At nine in the morning on May 17, 1922, a Fokker F.III monoplane sat in a field on Wolfert Station Road just outside Mullica Hill. Eight hundred pounds of asparagus, cut earlier that morning, sat strapped down behind the cockpit. The pilot at the stick was William N. de Wald, fired from the U.S. Air Mail Service two years earlier for refusing a flight. His passenger was Captain W. G. Schauffler Jr., who had commanded the 90th Aero Squadron in France during the World War. They were trying to prove that South Jersey produce could be cut at dawn and served at a Boston governor's luncheon by lunch.
It nearly worked. The plane got lost over Worcester and put down there by mistake. Two local Massachusetts pilots had to fly up and shepherd the monoplane the rest of the way to Framingham. By the time the asparagus arrived, the lunch was over. Somewhere over New England, one of the men aboard had shaved with a straight razor in flight and dropped the top of it out the open window.
The warehouse at this corner was the lifeline that made flights like that thinkable. At its peak it held nearly one million bushels of sweet potatoes. The South Glassboro to Mullica Hill rail line, completed in 1888, ran straight to the loading dock and put Mullica Hill produce inside a regional shipping network reaching from Massachusetts to Washington, D.C. R. A. Byrnes, Incorporated, a local trucking and produce company that operated out of 11 South Main and packed asparagus under its own labels, ran trucks across that corridor for decades before the firm was sold to Connecticut interests in 1956 and renamed Nelson Freightways. The corn and asparagus and sweet potatoes that moved through this building shaped the regional economy for the better part of a century.
