Now, 48 years after the industry began switching from wooden to cardboard boxes, Johnson may be the last commercial wooden apple-box maker left in the Northwest, if not the nation.

WENATCHEE – Sixty years ago, when Dave Johnson was just 13, he nailed together wooden apple boxes in orchards overlooking Lake Chelan. He was one of hundreds of people throughout Eastern ...

Seventy years ago if you saw Fred or Ted Cowan in the summertime, you saw a guy covered in sawdust. The twin brothers, now 86, spent seven summers in the 1940s making wooden apple boxes.

The woes of apple growers began when wooden apple boxes were replaced in the late 1990s with cardboard-based telescopic boxes. The wooden boxes were not flexible, which meant that the quantity of ...