.
Florence Adell Dickinson and Adam Randolph Shipley were of like minds when it came to growing Concord grapes. When Shipley established his farm on Stafford Road in the 1860s — still there today known as the Shipley-Cook Farmstead — he imported 45 varieties of American and European varieties of grapes from the East Coast in order to determine which would grow best for him. He grew quite a vineyard for many years, but eventually discarded all the European varieties, advising the cultivation of only American varieties for the Willamette Valley. When asked to name the three best American varieties for the market in those days he replied, “If I were setting out 300 grapes today, I would first set one hundred Concords, then another one hundred Concords, then another one hundred Concords.” At one time the Oswego Grange was located on the Shipley farm property. He served as the third state grange master from 1878-1880. Ironic isn’t it — the grange was located on Shipley’s farm; Shipley was into growing grapes and producing juice, Dickinson was into grapes for making her preserves.
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