There was a time when every Georgia county had at least one cannery, often associated with the local school district, offering a place for residents to prepare and preserve homegrown foods.
With the cannery providing equipment and space, agriculture teachers taught students and local residents the safe way to process what they had grown or purchased from local farms.
As a high school student in the 1960s, Robert Mitcham was active in the cannery at his Meriwether County school. He went on to become an agriculture teacher, ultimately running Rabun County’s cannery.
In 2024, Georgia Agricultural Education published a list showing the state had 22 remaining canneries, now called food processing centers.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
In 1983, Mitcham and his wife, Patsy, built a small jelly kitchen in the backyard of their Rabun County home and began producing a line of 10 items, including apple butter and strawberry jam, as well as bread and butter pickles.
“We made the apple butter and pickles for the Dillard House (in nearby Dillard) and it just grew from there,” Patsy Mitcham said. “Eventually Robert quit teaching and we started Hillside Orchard Farms. It started out small in our backyard and now there are four big buildings behind our house.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
“When we first started, we did a special order of 150 cases of apple butter with apples from our orchard,” she said. “It took us all week. Now we can do that in two hours. We make jams, jellies, barbecue sauce, pickles and relishes, chutney, fruit ciders and bloody mary mix, and we have a bakery where we make fruit bread, fritters, doughnuts and fruit cakes.”
The business now employs a staff of 60 workers when in full production and produces more than 700 products a year, including 17 flavors of jam, 21 varieties of jelly (corn cob and mayhaw among them) and 15 fruit and vegetable butters, such as sweet potato with honey and rum apple.
“We have 15 varieties of barbecue sauce and 26 different salsas. And lots of Vidalia onion products,” Patsy Mitcham said.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Robert died in 2023 but his wife and the next two generations of the Mitcham family continue the business. In addition to producing its own branded products, it provides growers and others with private labeling and co-packing services.
The company’s 6,000-square-foot retail shop is a showcase of the bottled and jarred products it produces, with shelf after shelf holding 22 varieties of hot sauce, a dozen different fruit syrups, eight kinds of fruit cider as well as marinades, salad dressings, dry mixes for baking, drink mixers, spice mixes, jams, jellies and pickles.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
In addition to selling what they preserve, the Mitchams expanded into agritourism, offering blackberry, apple and muscadines picking, a corn maze, a gem mine and the chance to meet their barnyard animals in season.
Distribution has been expanded by participating in AmericasMart Atlanta and the company has a booth at the Southeast Regional Fruit and Vegetable Conference in Savannah each year. Online, it sells products ranging from vegetable soup base to pickled peaches, all available for shipping across the country.
“It keeps us busy, and each year we add a product or two,” Mitcham said. “Last year, it was bourbon bacon jam. A few years ago, it was watermelon salsa. We were making watermelon rind pickles, and so we developed watermelon salsa and watermelon pepper jelly to use the flesh from all those melons.”
Mitcham said the company’s products that she uses the most are the vegetable soup base and Miss Davie’s barbecue sauce.
“The sauce is made from my mother-in-law’s recipe,” she said. “And everybody likes the apple butter. That was my dad’s recipe and what really started our business. But my favorite of everything is our beet pickles. Not everybody likes beets, but our pickles are made with sugar, vinegar, cinnamon sticks and whole cloves. Delicious.”
Hillside Orchard Farms. 18 Sorghum Mill Drive, Lakemont. 706-782-2776, hillsideorchard.com
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