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Seabrook Farms in the 1950s – The Multifarious History of South Jersey’s “Global Village”
May 27 @ 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Join us for another local history presentation with two speakers from the Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center (Cumberland County).
Mas Nakawatese and Helle Gawrylewski will talk about the global village that Seabrook was in the fifties – a farming community made up of the Japanese-Americans from the incarceration camps and the Estonians from the European displaced persons camps, as well as many other nationalities.
The Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center presents the stories of relocated Japanese Americans and Japanese Peruvians from United States incarceration camps; wartime refugees from Europe; migrant laborers from Appalachia, the Deep South and the Caribbean. Seabrook was an authentic “global bootstrap Village” where people of many cultures lived and worked together and still celebrate their heritage. Seabrook Farm was called the “largest vegetable factory on Earth” by Life Magazine in 1955, and it’s founder, Charles F. Seabrook, came to be known as the Henry Ford of Agriculture for his industrial approach to farming. – https://seabrookeducation.org/
Speaker Bios
Masaru Nakawatase
Mr. Nakawatase was born in the Poston, Arizona, internment camp for people of Japanese descent during WWII. When he was a child, his family moved to Seabrook where his parents worked in the frozen food plant. He can share his personal history from a perspective of a lifetime as a community organizer: in Georgia with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), in South Jersey in campaigns against poverty and the Vietnam War, and as the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) National Representative for Native American Affairs.
Mr. Nakawatase retired from the AFSC in 2005. He has also served on the boards of Asian Americans United (AAU) and the Folk Arts – Cultural Treasures Charter School (FACTS) in Philadelphia. He is currently the president of the SECC Board.
Helle Gawrylewski
Ms. Gawrylewski was born in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany after her family fled Estonia following World War II. She arrived in Seabrook with her family at the age of two, where they lived in Hoover Village in a shack that had a pot-belly stove in the middle of the living room and no bathroom. She can share memories of what it was like to move to another country without knowing the language, yet make the most of opportunities and eventually become fluent in three languages and succeed in industry as a woman.
Ms. Gawrylewski retired after forty-five years in the pharmaceutical industry, where she worked as Head of Translations at Hoechst Roussel, Associate Director of Medical Writing at Novo-Nordisk, and Senior Director of Medical and Regulatory Writing at Janssen. She now operates her own consulting business.
